Carly Gmeiner, Class of 2000
Though Carly is already graduated, she is an excellent interview candidate because as she explains it, she isn’t the same person she was before she came to The Lowell Whiteman School. Everything she does and plans to do in her life came out of being here.
“Whiteman is a very good college prep school,” Carly says when talking about standards and expectations on college campuses (she has attended two.) “I could have dropped my standards when writing papers for college, and still have goten an A or B, that would have been easy to do. But I didn’t. I did the work the way Whiteman would have expected it to be done.
Carly is looking at the possibly of teaching at the Whiteman School in the future. She smiles mischievously when she talks about how she will be using that college prep education to share it with others. Her aim is secondary education because she “loves having the freedom of exposing kids to new kinds of literature.” When asked if she ever felt that way sitting in her high school classes – she said it was Whiteman’s fault that she ended up where she did. It began with “The Fountain Head” in Mrs. Morse’s class and she laughs at the memory. “I hated it and didn’t want to read it and then I did and I loved it. I even ended up loving Shakespeare. So I blame Whiteman.” She said she was blown away by her SAT scores in English. “I just couldn’t believe it, and Whiteman did that.”
Carly comes from a freestyle skiing family and she has been competing for years. ”Since I graduated high school, I’ve been playing it year by year to see if I’m still into competing but I guess I’ll forever be a mogul skier.” She had a great year in 2005. She finished in the top twice on the NorAm, was 9th in Duals at Nationals and started doing backflips on snow “which was a huge thing for me.” Having just mastered a back flip in the bumps, Carly is looking to the future with trepidation. “What will they want next? Switch back flips off the bottom? That would be impressive. And scary.” She admits these tricks are scary but she does them anyway. Why? “Because you have to do it to win. You have to scare yourself in order to be the best.”
When asked what she remembered most about Whiteman, she says, “It was where I learned teachers could be more than educators, they can also be your friends and that’s what made me want to teach. That you’re not just standing up in front of a class and lecturing, you’re actually interacting with the students.” She likes that Whiteman is somewhat of a large family.
To this day, when Carly comes to campus, she is overwhelmed with hugs from faculty and staff. And when a teacher turns and notices she’s here, in person, there are squeals of delight. Of course, Carly was a blonde when she graduated and she’s her hair is now jet black. No wonder we didn’t recognize her at first.
She remembers some pretty wonderful times at Whiteman and reflects most on the laughter. “My Junior year in 1999 during Intersession, someone built a giant hot dog and I don’t know why or for what. It was the big joke to see who could put in a funny place. Someone put it Landon Sawyer’s car and stuck it through the sun roof. Then someone got into Doc’s (Academic Dean) locked office and put it in her chair. It just kept turning up in random places. As serious as this school is as far as academics go, we can have the best time! Some people get stressed out about homework; we can still manage to laugh 90% of the time. In 1999, my sister’s class Gina, class of 2002) lined the whole main hall with glasses of water. And during a student meeting, Gina and her cronies stole all the back packs parked in the hall and strung them up in the main building far out of reach of their owners. That’s just classic Whiteman.
Carly will graduate with a degree in Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Summer of 2005.