by Anya Dausey ’28
On Tuesday, March 24, the Kingswood Oxford community welcomed Associate Director of College Counseling and President of KO’s Cum Laude Chapter Peggy Clark to the stage during an all-school assembly to announce KO’s 20 Cum Laude Society inductees.
As the president of KO’s chapter of the Cum Laude Society, she spoke on behalf of all faculty members of the chapter, sharing what Cum Laude is. Cum Laude is a Latin phrase that translates to “with praise” and “with honor.” “It is widely used to describe a particularly high level of academic achievement,” Mrs. Clark said.
The Cum Laude Society was established in 1906 and is a national organization that recognizes students with high academic achievement and commitment in schools across the country. “In addition to academic achievement, the Cum Laude society recognizes ‘students who have demonstrated good character and integrity in all aspects of their school life,’” Mrs. Clark quoted. Faculty members of the Cum Laude Society at KO include Upper School history Chair David Baker as the chapter secretary, Head of the Upper School Lisa Loeb, Director of Academic Planning Carolyn McKee, and Director of College Counseling Jami Silver.
The top 20 students with the highest grade point averages in their junior year and the first half of their senior year are recognized as members of Cum Laude. Senior Ava Bonsignore was one of the 20 students to receive this honor. As an exceptional student, strong athlete, and active member of extracurriculars at KO, Ava shared that she relied heavily on routines to stay on top of work. “Sports and other extracurriculars actually ended up helping my academics more than hurting them because they forced me to stay organized and disciplined instead of always procrastinating,” she said.
The Cum Laude induction ceremony and dinner was held on Thursday, April 16, to celebrate and recognize new members for this high achievement. Each year, there is a guest speaker at the dinner to inspire and connect with the inductees. This year, the alumni speaker was Keenan Line ’14.
Ms. Line attended Brown University, studying biomedical engineering. After graduating from Brown, Line joined Highres Biosolutions in Beverly, Mass., as a software engineer, to help speed up the pace of research and discovery. Ms. Line now works for Google as a senior software engineer, leading a team to use artificial intelligence to extract and highlight merchant content within Google Search.
Congratulations to the 20 seniors who have received the honor of being in Cum Laude Society: Ishaan Bafna, Hannah Bateson, Ava Bonsignore, Jordan Cipriano, Dorian Ciscel, Ronan Culligan, Miles Gruber, Leo Kollen, Charles Levin, Corey Nguyen, William Parkhouse, Alexandre Picard, Gabrielle Post, Rishab Premish, Kathleen Reale, Teague Shamleffer, Arthur Tittmann, Samit Virmani, Yuhan “Helen” Wang, Xinyuan “Carmel” Zhang.
