For boarding students, the winter holidays at Milton are a time to celebrate, have fun, and bond together in the houses and as a boarding community, culminating in a boarder dinner just before break.

Each house has its own way of making the season special. “It really brightens the shortest days of the year and gives students an opportunity to give to one another,” says Millet House head Linnea Engstrom of the holiday traditions.

Wolcott boys decorated right after Thanksgiving, house head Joshua Emmott says. Tradition holds that Class IV students put up wreaths, while seniors string lights in the shape of a “W.” Perhaps not surprising to parents of teenage boys, a significant amount of food is involved in Wolcott’s celebrations.

Raúl the Third, an illustrator, author and painter, found his first artistic inspiration in a library.

Born Raúl González in El Paso, Texas, the artist explained that his mother—frustrated with staying in a tiny apartment with three young boys—dragged the family to a public library. Mr. González recalled two sensations he would love forever: air conditioning and the smell of books.

He and his mother got to know the librarians, who would recommend books that helped them learn English. One time, a librarian asked Mr. González to describe a book.

“She said, ‘If you can’t tell me what your favorite part was, why don’t you draw it for me?’” he recalled in a talk with visual arts students during the Nesto Gallery assembly. “From that point on, every time I read a book, I created an illustration for it.”

It is okay to take risks, get outside one’s comfort zone, and make mistakes, Deidre Dunn ‘95 told students during the Investment Club and Invest in Girls Assembly. Deirdre is managing director and co-head of global rates at Citi.

Deirdre said that even though she considers herself an introvert and dislikes public speaking, returning to campus to talk about her career was an easy decision.

“But not insignificant in my decision is something that I used to do by accident, but now I do on purpose. I pursue things that make me uncomfortable. You could almost say, I have gotten really comfortable being uncomfortable. And it has been incredibly powerful for me.”

New York City’s vulnerability to rising sea levels and storms goes back to its earliest days, historian Ted Steinberg told history students during the 2019 Heyburn Lecture. Mr. Steinberg is the Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University, and his work focuses on the intersection of environmental, social, and legal history.

Although, many residents were caught off guard by severe flooding during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Mr. Steinberg said the “seeds of New York City’s expansion at the expense of the sea had been planted in the early years.”

When an act of legislation ends legal discrimination, it does not automatically end oppression or abuses of power, scholar and activist Jamal Grant told students.

“It’s not enough to change bad laws and bad leaders,” said Mr. Grant, who spoke at an assembly hosted by the student clubs SIMA (Students Interested in Middle Eastern Affairs) and Amnesty International. “We have to change the systems that keep bad leadership in power.”

Spreading out across the 20-acre grounds of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, students from visual arts faculty member Martin McDermott’s Advanced Sculpture class studied and sketched works by renowned modern and contemporary artists.

Nick Morton ’02 was a few weeks into his senior year at Milton when the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, stirred in him the need to serve. Before graduating from high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve—and began a lifelong military career.

Now an Army Captain, Nick was the 2019 Veterans Day speaker.

“We spent the days and months trying to process what had happened” after the terrorist attacks in 2001, he said. “I can’t speak to what my classmates felt at that time, but for me, it began to synthesize this sense that I wanted to become part of something bigger than myself. I started wondering if I had something to give, if I could be of value.”