Rush McCloy ’92 Back on Campus
A navy lieutenant, private equity investor and entrepreneur, Rush McCloy ’92 is returning to Deerfield as the 2010 commencement speaker.
In planning Commencement ceremonies, Director of Alumni Relations Mimi Morsman looked for a “guest speaker with a Deerfield connection…a parent or an alumnus.”
Mr. McCloy was a natural choice: five members of his family attended Deerfield, including his wife, Brooke Goodchild McCloy ’95, whom he met in high school. A “very loyal alumnus,” Mr. McCloy serves on the Executive Committee of the Alumni Association. “He is very proud of his Deerfield diploma,” said Mrs. Morsman.
After graduating from Deerfield, Mr. McCloy attended the University of Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Lauder Institute and Wharton Business School, where he was the recipient of the Paul Green Award for Knowledge Creation.
According to Mrs. Morsman, “one of the first responders at Ground Zero to locate survivors among the rubble after 9/11,” Mr. McCloy joined the Naval Reserve shortly after the incident. He has served in Afghanistan since September 2007, where he “personally led missions to fight, capture, and convert Taliban and anti-government elements.”
Prior to his service, Mr. McCloy founded both Run4Research—an organization that “raises money for pediatric cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering”—and Channelstone Capital Partners.
“Deerfield instilled a sense of service and teamwork that I have carried with me throughout my personal and professional life,” said Mr. McCloy. Indeed, he has “run marathons and ultra marathons around the world to raise money for pediatric cancer research and education in South Africa’s townships.”
In his address, Mr. McCloy will seek to convey the importance of service and how service “does as much for you as it does for others.” According to Mrs. Morsman, he will aim to “relate to seniors” in his address through also discussing “what he was thinking about when he was eighteen,” to deliver a speech “that kids will remember.”
Looking ahead to Commencement weekend, Mr. McCloy said he has never felt “so honored and humbled as now to have the chance to speak to such an accomplished group.”
Student Speakers address beyond “the hills”
The year’s graduation exercises will feature student addresses by seniors Hannah Flato and Steve Kelley.
As a student speaker, Flato wanted to be one of “two individuals who would complement each other and fill in what the other missed.” Indeed, Flato often thought of last year: “Ingrid Kapteyn ’09 and Alex Nicholson ’09 really resonated well together and had a good balance between narratives and messages.”
Regarding the process of writing such a speech, Flato admitted the difficulty of offering “a detached point of view.” Still immersed in current school life, she said, “It’s hard to step back and look over all four years.”
In preparing his address, Kelley also looked to last year’s student speaker, Alex Nicholson. According to Kelley, his speech contains “a main message similar to [Alex] Nicholson’s.”
“We obviously had different experiences, but still both want to show the same respect for Deerfield,” said Kelley. He aims to “tell a story that shows his transformation from a normal person to a Deerfield boy and then analyze it with the sense of community here in mind.”