School Pointes
July 29, 2022
Camp O'Fun campers took a field trip to Universal Nonstop on Thursday.
Campers travel to a different galaxy
Two recent field trips for Camp O’Fun campers were out of this world.
During a visit to the Cranbrook Institute of Science, students went to the planetarium and saw two different shows divided by groups. The younger group saw “One World, One Sky: Big Bird’s Adventure” and the older group saw “Night Sky: Objects and Beyond.”
Students also visited a traveling exhibit called "Treasure" and explored the museum at large.
The second field trip was an indoor adventure at Universal Nonstop, an indoor amusement center.
Campers did everything from playing arcade games, laser tag and miniature golf, exploring the jungle gym, and -- the most coveted event of the trip – participating in Go Kart races.
For some students, according to camp director Crystal Fletcher, a highlight was riding the school bus.
“The kids were so excited to see the bus in our parking lot,” she said.
Students connect with businesses on The Hill
Fifth graders in Jane Plieth’s Summer Connection enrichment class have been busy making a full size “Island Adventure” board game. This STEAM-based game uses math (expense reports), science (insects-medicine vs. disease), English (describe your tribe) and social studies (world map/natural resources).
After playing the game, students walked up to The Hill to visit LaLonde Jewelers, Huntington Bank and Morning Glory coffee shop.
At the first stop, Mr. LaLonde spoke about the importance of small businesses that support our community, compared two emeralds based on their quality, and discussed why he only buys natural diamonds as opposed to man-made.
At the second stop, a representative from Huntington Bank spoke about debt, mortgages, loans and his career path and future goals in finance.
Finally, students used their budgeting skills to spend the least, but also buy the same item for all, from Morning Glory.
Class of 2022 Spotlight: Kamaria Davis
Our summer series on distinguished alumni from the Class of 2022 continues with Kamaria Davis, a graduate of Grosse Pointe North.
Kamaria Davis has wanted to go to New York University since she was 8. Initially it was the allure of New York City. Her interest in studying acting came later.
When selecting her top universities based on the strength of their drama programs, she considered options on the west coast such as USC and UCLA. She decided to apply Early Decision to her dream school, however, and was accepted into NYU’s Tisch Drama program.
“I was so happy; I cried when I got in,” she said.
The program has 10 professional training studios, each offering a unique approach to creative work. Upon acceptance, students are placed in one of eight different primary training studios where they learn the skills needed to proceed to an advanced level of training. They remain in their primary training studio for four consecutive semesters, each building upon the last.
Kamaria was accepted into the Atlantic Acting School, based on a company founded by the playwright David Mamet and the actor William H. Macy, most recently known for his role in the Netflix comedy, Shameless.
According to the NYU website, the Atlantic Acting School introduces students to professional-level ensemble work and teaches them how to build a successful career in theater, film and television.
Kamaria’s main passion is film and TV, as she hasn’t performed on stage in live theater since she participated in Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit when she was in elementary and middle school.
One advantage of NYU’s drama program is that it exposes her to “a little bit of everything," she said, and she looks forward to the opportunity to explore theater again.
Photos courtesy of Karri Brantley Photography
Kamaria is grateful she attended a four-week summer intensive program at an acting studio last summer in New York City. Not only did it help her navigate the city, it prepared her for what she understands is a very rigorous curriculum at NYU, with Monday, Wednesday and Friday spent in the studio, and Tuesday and Thursday reserved to fulfill her general education requirements. While many drama majors opt to minor in business entertainment, she is leaning toward communications.
Also preparing her for the rigor of college in general was her time at Grosse Pointe North. Her favorite classes were AP Psychology with Jennifer Weisbrodt, AP Literature with Jonathan Byrne, and all the classes she had with Dan Gilleran – government and sociology her junior year and Exploring Global Issues her senior year.
“I thoroughly enjoyed going to AP Psych every day and I was so sad when it was over because it was just a semester long,” Kamaria recalled. “My friends and family all tell me I should be a psychologist. That class really made me explore that as an option.”
She also appreciates the perspective her sociology class provided "on the world and my outlook on everything. Especially going to such a diverse school like NYU, I feel more prepared for that because of what I learned from sociology about everyone’s different opinions and perspectives," she said.
Finally, she credits Jonathan Byrne for helping her with her college essay.
“It was a requirement in his class to write a draft and that was so helpful. By senior year I was already so stressed about applying to colleges, having the foundation of my essay already done was so helpful.”
Her advice to next year’s college-bound seniors, especially those pursuing the performing arts, is to put the college essay on their summer to-do list.
“If you can do anything over the summer, do that, because you’re going to be dealing with so much stress with your auditions and keeping your grades up," she said.
For acting students, she recommends perfecting audition monologues because “you don’t get another chance.”
She also encourages students to look applications over carefully in advance, as she missed a requirement to prepare a dramatic dialog from prior to the 19th century.
“I had to learn a Shakespeare monologue with my acting coach,” she recalled. “I was so stressed because I had three days to prepare that.”
Do your research, she advises, and the rest will fall into place.
Alumni Through the Decades
Rachel Konrad
Class of 1989
Grosse Pointe South High School
There are a number of people Rachel Konrad considers influential in her professional trajectory, but leading the way was her journalism teacher at Grosse Pointe South High School, Bob Button. It was her experiences working as a student journalist and editor of the student newspaper, The Tower, that inspired her to study journalism at Northwestern University, and to spend the first 15 years of her career as a journalist.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that I owe my career to Mr. Button,” Rachel said about her former adviser, who died in 2021. “He was one of those teachers who had vast influence, the likes of which he could never know. The number of people he touched over the years – not just the people who went directly into journalism because of him, but the number of people who went on to write or interview strangers or get over their fear of cold calling people. He was definitely a formative influence.”
Rachel also learned about the commitment involved in producing a weekly newspaper. As an editor, she enjoyed editing her peers’ and writing for a column she “cheesily” titled “Konrad’s Corner."
“I loved being able to provoke people to think a bit differently, to get myself to think a little bit differently,” she said.
An even earlier influence than Bob Button was her fifth-grade teacher at Defer Elementary, Nancy Kline, the first person outside her family who made her feel like she could do “absolutely anything.”
“There were relatively few moments in my life where someone believed in me and was willing to put their confidence in me,” Rachel said. “It was high impact for a fifth grader. I was 11.”
After graduating from Northwestern with degrees in journalism and history, Rachel did an internship in Milwaukee. She was then hired at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., where she covered everything from the rodeo to fraud to court cases to the opening of the new ice-skating rink.
From there, she received an offer to return to the Detroit area and work at the business desk at the Detroit Free Press.
“I thought that was an incredible offer,” Rachel recalled. “I could come home.”
That experience opened up a lot of doors for her, as well as taught her foundational skills she has used in her career since, such as “crisp and fast writing” and “not being afraid to ask the tough questions.” She interviewed the CEOs of all the automakers, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, to name a few.
In 1999, Rachel witnessed the technology boom and migration of young professionals to the San Francisco Bay Area and considered a change in career. While she loved conventional print journalism, she recognized the challenges it was facing with the advent of the Internet.
She decided to apply to new 21st century-style journalism jobs in the heart of the tech industry. She ended up accepting an offer at CNET, which covered the tech industry. This job introduced her to a new industry and brought her to the San Francisco Bay Area.
After about two and a half years, she began to work for the Associated Press, one of the largest journalism organizations in the world. Among the emerging companies on her beat were Google and eBay.
“One of the start-ups I covered was this completely obscure, no-name car company,” Rachel said. “They invited me to test drive their electric car because they knew I had covered the automotive industry. I was a kid from Detroit and my dad worked for Chrysler for years. My family was all in the automotive industry.”
The company was Tesla. On a whim, Rachel reached out to a contact there and immediately received an offer to work in public relations.
Before she knew it, she was reporting directly to co-founder and CEO Elon Musk.
“That was terrifying and educational and illuminating and, honestly, awesome,” she said. “I’m really grateful to Elon. I did that for three years and it was like getting a master’s of business administration every day you worked for the man. He was incredible.”
Rachel began working at Tesla in 2008, right at the point the company started selling its first cars. In 2010, she and her husband and then 4-year-old son, Levi, had the opportunity to relocate from Tesla headquarters to England.
Rachel’s next offer came in 2011 while she was at the Paris Motor Show and ran into Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault-Nissan, who invited her to work for his company in global communications.
“I was not looking for a job or to leave Tesla; I loved it,” she said. “But it was an incredible opportunity to move to Paris and to see the auto industry from a different point of view.”
She remained in that position for five years. In 2015, while at a conference on the environment, she ran into someone named Pat Brown, who was in the stealth phases of founding a new company. While he complimented her on her role in helping the automotive industry move away from fossil fuel dependence toward solar energy vehicles, he said she was in the wrong industry. He invited her to come work for him at Impossible Foods.
“Here I am in Paris in this cushy job with an expat status, but I wanted to have an impact on the planet,” Rachel recalled. “I knew I needed to do this. I quit my job. I moved my family 7,000 miles back to California to the San Francisco Bay area so I could work with this company, still in stealth mode.”
This proved to be rewarding work and she remained there until 2021. Then, determined to accelerate her impact on the planet, in January 2022 she began working for Dave Friedberg at the Production Board, a San Francisco-based venture foundry fully focused on making and building businesses that decarbonize the Earth and solve the public health crisis. The Production Board starts and invests in businesses in food and agriculture technology, the life sciences and medicine.
Rachel is driven to protect the planet for the benefit of future generations, including her two sons, Levi, now 17, and Adam, 7.
In fact, Levi is headed to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the fall, where he plans to major in environmental science – an area of tremendous growth in the future, in Rachel's view.
“A lot of colleges advise not enrolling in the environmental studies program because it is oversubscribed,” she said. “That makes me really optimistic.”
Nominate your favorite GPPSS alum!
Partnering with the Grosse Pointe Alumni & Friends Association, we are nearing our goal of featuring 100 alumni as part of the district's 100th anniversary. There's still time to nominate an alum! Click here for details. And if you know any GPPSS couples, click here for a nomination form.
Click here to read more Alumni Through the Decades profiles.
Want to read more?
Check out past issues of School Pointes on the district website.
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