Opening Convocation Speech 2026

9/10/2026

Joshua Neudel, Head of Upper School

Imagine you are 36 years old.

Your country is at war, and you decide you want to serve.

There are a few problems.

First, you are a woman in 1943, and the military has few opportunities for you.

Second, at 105 pounds, you are considered too light to join the Navy.

And third, the Navy believes your work as a mathematics professor is too important to the war effort for you to leave.

But you persist.

Eventually, you receive a waiver, join the United States Naval Reserve, and are assigned to Harvard University.

And this is where the story gets really interesting.

You walk into a room and encounter something unlike almost anything else in the world.

It is more than 50 feet long, weighs several tons, and contains hundreds of miles of wire. It is called the Harvard Mark I, one of the world's earliest large-scale automatic computers.

And your assignment is to figure out how to make it do what you need it to do.

This woman's name was Grace Hopper.

Hopper was a mathematician who would become one of the pioneers of computer programming. During the war, she helped program the Mark I to perform complicated calculations for the military.

But Hopper began thinking about something bigger. At the time, programming required complicated numbers and symbols that most people couldn't understand. Hopper wondered something that seems obvious today, but sounded ridiculous then:

What if, instead, we could teach computers to understand us?

She was told it couldn't be done.

But Hopper worked on it anyway.

She developed one of the first compilers, which translated human instructions into steps a computer could execute. Her ideas helped lead to COBOL (KOH-bol), one of the first widely used programming languages to resemble ordinary English.

Grace Hopper wasn't simply figuring out how to use a computer.

She was helping figure out how all of us would someday talk to them.

Every time we type a command, use an app, write a line of code, or interact with technology without having to understand the electrical signals underneath it, we are living in a world that people like Grace Hopper helped imagine.

And as for her work in the Navy, Hopper would attain the 4th highest rank of Rear Admiral.

Stories play a critical role in understanding. They take enormous ideas and make them human.

They help us understand meaning. They help us learn about other people. And sometimes, they help us understand ourselves.

Last Tuesday, I met with the twelfth grade and asked them to think back to elementary school or their Lower School years. Who helped shape the person they would become?

Names from our own Lower School like Ms. Kevaney, Ms. Hellmuth, Ms. Wolf, and Ms. Wooster came up, along with teachers from schools they attended before Brimmer. They talked about teachers who believed in them, challenged them, and encouraged them.

I imagine everyone here can think of someone like that.

So take a second.

Place that person's name in your mind.

That's how community is built. Through people who notice us, challenge us, encourage us, and believe in us, often before we understand their impact.

And the story of our country isn't all that different.

We know names like Washington, Roosevelt, King, and Ginsburg. But over the past 250 years, our country has also been built by countless people whose names most of us don't know.

More than 160 years before Hopper joined the Navy, another Massachusetts woman wanted to serve her country.

Her name was Deborah Sampson.

In 1782, women could not enlist in the Continental Army. So Sampson cut her hair, dressed as a man, took the name Robert Shurtliff, and enlisted anyway.

She served for more than a year, fought in combat, and was wounded. According to accounts, she even removed a musket ball from her own leg rather than risk having her identity discovered.

Eventually, her secret was revealed, and Sampson was honorably discharged.

Think about these two women.

Deborah Sampson in 1782.

Grace Hopper in 1943.

Two Massachusetts women separated by more than 160 years.

Both wanted to contribute, and both were told, in different ways, that there wasn't a place for them.

Sampson had to hide who she was to serve.

Hopper needed special permission.

Neither accepted that the answer had to be no.

And neither could have known the impact her choices would have on generations to come.

Which brings me back to those names our 12th graders shared.

I wonder how many of those teachers understood their long-term impact. Did they know that years later, a student would still remember something they said or simply the way they made them feel seen?

Maybe, but maybe not.

Building community rarely happens through one grand act. It happens through the choices we make every day. We notice someone. We ask a question. We take a risk. We imagine that something could be better.

That is what I hope we think about as we explore our theme this year: 250 Years: Many Voices Building Community.

The 250 years ask us to look backward, to learn the stories of those who helped build the country and communities we inherited.

But the word building asks something different of us.

Building is not in the past tense.

It asks us to look forward.

The story of this community and our school is still being written, and every person in this room has a voice in what comes next.

So think again about the person whose name you placed in your mind. Think about what they gave to you.

And then ask yourself:

Whose story will be different because you were part of it?

Opening Convocation Speech 2026

Brimmer and May School