“Throughout the years, I’ve been lucky enough to view WFS as being a family to me, throughout the tough times and the good. Quaker philosophy tells us that everyone has a light within them and I think this is exemplified by the incredibly caring nature of the school community.

WFS taught me not only the importance of being there for your fellow peers, but also the importance of letting others be there for you, which is a quality I believe is crucial despite not being brought up often… To the Class of 2022, do not be afraid to step outside of your comfort zone and take risks. The best learning experiences come from when you try something new and embrace the lack of comfort that comes with novelty. So take that class that is wildly different from your major, join that club that pertains to something you have no experience with, apply for that cool internship that seems outside of what you currently know. Who knows what might happen! You might love it, or you might not. But you will definitely learn something along the way — about the  subject matter and about yourself!”

Tony Bennett ’18 is currently a senior at Harvard University where he majors in Human Evolutionary Biology. During his time in Cambridge, Tony has been an extremely active member in the community. In his role as a Peer Advising fellow, he supports first-year students in navigating academic, extracurricular, and social opportunities at Harvard and also plans different community building events for them. He is also on the Executive Board of the Harvard College Half Asian People’s Association, the Harvard Korean Association, the Minority Association of Premedical Students, and volunteers at the Phillips Brooks House Association. In the summer of 2020, he joined the Nemours Summer Undergraduate Research Program where he worked on a project comparing pediatric injury trends during the pandemic time period and non-pandemic time period.

Since last January, Tony has been working on his Senior Honors Thesis. In this work, he is studying the effects of Covid-19 on religiosity in the United States. More specifically, he is interested in learning more about how the pandemic has changed people’s relationships with religion. Tony states, “This is especially interesting to me because this change in terms of religiosity represents cultural evolution happening right before our eyes! Religion is often used as an implicit way of helping people to cope with uncertainty and hard times – we’re certainly facing both throughout the pandemic and our culture is following suit to meet the needs of the population!”

Upon his graduation from Harvard this spring, Tony will join Bain & Company as an Associate Consultant where he will work on teams with different consultants on different projects to make strategic recommendations to different organizations and companies. Tony is most excited about this opportunity because, as he states, “I will be able to employ the critical thinking and problem solving that once honed at Wilmington Friends School in a very fast-paced, exciting, and diverse line of work.” In addition to his work at Bain & Company, he will be applying to medical schools in the spring of 2023 for matriculation in the fall of 2024. 

Congrats on all of your success, Tony - we are so proud of you!