Senior of the Year: Will Soh

By ELLEN JIN ‘26

Every Tuesday night, just before 8 p.m., senior Will Soh and his fellow Student Council Executive Board members await the start of their weekly meetings. They take turns queuing songs to set the mood before people come in, singing and dancing along. One such song that Soh describes to encapsulate his four-year Exeter journey is “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus. Coupled with the choice of this upbeat pop song, Soh recounted his time at Exeter as one filled with lots of fun and good times. Many friends and teachers describe him as an easygoing, uplifting, and extremely fun person to be around, bringing this positive energy wherever he goes.

Aside from his role as Student Council Vice President, Soh is involved in a myriad of communities on campus such as serving as co-head of the Daniel Webster Debate Society, Korean Society, Exeter Rocket Team, and ESSO Music. He is also involved in Science Olympiad, the jazz band, and has a great love for physics. No matter the activity, Soh exhibits deep interest and passion for everything he’s involved in. “I don’t see any of the stuff I do outside of class as a chore or anything. I love being there and I love doing it,” he said.

Soh immigrated from Korea to America at the age of five and spent his earlier years before Exeter living in Illinois. Attending public elementary and middle school, he described the process of deciding to apply to Exeter as “a pretty funny story. I learned about Andover because I saw the Business Insider video in sixth or seventh grade, and that made me want to apply. I didn’t take considering coming to a place like this super seriously until late seventh grade. It all happened pretty fast, but I’m really glad I ended up here.”

Arriving as a new prep during the Covid pandemic, the initial transition to living on campus wasn’t easy. “I think coming here was a pretty big adjustment. I was fairly scared about the academic adjustment. I wasn’t top of my class in middle school or anything like that. So, I thought I’d be coming into this super competitive environment and I wasn’t sure how I would do,” Soh said. “On the social side, coming here during a pandemic year was really isolating in a way. They kept us in our rooms all the time — the first couple of weeks I had to eat in my room. So that isolation with homesickness the first few months were really tough.”

Although the social isolation was a challenge, Soh quickly found a sense of community and home in Main Street Dormitory. “I feel so lucky to have been placed into Main Street because it’s a dorm with such a strong community and culture. We’re further off campus than every other dorm, so I think our identity is a lot stronger. When I came in, the community took me in right away,” he said.

Soh has formed close bonds with many of his dormmates over the years. Senior Michael Yang commented on Soh’s energy when they first met in Main Street. “I met Will on one of my first days on campus as a prep. In the dorm, he was the first East-Asian prep I had met, and I felt an immediate connection to him,” Yang recalled. “I remember that he had this contagious aura of energy, some like to call it ‘prep energy,’ but to me it felt welcoming.”

Yang continued to recount fond memories shared with Soh in the dorm. “I used to live very close to him, which made it very common for us to hang out in the dorm. Even now, when he lives on the other side of the dorm, we consistently spend nights goofing around,” he said. “I love it when Will and I have cooked in the past. There is never a dull moment when you have two Asians cooking in the dorm kitchen.”

As a prep, Soh would often spend quality time in the rooms of upperclassmen, talking and doing homework. “There’s a senior in the dorm that graduated a few years ago named Ben Ehrman. He was a person I looked up to and was always willing to help me out. I think pretty much the entirety of prep year I spent the hours of eight to midnight in his room,” he said. 

Now as a dorm proctor himself, Soh tries to simulate the same kind of guidance and support he was once given. “[Ehrman] always gave me advice, and he really modeled for me what I wanted to be as a proctor. I felt like I had some big shoes to fill, if I’m being honest. I knew that I wanted to be that supportive person that kept my door open..”

Being a proctor is just one way that Soh has positively affected the student body. As part of the Student Council, he served as lower and upper representative before being elected to the role of Vice President. He talked about what first made him join and his initial experience, saying, “Student Council was always something I knew I’d want to be a part of. I’ve always been interested in the idea of student government. I was class rep for two years– I love that position because it gave us the means to really focus on our class. I really like the planning and running of events and thought that was super fun. But also being able to have a positive impact on my classmates, even if it’s a small one.” 

Soh ran for Vice President to focus on bigger impacts and making larger changes than he could as a class representative. “I wanted to focus a little bit more on larger school initiatives. So I ran for the Vice Presidency and as Vice President I really wanted to focus on what lasting things we could do to help student wellbeing and student life. I wanted to leave an impact and really help my community,” he said. 

He described one such initiative as revising the Visitations policy, a long-standing issue: “We passed the dorm heads [and faculty] votes, which is the first time in decades that we’ve done that. I’m really happy about the work we’ve been able to do with that.”

Senior Emilia Kniestedt, Student Council Co-Secretary, recounted an experience with Soh regarding the Visitations policy. “In the fall, we met with the dorm heads so that we could try to approve the V’s policy with them. We were all really nervous because it had been months and months of trying to prepare for that meeting, and he was just cracking jokes and making all of us feel better,” she shared. “I feel like there are few people where it’s easy to balance work and friendship and he’s one of those people where that’s very easy to do.”

Additionally, serving in Student Council gave Soh a platform to connect with new students. Senior Harrison McGovern referenced Student Council as his way of getting to know Soh. “I met Will in the DSL (Day Student Loung) my lower year, but I’d known him prior to that because he was the lower rep for my class. At the time, I was a new student, and I thought StuCo was really cool so I respected him and admired him.” 

“He introduced himself and he was very outgoing and friendly. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing him very well ever since,” McGovern continued.

When he first arrived at Exeter, Soh decided to explore new clubs and landed on debate. It has since become a major activity that he has been involved in on campus, although he didn’t initially expect anything from it. “I came in as a prep never having done debate, but I mean it’s always a big high school extracurricular. So I came in wanting to join, but I didn’t know if I would stick with it. I didn’t really expect much from it,” Soh stated.

He quickly began to enjoy the process and decided to stick with it: “I was surprised by how much fun I was having in debate. I mean, I loved these impromptu rounds and quick arguments. So much on the fly thinking and on the fly argumentation.” 

“My first two years, prep and lower year, really made me want to pursue it and continue being a part of that community. So I just kept going with it and it made me so much more confident in my public speaking abilities,” he continued.

Now as a senior, Soh has taken on the role of co-head. “As a co-head, the role was definitely more serious and demanding because our debate program is unique — it’s almost entirely student run,” he explained. “There is a lot of responsibility on a group of three to five students running a program, practices, and curriculum.” 

But he describes the role as being extremely gratifying: “It was really rewarding to see that small community of just five people grow once every week and see people becoming friends. So overall, it was definitely a demanding experience but so rewarding.”

Kniestedt admires Soh’s attitude towards many things that he does. “He’s such a passionate helper to the community, and he’s a really inspiring learner. For example, I’m terrible at physics. But he takes so many physics courses and even went to CERN last year, so I feel like he’s very inspiring in that sense.”

Soh described his passion for science and physics: “Physics is definitely probably my favorite subject. It’s definitely an incredibly difficult subject that’s just constantly kicking my ass, but I really like it. I’ve taken classes like modern physics and two astronomy classes. I’m loving quantum mechanics right now.” 

However, out of all of these, Soh cites modern physics as his favorite. “Modern physics is such an incredibly cool class. It was just a lot of new stuff that I’d never seen before, things like relativity just really made me think. It was probably one of the hardest classes I took, but it was such an amazing class.”

This interest has carried him through to many different clubs such as Science Olympiad and Exeter Rocket Team. Soh has been co-head of Exeter Rocket Team for two years, and shares more insight on what they do. “We’re an all purpose space club. We’d do small projects like building heat shields that would model heat shields on rockets. The main stuff the club did was model rocketry,” he continued. “We built model rockets, designed them, and launching them is always fun. But we also hosted guest speakers, we have presentations about space and space technology related things. So we’re kind of all-purpose. But last year, the co-heads and I decided to really focus on the model rocketry aspect of it because that’s what everyone loved doing.”

Focusing on one thing has allowed the smaller club to retain more members. “We started competing in this competition called the American Rocketry Challenge last year and we’re competing again this year. So that really focused the club on this one singular thing. We’re still a small club, but we were definitely larger than we used to be. We’re 10 to 15 now most meetings.”

The hands-on building aspect of model rocketry translates to Soh’s role in the Science Olympiad builds team. “Build events are more about building something to design parameters and competing whoever has the best build or the best design wins. That was way more intriguing to me than studying for tests. I want to be an engineer too, so that fit there.” 

He greatly enjoys the building process and spending time in the design lab. “The events aren’t necessarily that difficult so to me it feels a lot like time for relaxation, time to get working with my hands, have some more fun, and I’ve loved doing it. The builds team did really well at States last year, so we’re hoping to repeat that performance, but we’ll see.”

Another passion of Soh’s is music. He plays trumpet and is involved in jazz band and jazz combo: “I’ve been playing the trumpet since fourth grade. But I joined the jazz band freshman year and it was online, so it wasn’t really jazz band, it was more like music theory class.” So he switched out of jazz band and into jazz combos, which are smaller groups. “Lower year and through most of upper year I actually did jazz combos, because I had a lot on my plate. I didn’t know if I could take the extra load on my schedule. But I absolutely love jazz combos because it was a small group of maybe four to seven people, and usually my group had a vocalist. So we’d pick a couple of songs and rehearse once a week.”

However, after a while of small groups, Soh missed the larger group experience. “I did miss that big band experience. There’s nothing like being in the middle of a big jazz band, with the grooves going, that feeling is amazing. So I asked Mr. Rabb if I could join the big band again, and I joined the actual jazz band upper year. It’s probably the part of my day I look forward to the most.”

Aside from trumpet, Soh also plays piano, which he teaches through the ESSO Music program. He also served as a co-head, and described his role. “I help run the program. It’s mainly just a lot of logistical stuff, a lot of emails and spreadsheets. But it’s fun putting kids and tutors together, it feels great knowing I’m helping facilitate music learning.”

Soh also serves as co-head of Korean Society, helping to plan events and hosts the weekly meetings. “Korean Society meets every Monday night over dinner. We have this fun tradition where at dinner everyone introduces themselves, says their name even if we’ve known you and seen you a million times and the entire group says hi to that person back. Then they rate their day from one to 10 and tell us about their day and everyone does it. At the last person we average the score and we keep a track of average day ratings. You see them slowly go down over the term and it’s pretty funny. We had a 9.6 week last week I think, and that’s the highest it’s ever been and that was great.”

Soh speaks on what the community means to him. “I think Korean Society is unique in the community that it nurtures because the whole premise of the club is just getting together and eating dinner. That’s the only thing you really have to come and do. It’s a pretty awesome thing because you get really close to everyone around you. You’re eating dinner with the same group of people every Monday. It’s awesome to see the friendships that develop and the whole community that comes together. We become a really tight-knit group over the years.”

Instructor in and Soh’s advisor Art Adam Hosmer commented on his ability to juggle his activities and the stress that Exeter brings. “You don’t really kind of think of him as this super stressed out guy or anything. He shows that it is possible to do a number of things and succeed academically and get into a college that you’re happy to get into. It’s possible to be a well-balanced and successful student here without being super stressed.”

Soh also spoke about his journey with time management and balancing everything. “ I’m a big procrastinator. I enjoy napping and doom scrolling. But procrastination has gotten a lot better over time. It is definitely a challenge, but I don’t have any special tricks or skills. I’m not a big fan of schedules and planning out days. I mean, I prioritize and make sure I do the things I need to do.”

McGovern spoke to Soh’s ability to adapt to different situations, saying,“He’s both very spontaneous and very coordinated. So in some instances he’ll be with a group of people and try and get them to all jump up and go out into town. But in others it’s very minute by minute, he’s able to have a structure to things. I think it’s sort of a good balance where he’s able to juggle the roles but then also finding the time to let loose. It’s very admirable.”

Outside of school and clubs, in his free time, Soh enjoys playing games with his friends. “I’m really big on this game called F1 Mobile. It takes up an absurd amount of my time and they’re shutting the game down in two months so I’m really sad about that. But I spend an absurd amount of time on F1 mobile and I gotta say I’ve gotten pretty good at that game.”

McGovern shared a similar memory attached to the game: “I definitely like when he texts me five minute long screen recordings of him playing Formula One on his iPhone.” 

Many people close to Soh describe the impact he has had on their lives. Yang shares “I really appreciate how humble Will can be at times. He always treats others with the utmost respect and is never one to show off. I definitely feed off that quality of his.” 

Hosmer agreed. “I think one thing about Will is that he doesn’t usually talk about himself, but also is extremely accomplished,” he said. I went to see him play in the jazz ensemble and I had to ask him about his science trip to CERN. He wasn’t talking about it unless you ask him about it. But then he’s happy to go into detail about his life.”

Kniestedt mentions the positive energy Soh brings: “Every single time that I have hung out with Soh I just end up being in a better mood. He’s just there to make other people feel better and to make them laugh. It’s easy to spend time with him.”

McGovern also touches on the ease that Soh brings to conversations “I think Will is definitely someone who it’s very easy to have very complex and deep conversations with just because he spends a lot of his time contemplating life and the world.”

Having spent four years on campus, Soh has experienced much of the dining hall and grill food options. When asked about his favorites, he took the time to ponder this question. “This is actually kind of tough. I’m a big fan of chicken tenders. Grill cookies are always great. It’s actually tough, I’m not sure. I like those diet Arnold Palmer drinks that are 99 cents. It’s always a good deal.”

Soh was also very passionate when describing his favorite meal from the dining hall. “People always hate on this one, but I’m a big fan of the Sloppy Joe’s. You get Sloppy Joe’s, some tater tots, and some rice and you mix it all together and people are like ‘Oh, this is gross, this tastes bad,’ and I think it tastes amazing. If Party in the USA was a food, it’d be sloppy Joe’s and rice.”

Reflecting on his time at Exeter, Soh recounts the things he’ll miss the most. “I’m gonna miss the campus. The campus is absolutely beautiful, so much nature. The buildings are so cool. The walkways are cool, the trees are cool, the squirrels are cool, so I’m gonna miss this place.” Aside from the campus, he enjoys the school environment. “I really love classes here, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna be in a situation again where I’m in a class of eight to 12 students talking about a book, or working on math problems together. And, although challenging at times, I really love the collaborativeness of school here. I really am gonna miss being at the table talking about interesting subjects, learning about interesting subjects,” he said.

Soh cites Exeter as being a huge contributor to his personal growth over the years. “I’m really thankful for the environment that Exeter has been for me, it’s an environment that’s very conducive to self-developed growth, improving one’s character and abilities and that’s great. This place has just opened the doors to so many things for me.” 

Additionally, Soh mentions people as being heavily impactful on his experience. “I’ve met some of the most supportive people here, both friends and teachers that I’ll remember forever. The people here really are uniquely amazing and the friends that I’ve been able to make I’m extremely grateful for.” 

Through his contributions to the community,. Hosmer described Soh as the embodiment of non sibi. “He earnestly believes in the non sibi aspect of the school, and practices that in his life in a number of ways. For example, with StuCo, he has the interests of the people he represents at heart. I think he really thinks about that and takes that into account. Then just his ability to be a normal teenager, but also still get the absolute most out of being here at Exeter.” 

Yang agreed. “There are very few people on this campus who embody our school motto of non sibi more accurately and purely than Will. He is always the first one to recognize when others are in need of help. He is always there for you.”

Kniestedt also shined praise on Soh’s selfless work. “I think he really goes above and beyond in his roles to set up future students for success even if he won’t be here. The work that he has done in these spaces, future Exonians will be able to feel his presence on campus even after he graduates,” she concluded.