Priscilla Ehrgood
“Going to one specific market made my host mom really happy: she’d get fruit from a specific vendor, and then she'd have these specific apples from that specific person, and then she’d make an apple tart. It was satisfying and fulfilling for her.”
As senior Priscilla Ehrgood recalled her experience as a School Year Abroad (SYA) France participant last year, she mentions that the focus on small choices in France helped her become more spontaneous. “Focusing on the smaller things helped me not get too caught up in a big overall plan,” she said. “If you're thinking more about what direction your life is going, you don't really have room to have fun at a market—then it’s just a chore.”
Ehrgood, who came to Exeter four years ago with seemingly fixed plans, will soon graduate having fulfilled her largest initial goals: becoming fluent in French and earning the Classical Diploma. Although “on paper” she may have followed her plan, she will leave campus with heightened appreciation for relationships and the small joys of life. All the while, she has improved the lives of everyone around her with her witty humor and consistent selflessness.
Prep year, Ehrgood had planned out every aspect of her Exeter career. A unique challenge of Ehrgood’s schedule was that she hoped to reach advanced levels of French, Latin and Greek. Having taken both French and Latin in middle school, Ehrgood was intrigued by the structural elements of the different languages. “I’ve always liked patterns and puzzles, and language seemed like a way cooler version of a puzzle,” Ehrgood said. “I loved the introductory levels of both languages because it involved figuring out how self-expression works and examining how a sentence works.”
As she advanced in both languages, Ehrgood’s interests evolved from grammatical structures to cultural and literary insights. Her desire for French language and cultural immersion inspired her to take a huge detour from her original four-year plan with her decision to attend the SYA France program for her upper year. “In my middle school, there was very much a set path that everyone was supposed to follow,” she said. “But then, [when I came] to Exeter and [was] around different types of people from different places with different ideas of what kind of paths were set out for them already was really amazing for me. That was part of the reason I was interested in France.”
Spending a year in France surrounded by both French locals and other American peers prompted her to re-examine her priorities and approach to daily life. Specifically, she recalled that she was surprised by the relative insignificance in European culture of success at work. “I remember my English teacher was telling me a story: she had lived in Spain and was trying to explain the difference between an American office and a Spanish office,” Ehrgood said. “She said, ‘Well, in America, you want to come in earlier than asked and stay the latest so that you can look like you're really dedicated to your job, right? In Spain, if somebody worked overtime, they would ask, why would you do that? You could be doing other things with your life.’”
Ehrgood applied this principle to the focus around work at Exeter. “I think Exeter is very much aligned with the first way [of thinking]. Everybody needs to take on the second way a little more sometimes.”
She noted that being away from PEA for a year helped her recognize how unusually fast-paced and work-centric it was. “It's so crazy because anytime you want to talk with somebody at Exeter, they always say ‘I only have half an hour, I have to go do this, I'm so stressed about this’,” she said. “But a lot of my friends at SYA didn't think that school had such a big place in your life. We would just go out and the conversation wouldn't be about what you're stressed about; it would just be about how you're doing. It was refreshing to be around people who thought, school is school, and now, life is life.”
Returning to campus for her senior year, Ehrgood now approaches Exeter life with different priorities. “I emphasized my friendships more in the fall because of my experience in France; I had a better work-life balance than I had had at Exeter my first two years,” she said.
Ehrgood said she was most delighted to come back to Wheelwright Hall, where she serves as a dormitory proctor. “I’m really happy to have the people in this dorm because a lot of the people are open and kind. We have different interests and paths and social scenes but at the same time, we’re able to come together,” she said. “I was nervous coming back after a year and not knowing two grades but all the new people are awesome.”
Former Wheelwright proctors Clara Lee, Alexis Gorfine and Alexis Lee ’18 all recalled that Ehrgood was endlessly generous. “For as long as I’ve known her, even when things are difficult, I’ve never seen her stop being kind,” C. Lee said. “Kindness is a difficult thing to cultivate, but Priscilla has it in spades.”
Gorfine described Ehrgood as a reliable and supportive friend. “She is one of the sweetest and most caring people I’ve ever met,” Gorfine said. “No matter what was going on in her life, she always made time to be there for me, even when she was in France.”
A. Lee said that someone who did not know Ehrgood would probably be able to identify her: “Just enter a room and point to the person who seems most genuinely kind,” she said.
Senior and fellow Wheelwright proctor Michaela Phan also emphasized Ehrgood’s consistent selflessness. “In the dorm, her door is always open to everyone at any time. She’s always there for people,” Phan said. “Despite being so selfless towards others, she still has her own personality.”
A. Lee offered insight into Ehrgood’s unique character, describing her humor as “jokes that I feel my grandma would really enjoy.”
Meanwhile, English Instructor and Ehrgood’s advisor Barbara Desmond praised Ehrgood’s charisma. “Put her in a common room full of Wheelwright students, [who are] all cranky about a 10 p.m. dorm meeting and eager to get back to their homework, and she can command and hold everyone's attention,” she said.
In addition, Desmond, who taught Ehrgood for the first time in the Iliad English course, said she appreciated Ehrgood’s “gracious and knowledgeable” presence in the classroom. “Priscilla always has the right thing to say at the right moment, and she pulls it off with so little fanfare. She is humble, but she does not hide,” Desmond said.
Ehrgood has extended her love of learning to others by participating in ESSO Tutoring, through which she teaches French. To further pursue her interest in education outside of Exeter, she has also worked at a nursery and interned for an education non-profit.
She noted that teaching younger students always sparked inspiration and joy for her. “Tutoring French was a lot of fun because I was able to both remember why I like French [...] and to share that with somebody else and have them be excited about it too,” Ehrgood said. “I would feel really proud of the student when she got something right, remembered something or made a connection. I find that really rewarding, being able to teach somebody something and have them be excited about it and feel proud of themselves.”
Ehrgood translated her love of teaching into a passion for education policy reform in the summer after her lower year when she interned at All The Kin, a Connecticut-based nonprofit focusing on helping provide low-income families a good education.
Spurred by this experience, through which she learned about the structural issues in the education system, Ehrgood hopes to pursue a graduate degree so she can become involved in public interest law and help reform education policies. “Certain people at Exeter take a good education for granted, and it’s this really incredible thing that people can get but it's distributed really unevenly to different populations,” she said. “Realizing the gravity and the greater implications of education during that internship motivated me to pursue education policy instead of just education.”
If Ehrgood is taking one lesson away from Exeter, though, it’s that there is no point in her making another four year plan. “I want to go into college just with a sense of doing things that would make me happy and interest me and then figuring things out from there,” she said. “It's worked out pretty well.”