Hobart and William Smith Colleges

19 September 2013 Women Celebrate Excellence

The senior speakers at this years William Smith Celebrating Excellence Dinner, Annie Mandart 14 and Kathryn Middleton 14, have been friends since meeting on their initial tour of HWS, when they were juniors in high school. The two seniors will share their story at the dinner held at 6 p.m. on Sept. 19 in the Vandervort Room of the Scandling Campus Center.

There were only five of us on our tour and at our info session myself, my mom, my dad, Kathryn, and her father, says Mandart. We did not talk much that day, but our dads hit it off right away!

Middleton and Mandart kept in touch, updating each other throughout the admissions process.

We sent Facebook messages back and forth to stay in touch and write what we thought were the pros and cons, Middleton says. We became really close friends after doing Summer Research together in 2011 on Computational Thinking.

This past summer, with assistance from the Charles H. Salisbury Summer International Internship Stipend, both Mandart and Middleton worked abroad, respectively, for Chegg & Zinch and Markit.

With three years of experience as students, employees and friends in the HWS community, Mandart and Middleton will speak to William Smith students about the challenges and accomplishments of an HWS education and our incredible experiences working at these companies and exploring how they communicate and work globally, says Middleton, who recently accepted a job as a programmer with Markit.

The annual Celebrating Excellence Dinner is to publicly recognize the accomplishments of William Smith women, both in and out of the classroom.

Because Kathryn and I are sharing the senior speaker position, we each only have a very short time to speak, says Mandart, but I want the younger students especially to know that HWS is an excellent place and you get out of it what you put in.