Latin School of Chicago

It's nearly impossible not to rely on superlatives when describing Alice Baumgartner's academic and intellectual career. Baumgartner '06 attended Latin for high school, and she made those four years count, excelling in the classroom and on the school's cross country and track teams. She also committed her considerable energies to LIFE (Latin's Initiative for Ethics), founded the Latin chapter of STAND (Students Taking Action Now for Darfur) and joined other Chicago-area activists working on behalf of Rwandan refugees. In 2010, Baumgartner graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a degree in history and writing, and she won the James Andrew Haas Prize for her "breadth of intellectual achievement, strength of character and fundamental humanity." Her poetry and nonfiction have been widely published – and just as widely lauded. She was awarded a 2011 Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College at Oxford Unversity. Before moving to England, Baumgartner worked for a year as a Gordon Grand Public Service Fellow, assisting in a free health clinic in Palacios, Bolivia. That job, she said, gave her hands-on experience in making the most of very limited resources and familiarized her with how a lack of resources can impact lifeand death-decisions in developing countries. After her time in Latin America, Baumgartner felt a need to better understand the history behind circumstances she witnessed. Her graduate work at Oxford is focused on the Mexican-U.S. border in the 19th century. Now completing the second year of her master's degree, Baumgartner is considering various Ph.D. programs. Her ultimate goal, she said, is to teach history at the college level. "History is important because it's so often used to justify things that are happening in the present," she said. In 10 years, Baumgartner said, "I'd like to be teaching at a college, and I'd like to be writing along the lines of Jill Lepore (a staff writer at The New Yorker who received a Ph.D. in American History from Yale). I want to be writing in a way that's embraced outside of academia but is still intellectually rigorous. I don't think those things need to be mutually exclusive." n "History is important because it's so often used to justify things that are happening in the present." 34 L AT I N M AGAZINE

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