Hanna Gilroy – Most Likely to Succeed, 2005

Hanna Gilroy, a 2005 Harwood graduate, now lives in Exeter, New Hampshire with her husband, Andrew, and daughter, Eleanor. In high school, she got the “Most Likely to Succeed” senior superlative. 

           After graduating high school, Hanna studied Neuropsychology and Human Development at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She graduated college in 2009, after the recession, so finding a job, especially as a new graduate, was challenging. Instead, she decided to go to graduate school at Wheelock College during that time to get more training. 

     At Wheelock, now a part of Boston University, she got a degree in Child Life and Family Centered Care in order to become a Certified Child Life Specialist. “I had known I wanted to be a child life specialist since high school, thanks to Ellen Berrings who pointed me in that direction,” she said. 

     During graduate school and a few years after, Hanna worked at a Montessori school, which focuses on hands-on learning. She now works at Dartmouth Health Children’s, supporting the emotional safety of children and their families. “We do this through developmentally appropriate preparation and education, opportunities for play and normalization, and facilitating good coping strategies during challenging experiences.” 

Ariel Goodman – Class Clown, 2010

Ariel Goodman, who graduated from Harwood in 2010 with the “Class Clown” superlative, now lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania after spending time in Latin America and New York City. As an investigative journalist, she worked for the Marshall Project, which is a news organization focused on criminal justice issues, and she is now an editor for another social justice project.

 In addition to being a journalist, Ariel is also part of a band that plays klezmer and cumbia music. She says that “everything I learned, I learned by pranking my classmates and teachers,” and that she still is a trickster and likes playing jokes on her friends. Ariel finds that a sense of humor is an important part of being a journalist, because many of the topics she has to write about are typically not considered to be “happy”, so having the ability to stay positive helps.