Author Spotlight
Reser Hall
Terere Club
Seniors and Tereré (pronounced Teh-de-day) Club co-presidents Will Knutson and Matthew Hyatt both spent the summer in Paraguay with Amigos last year, where they learned the cultural importance of Tereré, a Paraguayan tea, through two very different experiences.
“My supervisor who was in charge of me the entire time was like ‘Hey the family you were going to live decided they didn’t want Amigos anymore,’” Hyatt said. “So they scrambled to find me a host family without giving them a background check or anything.”
After spending a mere two days with the new background check-less host family, Hyatt was reassigned to be closer to his community into yet another home without a background check.
“This house that I’m living in is with the town alcoholic apparently, this dude [Antonio] is drunk all the time,” Hyatt explained. “He wakes up and starts downing beers.”
After five weeks, Antonio kicked Hyatt out.
Hyatt finally settled into his new location drinking tereré bonding with his originally assigned host family that decided they wanted him after all. This was his first time eating real food like chicken all trip. While Hyatt was with Antonio, he ate mostly bread and cow tongue.
Knutson, on the other hand, got to experience a much smoother way of life with a traditional Paraguayan family, unlike Hyatt’s experience.
“You hang out with them most of the day and do whatever they do,” Knutson said. “I had a bunch of chores, like milking the cow and cleaning the kitchen.”
In addition to daily activities and chores, Knutson also helped out at a local school teaching kids about the environment, the importance of properly disposing trash and how to brush their teeth.
The two hoped to bring back the Paraguayan lifestyle through Tereré Club, a new club at East this year.
“We felt like it would be a great sense of community to have everybody brought together,” Hyatt said. “We wouldn’t normally drink tereré outside of Paraguay, but we wanted to remember the bonds and introduce a little culture to those who wanted to be introduced to it.”
They were inspired to bring back the traditional Paraguayan tea back to East after seeing how the communities truly bonded over drinking the tea.
“It’s a cultural thing that they drink every day,” Hyatt said. “You just drink with random people sometimes, like I would be walking down the street and next thing I know I’m with ten men that I’ve never met just passing around some tea.”
Tereré Club hopes to spread that same sense of community, with ten regular members that meet most weeks in room 504, Mrs. Andersen’s room, to drink tea and talk.
Aside from drinking the tea, the topics of discussion at the club meetings include conspiracy theories, urban legends and economics. According to Hyatt, the latest topics to be discussed are the Jersey Devil, the Bermuda Triangle and socioeconomic issues facing lower class Americans today.
As for next year, there is no current plan to continue the club next year, which both Knutson and Hyatt have no problem with.
“We want to be remembered as the club where people drank tea and had a good time for one year then just vanished the next,” Hyatt said.
Investment Club
Seniors and co-presidents of Investment Club Owen Hill and Sam Fay bring real market analysis and research to their weekly Thursday afternoon club meetings in Mr. Bickers’ room 314, which is filled with fourteen regular members looking to learn about the stock market and the economy.
They can be seen scrolling through rows of tabs filled with Marketwatch charts on the biggest movers of the day and the Dow in their third-hour marketing class where the pair plans for their upcoming meetings.
Their respective interests for the stock market came from different sources, but their passion for the industry is the same. For Fay, it was his mother’s career as the Director of Strategic Projects at Sprint that made him interested initially.
“From a very young age I told my mom I wanted to start a portfolio and… [she] was always talking about that around me,” Fay said. “It made me interested and I started to do my own research and really get interested in it and start my own portfolios here and there and mess around with it..”
For Hill, it was his grandfather’s passion for the stock market that originally piqued his interest in the field and his continued involvement with his grandfather that keeps him interested.
“I remember asking questions like ‘who gets to decide how much a stock is worth?’’ Hill said. “From that point I was very interested in why they moved and the changes behind it.”
The connection between Hill and his grandfather and Hill’s interest in the stock market only grew as Hill aspired to gain experience in investing in the stock market.
“As I got older he let me make some decisions because I was obviously working with their [Hill’s grandparents] finances for retirement, but he would text me often and say ‘What do you think of this move? What’s behind it? What’s spurring it?”
One of the core activities of the club is their currently-running club-wide stock market game. The game, which started in early January, has seen the recent ups and downs of the market affecting the leaderboard. Fay has gone first place when he was up 68,000 dollars to 13,000 dollars in the hole and in dead last in the span of a month.
Despite being founded this year, both Hill and Fay look for the club to continue even after the graduate. The club, according to both Fay and Hill, should be in good hands with younger leaders, such as junior Tom Joyce, that are already in the club.
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