She pulls out a bag of FiberFill Stuffing and molds it into a perfect circle around a small black lamp and then adds small, sparkly blue snowflakes and a dash of glitter. “There. That’s what my vision was,” she tells a group of underclassmen volunteers. Not every senior would volunteer to spend hours of their Friday night prepping and cleaning up after a dance, not to mention the weeks of prior planning the task entails, but Anna Holtz is not just any senior.

On April 15, students were beckoned inside the Assembly Hall for an unforgettable assembly — one that not only inspired an appreciation for the fight against racial inequity in the United States but also challenged each listener to reflect on their own role in building a more just community at Exeter. Rev. Wheeler Parker, the last living witness of the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, stood at the podium and delivered a Tuesday assembly speech like no other, recounting the chilling facts of his late cousin’s fate.

The campus is quiet as students rush to complete assignments in their dorm rooms on Friday, April 25, before Saturday classes the next morning. The sound of cascading arpeggios streams out from “the Bowld,” where students perform the concertos, preludes, and pop songs they’ve poured every spare minute into practicing for the Student Soloist Concert.