Brady McElroy’s favorite subject is history. The member of the class of 2023 at St. Anselm’s Abbey School in Washington, D.C., participates in the school’s history club and St. Anselm’s Model United Nations (UN) team. He has attended several conferences in the last couple of years with Model UN, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It has been a lot of fun getting to meet great people from around the country, even around the world. There was one conference (the Harvard Model UN in Boston) that was mostly international students, which was a lot of fun,” McElroy said.
Keeping with the tradition of the Benedictine order that sponsors the school, McElroy will be attending St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, where he hopes to study history. His future is full of options as he considers teaching either on a collegiate level, or potentially returning to his alma mater to teach, or becoming a researcher.
“I will definitely miss the Abbey. The class, the teachers, the whole place. It's just been such a wonderful experience that it's a lot to leave,” McElroy said.
School traditions he will miss include Renaissance Day, when students and teachers give seminars on something different, such as meditation, the history of hip-hop or grilling food. McElroy also reminisced over the athletic event days such House Day and Field Day, which end with the “Wacky Relay” in which each house (the school is divided into four houses) competes against the other.
“Each house gets representatives of each grade and they do various things. One is a, like a wheelbarrow race or a three-legged race. The ‘A Formers,’ that is the sixth graders, have to carry a greased watermelon,” McElroy said. “Often [they] drop the watermelon, and it splats on the ground…obviously, you have to eat the watermelon. It’s a perfectly fine watermelon.”
Then, McElroy explained the student who carried the slippery fruit will have to wear the empty watermelon rind as a hat.
McElroy has a brother currently in sixth grade at St. Anselm's, and has practical advice for incoming students.
“Just getting the homework done as soon as possible rather than putting it off definitely helps a lot….[and] participating in class as well. You remember more when you take an active participation role,” McElroy said.
McElroy's faith has been shaped by St. Anselm's Abbey, particularly through the junior year retreat known as Kairos. Students spend four days together.
“It is a very kind of intense spiritual retreat that we do with taking the whole grade and going to a retreat center…It’s a wonderful experience, it really impacted me junior year, which is why I went back senior year and felt called to help lead it,” McElroy said.
McElroy has described St. Anselm’s as having a more tangible impact on his relationship to religion.
“You could say [in a] more concrete spiritual sense, like the religion classes provide such a wonderful experience explaining, because when you come in sixth grade, 11 year olds don't know that much about religion…having the religion classes with so much detail, so much kind of background on all that was very interesting,” McElroy said.
For his yearbook quote, McElroy quoted the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. The poem reads, “It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”
“It's a poem that I really enjoy. It's a very impactful and short and sweet poem. It is kind of pithy, but it's got a certain heft behind it. It seemed like a good motto to live by,” McElroy said.
