Upper School Intersession 2025

Join us for a workshop designed to equip you with the skills and strategies needed to navigate difficult conversations across lines of difference. This session highlights the importance of engaging in these conversations and provides a comprehensive overview of the techniques and mindsets that lead to productive disagreements. You will also leave with an individual game plan for tackling an important personal or professional disagreement.

"Nine to five is how to survive, I ain't trying to survive, I'm trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot.” - Jay Z

In the 23 years since Jay-Z first rapped this line, he has released 14 albums, founded a clothing company, served as president of a record label, taken charge of a media streaming service, and is raising three children. This is creative hustle at its peak - the unmarked process outside of institutions, beyond survival, and where our best innovation lives. There is creative hustle living inside us all -- many of us en route to our own peak without even knowing it. This experience explores how to build confidence and effective mindsets, develop industry-relevant skills, and increase access to valuable networks through the stories of a wide array of diverse hustlers, with enough space between the lines for you to see your own path.

"Don’t tell me words don’t matter. I have a dream – just words words. We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal – just words. We have nothing to fear but fear itself – just words, just speeches" (President Barack Obama).

Back in the day, in his first campaign for president, Barack Obama promised change; yet in formulating that promise he relied on rhetorical rules, which for more than 2000 years have remained unchanged. Across the ages another politician and orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero, can help us analyze and appreciate Obama’s and other contemporary politicians’ rhetorical accomplishments.

We will look at excerpts from speeches by Obama, Bill Clinton, Pericles, Cicero, and Tacitus with an eye to their enactments of specific rhetorical rules–formulated in ancient times, followed to this day. Words have always mattered.

When people think of “networking,” they imagine attending social events to meet the right people to advance their careers while exchanging business cards. The reality is that building relationships leads to making meaningful connections that happen in both personal and professional settings. 

Instead of thinking about networking as making a business connection, think about it as creating a friendship. Demonstrate interest in others to build relationships in the same way you would make a friend through The FACE Framework: Familiarity, Authenticity, Curiosity, and Elasticity. You are the FACE of your organization!

This session will include storytelling to demonstrate each element of FACE. There will also be an activity called “Speed Friending” that encourages audience members to find what they have in common as they learn about each other for who they are.