Kimberly Ashton

Higher Education and Independent School Writing

The Winsor Bulletin •

Class of ’87 Makes an Investment in Wellness

By any measure, Winsor’s Class of 1987 has been remarkably generous. They have won the school’s yearly Giving Day competition, class members serve on Winsor boards and panels, and in November 2024 they established an endowed fund to support wellness initiatives at Winsor.
Notable as these accomplishments are, they spring from another powerful way class members have given over the last 38 years—to one another. For nearly four decades, the women of ’87 have stayed in close contact, lending their c...
The Winsor Bulletin •

Stories of 'Brilliance and Resilience'

Jaya Goud ’27 was in the sixth grade when the pandemic started, and she quickly grew to miss campus life once her class switched to virtual learning.
“I just felt so isolated....We had all been together for the entirety of my fifth-grade year, and suddenly we were all just tiny little boxes on screens,” she says. “I really wanted to find a way to connect with the community, to have meaningful conversations with my teachers again, and create something that could inspire and support other students...
The Winsor Bulletin •

A Remarkable Gift for Families, and for Winsor

Many families find themselves in a difficult position when considering the cost of an independent school education. For some, full tuition is not financially feasible, yet they may not qualify for the level of financial aid that would make such an educational opportunity possible. As a result, students from these families sometimes decide not to apply, leading to their underrepresentation in the student body and the community as a whole.
Jean Hynes and Mark Condon, who sent their four daughters—...
Berklee Today •

A Rising Star

Puerto Ricans have a saying about themselves, an adage they’ve had too many reasons to repeat over the past couple of years: Puerto Rico se levanta. Puerto Rico rises. 

Hurricane Maria, the ongoing debt management, and this summer’s political protests have all concussed the island, but Puerto Ricans get up, dust off, and press on. 

Take Rubén Amador B.M. ’01, for example. When his contemporary-music school, Conservatorio de Artes del Caribe, folded in 2005, four years after its opening, Amador...
Berklee.edu •

Soldiers and Veterans Pursue Art and Degree Online

In the Iraqi desert in 2004, in between shifts at a small outpost the Marines established at an abandoned train depot to refuel planes, Lance Corporal Andrew Bonica was able to occasionally grab a few minutes on a spotty internet connection and plug into life back home.
During one of this portal’s brief openings, Bonica came across a guitar magazine that featured an ad for BerkleeMusic.com, the predecessor to Berklee Online, the college’s online extension school.
He had taught himself to play gu...
Berklee Today •

Charlie Rosen: Broadway to Berklee and Back

Charlie Rosen ’12 was just three years old when his parents noted his perfect pitch. Not long after learning his colors, he could say whether a piano sound came from a black key or a white one. His parents, both musicians, started giving him lessons and let him experiment with the assortment of instruments they had around the house, an assemblage that included his mother’s woodwinds and his father’s theremin and backyard pipe organ. As Rosen’s interest grew, so did the number of instruments in h...
Berklee Today •

Taking Up the Baton

President Erica Muhl describes herself as a radio person, not a playlist person. She likes to channel surf. She’ll jump from the classical channel to the one that plays ’80s pop and rock. From there, she might dip into some bluegrass, take a ride on the country air waves, or spend time with folk and classic rock favorites. Lately, her digital dial has been landing a lot on the jazz station.

It’s hard not to hear a bit of her own biography in the genres she likes. “Music, I think, was really a v...
Berklee Today •

Courtney's Got Talent

Courtney Harrell ’01 remembers being about 11 or 12 years old when her mother, a gospel singer, started calling her up to the front of church congregations: “She would point to me, and just say, ‘Come up here,’ while she was singing, and toss me the mic.”

Her mom would do this at Faith Tabernacle Assembly, the Dorchester church where she and Harrell’s father were co-pastors, and at the many churches where she was a guest singer. “That was her way: She just threw me in the deep end,” Harrell say...
Berklee.edu •

Berklee Alumna Uses Music Therapy to Help Heal the Wounds of War

Master Sergeant Michael Schneider retired from the Marine Corps in 2015 with the signature mental wounds now endemic among wartime soldiers. He had post-traumatic stress disorder, and a traumatic brain injury that damaged a 4-centimeter strip of his right temporal lobe.
“I needed something to get around that section and relearn pieces and refire brainwaves,” Schneider said in a podcast and article for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). “And music therapy was it.”
With the help of music t...
Harvard Law Bulletin •

Getting Ireland to Come Clean - Harvard Law School

Just 24 years old, Maeve O’Rourke LL.M. ’10 went to the United Nations with a bold and unprecedented case against the Irish government. Appearing in Geneva before the Committee Against Torture in 2011, O’Rourke argued that Ireland had allowed the enslavement and forced labor of thousands of women throughout most of the 20th century.
What she wanted, she told the committee, was for the government to acknowledge its complicity, to apologize and to pay reparations to the victims.
“I was writing som...
Berklee.edu •

Megadeth Bassist Dave Ellefson Shares Rock Solid Advice at Clinic

Standing before a crowd of students that was born long after his band Megadeth came to life, bassist Dave Ellefson took the stage at the Berklee Performance Center on July 27 and treated the audience to some hard rock before getting down to the brass tacks of metal.

“Are you ready to rock?“ he asked more than 200 Berklee and Five-Week Summer Performance program students, many of them decked out in T-shirts from Megadeth, Iron Maiden, and other iconic metal bands. Then Ellefson, backed by Berkle...
Berklee Today •

In the Game

Finding Félix Carcone on the streets of Paris’s 18th arrondissement is not dissimilar to how his clients find his game, The Live Thriller.“ I have my computer bag on the side, brown shoes, and coffee creamy pantalon. With a blue beanie hat,” his message said.
A message to one of his clients might read: “You’ll recognize me easily. Dressed in black. Nothing but black.”
The client, who in receiving the message becomes a player, doesn’t have an exact address for the game, but rather is told to show...
Berklee Today •

Breaking a Sound Barrier with Captain Marvel

Inked on Pinar Toprak’s wrist is a small nautical design encircling a number 1. The tattoo is a reminder to her that at any time she’s just one decision away from changing the course of her life. Like the decision she made at 17 to move to Chicago to learn English, or the one a year later to change her major to film scoring, or the one last year, to demo for Captain Marvel.
In getting that gig, Toprak B.M. ’00 became the first woman to score a superhero movie, as well as the first to score a fil...
Berklee Today •

A Natural Partnership

Years before he came to be the managing director of Philippos Nakas Conservatory, before he oversaw its role as one of Berklee’s earliest international partners and host of the college’s first study abroad program, Leonidas Arniakos spent his evenings surreptitiously disseminating rock and jazz over Greece’s airwaves.
It was 1976 and his pirate station was squatting on the radio dial among the four legal state signals. Every night, after coming home from his job as a mechanical engineer, Arniako...
Berklee.edu •

Graduate Program Allows Practicing Music Therapists to Develop into Leaders and Visionaries in Field

It’s easy to see why children with cancer often don’t look forward to going to Dana-Farber’s Jimmy Fund clinic in Boston. It’s where they get stuck with needles, where they take medications that make them feel badly. Considering these experiences, it can be tough to get kids to see the hospital as a fun and exciting place. But making it less frightening, and even enjoyable, is part of what music therapist Channing Shippen '11 does every day.

Whether it’s distracting kids during blood draws or s...
Berklee.edu •

Berklee Offers First Online Five-Week Program

This July, Berklee will launch its first-ever virtual five-week program in partnership with Berklee Online—the largest provider of accredited online music education in the world—allowing students all over the globe to spend the summer taking their musicianship to a higher level. 

The program, Aspire: Five-Week Music Performance Intensive, is the college’s flagship summer program for high-school-aged students. Traditionally held on the Boston campus, which is closed for the summer, Five-Week thi...
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