When people learn that physicist Lindsey Bleem ’05 has spent several months of her life at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station as part of her work for Argonne National Laboratory, they’re often curious about the location’s bone-chilling cold. “The Scandinavians say there’s no bad weather, just bad clothing, and that applies there,” she explains matter-of-factly.

But Bleem says that the temperatures are only the start. The South Pole research station sits at a literally breathtaking altitude of about 10,000 feet. “It’s also (part of ) the world’s largest desert, bigger than the Sahara,” she says.

Those extremes — paired with the barriers to getting there in the first place, whether as a scientist or an electrician — mean it attracts all sorts of unconventional personalities. “Some of the people there are 19, and they want to see the world, and others are 45 and want a (midlife) adventure. Everyone has an interesting pathway there,” she says.

Bleem’s time in one of the planet’s harshest environments is unique — but she’s also one of countless Kenyon alumni who have had the opportunity to experience things that few others on the planet have.

For this story, we give you a front-row seat to learn from fellow alumni what it was like to be in their shoes for some unforgettable experiences.

What does it feel like to live on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean? To have your brand-new restaurant land on one of the most prestigious best restaurant lists in the country? To solve a months-long medical mystery? Here, alumni share those moments in their own words.

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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

sail over 25,000 miles

What’s it like to be on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean? Well, you’re always moving: the boat is always going up and down waves, and often leaning to one side, depending on what side the wind is pushing on. Whenever you’re walking, you’re in a crouch, because you’re balancing your body all the time. Even when you’re sleeping, you’re often bracing yourself.

There’s also the noise: when you’re down inside the boat, you can hear the water rushing by, the boat creaking as it moves up the wave, and the people pulling lines in on the deck. People tend to like it, but it’s constant.

The feeling of being in nature, in the middle of a blue expanse of ocean, never gets old. And there are things that you get to see that feel almost magical. In the middle of the night, for example, you might see dolphins swimming through bioluminescence. Dolphins are so playful: they’ll play in the wake of the boat, and there might be dozens of them, making their little noises. Or you might see a humpback whale that’s bigger than the boat we’re on.

And while you’re always close together — sleeping just a couple feet away from (your fellow crewmates), sharing a bathroom with seven people — there’s something really special about the rhythm you get into with people when you’re sailing nonstop. You’re living together, keeping the boat moving forward. Everyone rotates: some people are sailing while others are asleep. It’s a contained experience. You’re basically in a little spaceship, and even if someone has an annoying habit, you learn to live with it in a really small space. Your group becomes a team. Nobody’s checking Instagram. You become a weird family.

Emma Garschagen ’19 is the skipper of Seabird and the founder and owner of Sail Seabird, a Portland, Maine-based business that offers coastal sail training voyages. Over the course of her career, she has logged more than 25,000 ocean miles, including two-week transatlantic crossings.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

get on a ‘best restaurants’ list

I’ll never forget the moment we got our first-ever recognition from a national publication: it was on the New York Times restaurant list of “50 places in America we’re most excited about right now.”

It happened three months after we opened in 2021. When it happened, (my wife, Tracy, and I) were at another restaurant having dinner with some friends. Our phones started blowing up. Text after text: “Congrats on the list!” And I was like: “What list?”

There had been no precedent for the award — the Times had never done anything like it before. We didn’t really know what it meant, we just knew we had made a list.

So we did shots of mezcal at the bar, and then we met up with our team afterward. Just seeing their faces, and how excited they were about being the only Austin, Texas restaurant on a New York Times list, was really meaningful. It was a pure, joyful moment.

Oh, my adrenaline is pumping just thinking about that moment right now. It’s hard to overstate how magical that was.

We later learned that nothing moves the needle like the New York Times — we’d start to have lines down the block for people to get in on Tuesdays at 4:30 p.m., and it put us on the map for other publications — but we had no idea at that point.

I still think about that moment a lot. Tracy and I talk about it every year on our anniversary because it is one of the most moving and meaningful experiences we’ve had as owners.

Arjav Ezekiel ’10 is a co-owner of Birdie’s restaurant, which opened in 2021. He owns the Austin, Texas-based restaurant with his wife, Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel. Birdie’s was named one of Esquire’s Best New Restaurants in America and Bon Appétit’s 50 Best New Restaurants of 2022. Food & Wine magazine named it Restaurant of the Year in 2023. In August, the New York Times ran an in-depth feature on Ezekiel, in which he shared his family’s immigration story.

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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

sit with the dying

“Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande and “When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi had come out. There was also a remarkable article, (“One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die”), in the New York Times by the palliative care physician BJ Miller.

I was very curious about how our identities are reshaped by serious, even terminal illness. These were some of the things that made me want to get involved with hospice volunteering, and my time working with a Bay Area hospice organization was a formative time.

I remember spending a lot of time with one patient who passed away after I moved to go to medical school. The patient’s family reached out after she had passed to let me know that our relationship had meant a lot to her in the last period of her life.

My time with her was meaningful, but it was not glamorous. I would find her YouTube videos of the small town she was from. We talked about her childhood and her family life. She talked about her illnesses, and how she could feel lonely and cut off from many of her human relationships because she was not very mobile. I might get her into her wheelchair and walk her around her neighborhood so she could see the flowers. If it was dinnertime, I would eat with her.

I might have idealized these moments before I had experienced them, but they didn’t necessarily feel profound. They felt natural. This work did not require a tremendous amount of skill — it was more about being present with someone.

The value you can give to — and get from — someone is not about performing in a certain way. It is just by being there.

Aldis Petriceks ’17 is a first-year resident physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has been a hospice care volunteer, authored journal articles about palliative care and plans to pursue a career in gerontology.

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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

have your art featured on the cover of Architectural Digest

I am a planner. What am I doing tomorrow? It’s scheduled. What do I want my life to look like in one year? I write it down in my journal. Every dream and goal I have? It’s written down. It’s a little anxiety-inducing, honestly.

But an Architectural Digest cover? It wouldn’t have occurred to me as something I wanted to manifest.

It happened because my boyfriend’s mom came to one of my exhibitions and talked about it to her friends. One of her friends is an interior designer who happened to be working on Viola Davis’ house at the time. (The designer, Michaela Cadiz) came to my apartment to see my art, and she just started rooting for me. She showed (Davis) my work, and they agreed that they would use it.

When I saw that the Architectural Digest video for Viola Davis’ house, called “Welcome to my Home,” had come out, I watched it on YouTube. I thought I might get a glimpse of my work for five seconds, and I could copy the link and send the timestamp to my parents. But it wasn’t in the video. I knew that it was a possibility that I wouldn’t see it, but when it didn’t make it, I was extremely down.

It was my birthday, and I was with my sister in Indiana, so I put my phone away for a few hours. When I came back, there were all these texts. I thought they would be happy birthday texts, and the first thing I saw was “Congratulations!” I thought: “That’s an interesting way to say ‘happy birthday.’ ”

But then I got screenshots of the print cover. I went back to my sister, grinning. I expected a five-second cameo in the video, and it ended up on the cover.

I thought: I need to go and buy out a store of those magazines right now, but where do you go to buy magazines that just came out when you’re in Indiana? The answer is nowhere.

But then my boyfriend FaceTimed me. He was in L.A., and he was literally in front of a newsstand. He had a stack of like 20 copies in his hand that he had already bought.

That experience was a really big lesson for me: I write things down because I think I’ll have a level of control over them. But what is actually in your control is putting in the work. You can’t know what’s coming for you! You can only do what you’re doing right now, and know that what is coming toward you might actually be better than what you imagined.

Kefa Memeh ’22 is an artist who lives in Los Angeles. Her work is featured prominently at Kenyon, in Lowell House.

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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

work at the South Pole

To get to Antarctica, I took a military plane from New Zealand. Even on the plane, you wear your (government-issued) Extreme Cold Weather gear, called ECW. It’s the puffy, polar, Canada goose stuff.

On the way, you can look through the little portholes on the plane and see land that nobody has ever walked on. More people have climbed Mount Everest than have gone to the South Pole.

At some points, the temperature got to about minus 60 when I was there, but it was sunny, and (more typically) about minus 15. Plus, it’s a dry cold, not a damp cold, like the Midwest. Yes, it’s very cold, but I’ve also felt colder in Chicago.

But there are other things that are striking: the altitude, for one. You’re sitting at about 10,000 feet, and it takes awhile to adjust to that. The snow is like styrofoam, and you can pick up huge blocks of it and toss it. It’s also such an extreme environment that if you cut yourself, it doesn’t really heal.

I remember landing at McMurdo Sound. There are still huts from the first Antarctic expeditions there in the 1900s, including those of (explorers Robert Falcon) Scott and (Ernest) Shackleton. There’s a cross and a memorial, and these are all just a short distance from the scientific station.

There’s something about (that memorial) that really (cements) the feeling that Antarctica is the unknown continent. It’s wild. It’s dangerous. You’re constantly aware that you’re in an environment that will try to kill you.

Lindsey Bleem ’05 is a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois. In 2008 and 2013, she traveled to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica to work with a millimeter wave telescope on research that helps us understand the conditions at the very earliest moments of the universe.

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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

never listen to the same song twice

When I was at Kenyon, I was always down studying in the audition room next to the radio studio. There were walls of records, and I’d pull the ones I didn’t recognize and listen to them. I’d do that all day.

Years later, I got a job at the Center for Folklife at the Smithsonian, which was founded on the idea that there were all sorts of community traditions that have been going on for a very long time, and that should be treasured. That includes music. We hold a festival every year that features people from all over, playing different styles of music — things you’d never even know existed.

For example, there’s music that the Yaqui (Indigenous people) who live near the border of Mexico play called chicken scratch music. It’s sort of a scratchy fiddle with an accordion. There’s overtone throat singing, where one person sings with two voices at one time.

I’m fascinated by music in all its forms — I soak it in like a sponge. I like it when I’m somewhere and something catches my ear: What is it? How do they do it? Emotionally, I just try to be in it. I don’t overthink it.

At home, I have about eight terabytes of audio that I stream — almost 290,000 tracks — and I listen to them randomly. An old fiddle tune, a Japanese song, Led Zeppelin.

Repetition? That’s a negative to me. There’s a tiki bar I go to, and if I hear even two notes of “Sweet Caroline” or “Brown-Eyed Girl,” I’m like: ugh.

Jeff Place ’79 is a curator and senior archivist with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. He has been nominated for 10 Grammys and has won three, including two in 1998 for Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes. Both awards recognized his work for the “Anthology of American Folk Music – 1997 Expanded Edition.”

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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

solve a medical mystery

When I was at Vanderbilt, I was often the third or fourth allergy doctor that patients had seen to try to get to the bottom of what was going on with them. They might drive three, four, six hours to see me. Some even flew.

When people came to see me, my feeling was always: I’m going to roll up my sleeves and crack this mystery. The cases can be bizarre, but I also knew it was my responsibility.

In the case featured by the New York Times, the patient had come to see me because of her hives and itching. Itching has a worse effect on quality of life than even pain. She came back three or four different times, and I had thrown the entire kitchen sink at it. Then we tested her for a delayed red meat allergy. It came back positive, and her turnaround was remarkable.

To solve people’s cases, I read a lot, I go to a lot of conferences, and I absorb as much as I can about a wider range of diseases. I talk to people doing the research and reach out to international experts.

In some ways, it feels like this work allows me to embrace my creativity as a doctor: I’m not following a template of what’s worked before for other people. It feels like I’m drawing new connections between all of the knowledge I have in order to produce something that’s unique. I like putting the clues together to make a diagnosis.

When you can say to someone: “I think I know what’s going on with you,” and when you realize they’ve never heard (your solution) to their particular problem, it’s the most satisfying thing. They just light up. It’s amazing. You can see the life come back into their eyes.

Basil Kahwash ’10 is an allergist and immunologist for Ohio ENT and Allergy. From 2020 to 2024, he worked as an assistant professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, often seeing patients with tough-to-solve allergy-related challenges. In 2022, one of his cases was featured in the New York Times “Diagnosis” section.

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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

watch your business school case studies play out at the speed of technology

During my time at Harvard Business School (1996-98), the world was in the very early stages of the digital revolution, and I was taking a seminal class about how traditional businesses may be disrupted by emerging commerce models on the internet. One of our case studies explored the battle for online books that was raging between Amazon and Barnes & Noble. In typical smug, pre M.B.A. self-confidence, we all concluded Barnes & Noble would win the war. Jeff Bezos — before he was Jeff Bezos — was in the classroom as a guest speaker and conceded that we were probably right about the book business — but he didn’t care. He then went on to explain his vision of building a marketplace where you could buy anything you could possibly want on one site, in one transaction. The whole class burst out laughing at this absurd idea, which flew in the face of prevailing retail market trends that were going to define shopping in the new millennium. Needless to say, we all found ourselves choking on a heaping dish of crow that I can still taste to this day, and I had my first real lesson in the hazards of relying on conventional wisdom during times of transformational change.

After I graduated in 1998, I went to work for BMG, one of the “big five” global music conglomerates. At the time, the music business was nearly all physical CDs sold through brick-and-mortar retailers, and our classroom debates about disruptive technology had little relevance. However, there was a growing buzz in the industry about something called an MP3 file and BMG needed someone to jump in to see what all the fuss was about. The business of music hadn’t changed much over the previous few decades, and there weren’t a lot of volunteers lining up to spend their valuable time deciphering new technology and contemplating new business models. Coincidentally, I had written a paper at HBS about how MP3 files could impact the music industry, so I raised my hand.

In my new role as vice president of new media, I was tasked with figuring out how BMG would navigate a theoretical, distant world in which all music would be downloaded or streamed — an exercise dismissed by most of the label elites as a trip to Fantasyland. Then in 1999, Napster launched and upended the entire industry by allowing people to share music files with each other without paying us a dime — suddenly and without warning we found ourselves trying to sell snow in the wintertime. Although the courts would later rule that Napster’s service was illegal, it was too late. People wanted to get their music conveniently, instantly and cheaply, and we didn’t have a viable alternative to meet their demands; our entire industry was unprepared for the digital revolution.

Business school gave me a view from the ivory tower of the risks and opportunities that evolving technology can present to the corporate establishment — and then I learned this the hard way at BMG. During my 17 years in the video game business with Take-Two Interactive, I’ve tried to take these lessons to heart and avoid making the same mistakes as an executive, and as a steward of the industry.

Karl Slatoff ’92 is the president of Take-Two Interactive Software, an American video game holding company with a portfolio that includes Grand Theft Auto, NBA2K and Borderlands.