Great Barrington — This past December, a Monument Mountain Regional High School senior achieved a feat few people anywhere achieve: admission to Yale University. What set her apart from 6,729 other applicants around the world, and made her one of just 728 accepted early action? The most obvious reason is that she is a classic scholar. Why Yale? Because, she says, “I’m a sucker for libraries,” and Yale’s library, built to be a cathedral, is quite lovely. Hannah Roller is the sort of teenager who chooses colleges based on the appeal of the library, because she knows she will be spending much of her life there, focusing, if today’s passions persist, on neuroscience and philosophy.
Hannah’s grandfather is longtime Monument Mountain Social Studies teacher and current Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee member Bill Fields. He knew Hannah would be a serious reader starting when she was a toddler and he took her on weekly trips to Lenox Library. She would pick up books and make up stories to go with the pictures, putting across to the world a convincing picture of a confident reader. A couple of years later, Fields recalls, “When I asked her what she wanted to get out of kindergarten, she said, ‘I want to be able to read.’ And by the end of kindergarten, she was reading.”
During the remote COVID school year of 2020–21, Grandpa Fields became Hannah’s eighth grade homeschool tutor, and with him she further indulged her appetite for books. According to Hannah, Monument Guidance Counselor Sean Flynn deserves the credit for helping her once she arrived at the high school with setting the concrete goals that led to the big one: earning admission to an Ivy League school. When, for instance, she signed up to take five Advanced Placement classes, Hannah’s mom thought it was too much. But Mr. Flynn explained that the goal dictated the path. “If you want this,” Hannah recalls him saying, “you have to go all in.”
Flynn helped Hannah set up the independent study classes and experiences that further set her apart from the crowd. These included Dystopian Literature with Isabelle Morley, Western Philosophy with Mr. Collins, and Psychoanalysis with Steve Piazzo. This last one led to a summer study with Dr. Katie Lewis at Austen Riggs, which allowed Hannah to go more in depth with what was then her big passion, psychology. “Three things set Hannah apart,” says Mr. Collins. “She has a deep reservoir of talent and energy for the humanities, an ability to be positive and generous in the present, and a clear focus on what is important (and what is unimportant) in navigating the daily trials of high school.”
While at Monument, Hannah became an integral member of the Student Adult Advisory Board (SAAB), a group whose leadership—Tessa Baldwin [Disclaimer: Tessa Baldwin is an intern for The Berkshire Edge], Bronly Boyd, and Annabelle Holmes, in addition to Hannah—have been researching the impact of the “deleveling” or “detracking” that began her freshman year. They have conducted student surveys, teacher interviews, presented at School Committee meetings, and developed new subcommittees to tackle the new problems that arose. In that role, Hannah also represented Monument at the Great School Partnership School Redesign Conference in Rhode Island and school visits to San Diego.
Hannah is a member of the National Honor Society and a volunteer for Best Buddies, as well as captain of the cross country and swim teams and a varsity lacrosse player. She has volunteered twice in the Dominican Republic on a student-led service trip, and she works every summer and weekends with her family business Samale’s Deli and Catering. In fact, perhaps this was an experience that helped propel Hannah Roller to the front of the Ivy League line. She started out one of her winning Yale essays, according to Fields, with: “The world would be a far better place if everyone had to work in the food industry at least once in their life.”
