Real Talk on Junior Trip

“Fires are all about tough love,” Xero W.’ 26 tells me like some Promethean emissary dispatched to save us. The most recent log added is the biggest yet, throwing sparks high where they’re caught on a sharp westerly gust borne off the white-capped waters of Millinocket Lake and sent through camp to convoke straggling members of the junior class. We’re fresh off the Class V rapids of the Penobscot River’s West Branch. “Exterminator” and the misadventurous “Cribworks” are still only hours in the rearview, and many of us are still only partially thawed, hence the fire we’ve got going. 

We’re up in Millinocket, Maine, once home to the world’s largest paper mill and now a depressed former mill town whose population has been dwindling since Great Northern Paper closed up shop in 2008. This is Maine as you caricature it, where “a” is “ahh,” “r” drops out of speech altogether, and moose abound. The old Millinocket Mill still stands as a conspicuous cadaver of industry on the approach to town. Look beyond on a clear day and you can see the impressive prominence of Mount Katahdin in the distance. 

Once the center of an extractive industry, the major economic force today is based on attraction. This is the North Maine Woods, home of Baxter State Park, fabled landscape that looms in American letters and has, for the past several decades, been a retreat for classes of Dublin students. 

We left from Dublin for Millinocket early Sunday morning, stopping briefly in Freeport for lunch and some exploring before continuing north. This year, as in years past, Matthew Polstein ’79 hosted the junior class at the New England Outdoor Center, a resort and whitewater rafting outfit he founded soon after graduating Dublin School. Much more keen on paddling whitewater than classwork during his adolescence, Matt enrolled at Dublin after the school promised to support his slalom kayaking pursuits. As we rattle down The Golden Road en route to our first put-in on Monday morning, Matt recalls practicing sweep rolls on Dublin Lake, where he trained as Dublin’s first ever competitive kayaker. He’s 63 now, and still paddling, we learn, as he tells about a recent kayaking adventure on the mediterranean island of Corsica. 

When we arrived to camp Sunday night, Head of School Brad Bates previewed the next twenty-four hours for the juniors and explained some of the “why” behind Junior Trip. He discussed the intentionality around the trip, framing the rafting experience as a sort of overture meant to prime the class for deep thinking and dialogue about their transition to senior year. 

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” Brad told the kids, continuing “What kind of culture do you want to create as seniors? I want you to think about this. Tomorrow after dinner we’ll gather and you all will have an opportunity to share your thoughts.”

The 2,300 deafening cubic feet per second being squeezed through the Ripogenus Power Station the following morning made thinking about culture and leadership difficult, not to mention the more immediate concern of regulating body temperature on a humorless, damp, 43°F spring day in Maine – Type 2 Fun, for sure, with potential for escalation into Type 3 fun. 

Ostensibly thinking about culture and leadership, we loaded into vulcanized rubber inflatables and set off towards the day’s first rapid, a Class V called “Exterminator.” And for the next couple hours we navigated the Penobscot, alternating quiet moments of camaraderie with “ALL AHEAD” assaults on the rapids. “Cribworks,” the day’s second Class V, was interesting. All's well that ends well, as they say, and everything ended well. 

Here are some action shots from our time out on the river. 

Following dinner that evening, conversation turned towards aspirations for ‘25 - ‘26 academic year. Aristotle apparently said something to the effect of “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom,” or the beginning of all leadership, as it were. With some similar idea in mind, Brad coordinated an exercise aimed at helping members of the junior class develop a more keen understanding of their own leadership styles, their strengths, areas for improvement, how they add to a group, and how they benefit from others within groups. The basic premise of the exercise is that leadership is innate to each of us, something we have an equal claim to, no matter if we style ourselves as leaders or not. Baked into the exercise is also a belief that the most well ordered and functioning groups emerge when many different leadership styles are present. 

You can read more about the mechanics of the exercise here. Basically how it worked was Brad asked two questions. In response to the first, students self-selected into one of two groups. The process was repeated with a second question, bifurcating and then creating quadrants. 

Four quadrants meant to correspond to four different leadership styles: Architects & Analysts, Drivers, Relationship Masters, and Spontaneous Motivators. Read more about each style here. 

To whatever extent it’s meaningful to read into this, roughly 15% of the Class of 2026 cast themselves as Drivers, 15% as Spontaneous Motivators, with around 35% falling into the category of Architects and Analysts, while the remaining 35% are so-called Relationship Masters.

And so what does this mean? 

Whatever the Class of 2026 decides it means. 

What happened next is members of the junior class began deciding what it meant. Brad asked them “what do you want to see in our school culture next year?” and let ‘em run with it.

As students shared their intentions for the ’25 - ’26 academic year, a few themes emerged. They frequently touched on ideas related to creating / continuing a culture of playfulness, something Brad says has not come up on previous junior trips. Alongside playfulness, the juniors prized an ethic of engagement, saying they want to “show up” and encourage others to do the same, whether that be on the sidelines of a soccer game, in the recital hall, or at an INSPIRES event. Empathy, kindness, respect, accountability, and many other virtuous qualities emerged, too, but the juniors articulated these platitudes in pretty remarkable ways that added nuance to well-worn ideas that in other settings sometimes sound trite, almost tokenized. 

As we wound down, each member of the class was given a note card and asked to cast their vote for which principles / words / ideas they want to see foregrounded in the year to come. These were collected and handed over to the executive StuGov trio of Alaria C., Hayden A., and Chris H., who will begin thinking about how to go about moving from ideation to implementation.