Tigers Don’t Graduate Alone 

Mr. John Gursky looked across the dinner table in Switzerland and realized he recognized both faces. 

One was a TAS alumna in her final year at École hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL). The other was a recent graduate just beginning her first. Sitting across from them was the counselor who had once helped both students imagine what life after Taipei American School might look like. 

The dinner had been arranged for counselors, part of a networking event at the end of a university fly-in program. But for Mr. Gursky, TAS’s Interim Director of College Counseling, it became something else entirely. 

Seeing former students is nothing unusual for him. At the end of August alone, more than 10 alumni stopped by his office before heading back to university. 

Seeing it happen an ocean away was different. 

“Seeing it happen an ocean away, at their dinner table instead of mine, that’s when it really hit me: they hadn’t left TAS behind, they’d just brought it with them,” he said. 

It is easy to think of a college counselor’s travel as fact-finding: visiting campuses, meeting admission officers, and gathering information to bring home to students. And it is. This year, TAS counselors also attended the International ACAC Conference in Pittsburgh alongside nearly 1,500 counselors and admission officers from 93 countries. 

But the dinner in Switzerland was a reminder of something those conference rooms cannot fully capture. 

The relationships built at TAS do not just end when a student receives an acceptance letter or walks across the graduation stage. They change shape. They travel. And, over time, they can become part of the network supporting the Tigers who come next. It is a cycle that begins long before graduation. 

Few people have watched it unfold for longer than Mr. Richard Arnold. 

TAS’s historian spent 57 years teaching at the school before retiring last year. Today, he estimates that he sends around 100 birthday cards each year to former students scattered across the world, including some who left his classroom decades ago. 

For Mr. Arnold, graduation was never really the end of the relationship. It was the beginning of a different one. 

When Mr. Arnold was a teacher, during one Lunar New Year  it was not safe for a former student to travel home, so Mr. Arnold went out of his way to make sure he had somewhere safe to go. The two stayed close. Years later, the former student met his future wife on a trip Mr. Arnold organized. Their second child was eventually born on Mr. Arnold’s birthday. 

Mr. Arnold still visits the family, sometimes bringing his own children along. 

Asked what ties people together for that long, he did not point to a building, program, or tradition. 

“I think when you experience any kind of thing together, that’s a bond,” he said. “Whether it’s something wonderful, or something hard, that’s what ties you together forever.” 

Perhaps that is why the smallest details seem to endure. 

Former Tigers remember Mr. Arnold knowing the names of custodians, kitchen staff, and guards as readily as he knew theirs. Decades later, he can still recall the siblings and classmates of alumni who attended TAS in the 1970s. 

To be remembered that specifically is, in its own way, to be told that you still belong. 

And Mr. Arnold is hardly the only teacher whose relationships have followed students beyond the classroom. 

Upper School Visual Arts teacher Mr. Brett Barrus has a standing offer for his former students. 

“You hit me up when you’re back in Taipei, and you’re getting a free meal,” he said. He has kept that promise for years. 

But sometimes those meals and conversations find their way back into the classroom, too. 

Last year, Mr. Barrus gathered former TAS students now attending film school for a video call with current students considering the same path. 

“I got all my kids who’d gone to film school on one call,” he said, “so current students could ask them straight: was it worth it? What would you do differently?” 

The people who once came to him for advice had become the ones giving it. 

One former student, now an interactive designer, created a virtual museum preserving his grandmother’s memories and later exhibited the work at a fine arts museum in Tainan. When he returns to Taipei, he and Mr. Barrus still meet for meals and feedback sessions. 

Ms. Jessica Huang understands that evolution, that of teacher and students, from both sides. 

A TAS graduate who is now a member of the faculty, Ms. Huang once found herself in the Netherlands at the same time as former TAS staff member Ms. Megan Yonkey. They spent the day together over brunch, a museum visit, and years of memories. 

“We reminisced and unpacked our perspectives,” Ms. Huang said. “It’s very common to come to the realization that your teachers are also human, and have a life outside of the classroom.” 

Neither knew that it would be one of the last times they would see each other. 

Ms. Yonkey passed away in the summer of 2025 after battling cancer. In one of her final messages to Ms. Huang, she told her how meaningful it had been to see the person her former student had become and encouraged her to remain curious about the world. 

By then, the relationship had long since moved beyond the roles they once occupied at TAS. For Ms. Huang, that experience has shaped the way she thinks about belonging itself. 

“Belonging wasn’t really a word that existed during my time as a student,” she said. “For me, it was more about finding people, and finding my art. It’s a lifelong journey. Sometimes you don’t realize you didn’t belong somewhere until you do, somewhere else.” 

That may be part of what makes a school community difficult to define, yet so enduring. The people within it do not remain who they were when they first met.  

Students graduate. Teachers retire. People move across countries and continents. A student becomes a colleague. A teacher becomes a friend. A former student becomes the person another Tiger calls for advice. 

What remains is the connection between them. 

Sometimes those connections continue on their own. Other times, maintaining them requires the deliberate work of remembering. 

When members of the Class of ’96 returned to TAS for their reunion, they asked about a statue their class had once given the school. No one could find it. 

So the Alumni Office started looking. 

They contacted the original donor for a description, searched old yearbooks, and eventually found a photograph tucked into the pages following a graduation spread. The statue itself was never recovered, but for Ms. Elaine Liu, Assistant Director of Alumni & Community Relations, the search mattered. 

It was another way of telling alumni that the things they remember about TAS still matter here, too. 

Since the 2024–25 school year, the Alumni Office has organized the Always a Tiger Tour, bringing TAS to six to eight cities around the world each year. At each stop, alumni are greeted with a slideshow featuring their own yearbook photographs. 

“It was time consuming,” Ms. Liu said, “but we always want our Tigers to feel remembered. They are crucial to our community here at TAS.” 

The requests that reach her office often seem small: campus visits, alumni ID cards, transcripts, old yearbooks, or spots at alumni basketball nights in the Upper and Middle School gyms. 

But taken together, they tell a larger story. People keep finding reasons to reach back. 

“A lifelong relationship really comes down to making sure our alumni always feel remembered and know there will always be a place for them here,” Ms. Liu said.  

There have even been times where one generation reaches back without ever knowing who will be on the other end. 

Recent graduate Edward T. ’25 once found a handwritten note tucked inside a school clarinet. It had been left there years earlier by Michael W. ’16, filled with the kind of specific, practical advice that only another clarinet player would think to leave for whoever picked up the instrument next. 

Edward contacted the Alumni Office hoping to learn who had written it. When Ms. Liu eventually tracked Michael down, he was stunned that someone had found the note at all. 

Nearly a decade separated the two students. They had never needed to know each other for one Tiger to leave something meaning behind for the next. 

In many ways, that small note tells the same story as the dinner table in Switzerland: a student leaves TAS, but something remains. 

It might be advice tucked inside a clarinet. A birthday card sent decades later. A free meal waiting in Taipei. A museum visit in the Netherlands. Two alumnae sitting across from their former counselor in Switzerland. Or a former student answering questions from a Tiger who is only beginning to imagine what comes next. 

Different generations. Different cities. Different relationships. 

All part of the same story. 

Tigers graduate. 

They just don’t graduate alone.