FEATURED ALUMNI OF THE MONTH

Robert Brutus

Hometown – Shreveport, LA
Undergrad – Princeton University, AB, Anthropology
Graduate School – Suffolk University, M.S., Ethics & Public Policy; University of Rochester, MBA (Finance)
Current Occupation – CoStar
Title – Regional Market Analyst

Greatest Impact

Motivated by a desire to give back and to have an impact on the lives of young people, Robert spent 9 years in education teaching ethics and Latin at Boston Prep in MA and Landon School in the DC metro area. Looking back, teaching enabled him to facilitate students’ discovery of their talents as linguists, writers, and athletes. Robert helped his students develop personal understandings of the Aristotelian virtues of courage, compassion, integrity, respect, and perseverance and why ethics is important. He tirelessly worked to encourage students to ask their own questions and think for themselves. And just as his teachers had done for him, Robert continuously served as a mirror to reflect back to the young people he taught and coached all the potential that he saw in them that they did not yet see in themselves.

Bio

Robert studied classics and cultural anthropology at Princeton University.  Right after college, Robert worked on M&A and private equity deals as a corporate paralegal in New York City.  Before continuing with his corporate career, Robert felt a deep desire to give back to his community and was inspired by Teach For America, so he decided to teach. Growing up in Shreveport, LA, Robert had endured poverty and instability in his home life, spending time in foster care and then living with various relatives throughout his middle and high school years.  In the eighth grade, everything changed when Robert’s grandmother facilitated his transfer to a magnet school, and his teachers and classmates there supported him in creating an upward trajectory for his life. He went on to spend six years as a Latin teacher, first at an urban charter school in Boston and then at a D.C.-area prep school.  At Boston Prep, a charter school in Hyde Park, MA, Robert taught Latin in addition to ethics, creative writing, and chess.  He then went on to teach at the Landon School, a D.C.-area prep school, where in addition to teaching Latin and ethics, he coached squash.  At Boston Prep many of his students, like him, received free lunch and faced violence in their communities.  Nevertheless, the school’s dedicated corps of educators recruited from the most selected colleges and universities in the country and its rigorous curriculum supported the predominantly Black and Hispanic student body, many of whom lived in the toughest neighborhoods in Boston, in excelling academically and matriculating to four-year colleges despite the odds. At Landon, where the student body was affluent and the resources abundant, Robert served as a positive role model for students, many of whom had had no prior experience interacting with a Black man.  Every year most of his students earned high honors on the National Latin Exam, and he led the Upper School squash team to win the 2015 league championship, and as a cultural liaison to the Upper School supported students in presenting Landon’s first Asian- Pacific American History Month celebrations. After backpacking in Southeast Asia for a year where he studied yoga and meditation and taught ESL, Robert worked in career services at Suffolk University in Boston while earning a master of science in Ethics & Public Policy.  He went on to earn an MBA at Simon Business School at the University of Rochester, graduating this past May.  He starts work full-time in CoStar’s Market Analytics Group in Washington, D.C. this June.  In addition to his passion for teaching and learning, Robert is a certified yoga instructor with over 400 hours of training.  He enjoys traveling, having visited Germany, Italy, Mexico, the U.A.E., Nepal, India, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.  In his free time, Robert most enjoys reading, creative writing, visiting friends across the country, and skiing.  A little known fact is that he once worked as a lift operator and kids ski school instructor at Copper Mountain in Colorado.