Elizabeth Vale ’72, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and significant member of the Obama White House, credits Shipley with teaching her everything she needed to know. “I really did learn how to write and think and speak the King’s English,” says Elizabeth. “Those are the skills that can take you through to do anything you want to.”

Her experience was so positive that she enrolled her daughter, Ann Vale ‘03. “I loved her so much, I wanted her to have the same opportunities that I had.”

Ann, a Princeton graduate and a third-year resident in OBGYN at Lankenau, credits Shipley with giving her the confidence in herself and her abilities. “That comes both from Shipley’s nurturing environment and from the high level of attention to students’ work. We learned how to write a paper, how to think, how to research, and how to manage time. We learned how to ask for help from teachers, and more importantly, how to know when help was needed. Shipley grounded us in a way that a larger, more anonymous school could not, because at Shipley, there are more people in your corner celebrating your successes and helping you recover from your failures.”

“The fundamentals I learned at Shipley made my transition to Harvard seamless," says Elizabeth. When it comes to Shipley, she says of her daughter and herself, “We feel it, we live it, we are it.”