**Burke in her Global Initiative office on the third floor of EPAC.** Owen Dudley/*The Exonian*

By ROXANE PARK and ELAINE QIAO

Incredible English teacher. Director of Global Initiatives. Traveler of the world. Amazing baker, dorm head, coach of the cycling team, Emily Dickinson’s biggest fan. An EMT? Is there anything that Patricia Burke-Hickey can’t do?

Burke has recently stepped into the role as the new Director of Global Initiatives, coordinating the student abroad programs. In her own words, this meant two things: vision and risk management. “We try to make sure that you’re all safe, that that program is safe, that we know where you’re staying and the chaperones are trained. It’s here that we create the big picture and then put all the pieces of those big ideas together,” she explained.

Burke is excited about her new role and was “happily surprised by how collaborative it is.” She works with people across and off campus and shared the ways in which she was grateful to be seen as a resource for people interested in launching a program.

“That’s one of the really exciting things about this job,” Burke said. “Because we’re up here on the third floor, it looks like we’re all by ourselves, but we’re actually not. We’re networked all over the community and with other partners all around the world.”

Fitting her role as Director of Global Initiatives, Burke has a passion for travel and has lived in many places around the world. Burke grew up in Buffalo, New York, and later resided in Colorado, where she held her first teaching position at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale. She has also taught at the American International School in Vienna, Austria. She has five siblings and described her family life growing up: “We grew up in a busy household because my mom worked full-time and my dad worked. My parents would always take us on adventures. I have wonderful memories camping with my family, and I’ve been to a lot of the national parks... We’d travel and learn together.” She added, “I love to travel with my own family. My two amazing children went to Exeter and benefited so much from their experiences on Global Initiatives programs.”

This sense of adventure has followed her into her adult life. “I graduated from college early because I had enough AP credits and so I thought, ‘well, time to get out there in the world.’ So I bought a one-way ticket to London and had a student work visa and just arrived. I looked for a place to stay and a job and ended up working in London for a while,” she explained. After this stint, she went back to graduate school.

Although recently she has been focusing more on Global Initiatives, Burke originally arrived at Exeter in 1997 and has been a beloved English teacher for almost 25 years. Senior Alia Bonanno attested to this in her experience in Room 011 of Phillips Hall during her upper fall.

“As a teacher, Ms. Burke is wonderful. I didn’t know much about poetry or writing personal essays. She was always accommodating to this, and I learned more in that class about writing than I have any other at Exeter. I wrote one of my favorite essays in that class… it was actually really bad when I first wrote it, but her advice and just the way she is so optimistic about writing made it great. I’ve always really loved the way she approached the Harkness table; she was willing to jump in when we needed help, and encouraged us to go past our comfort zone when we were talking about pieces we honestly knew nothing about. I was never afraid to be wrong in her class, and I know myself and others truly appreciated the environment she created,” Bonanno said.

This safe environment is something that Burke also referenced as one of her goals as a teacher. “It’s so important to build a community where students trust one another and trust me and we’re working together,” she said. “The texts are a vehicle for this. But I think if you don’t find that sense of community and trust and joy in learning, it’s really hard for students. So I think something that’s important to my teaching style is just a little play, kindness, and empathy too.”

Other than this empathy, Emily Dickinson collections, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda, and a little bit of Haruki Murakami, Burke’s Harkness table is defined by one thing in particular: the chocolate bowl.

“Ms. Burke would always have candy on the table,” Bonanno remembered, “and I loved that because I have a huge sweet tooth. She also would make us tea and bring donuts in when we had Saturday class. She is such an understanding person, and that always came out in the way she taught us.”

Many colleagues also shared their fondness of working with Burke.

Assistant Director of Global Initiatives Chelsea Davidson shared, “I love working with Ms. Burke, we get along very well and both enjoy coming to work. We complement each other well and we also seem to be on the same page. I am lucky to have the opportunity to work with her. She is very caring, organized, and thoughtful. Working with her [is] one of the best opportunities I have had at PEA and I could not be more thankful.”

When asked what is her favorite thing about Burke, Davidson replied, “She’s very funny and has a great sense of humor!”

Instructor in English Willie Perdomo shared his experience working with Burke. “Ms. Burke was my neighbor in the basement level of Phillips Hall before she went global,” he said. “She’s ebullient, generous, supportive, funny, and ever ready with a calm suggestion, a recommended good read, an article that might be useful in a class, and she introduced me to the vortex world of crullers. Laughter shared with Ms. Burke is time well spent. She is collegiality personified and her love of teaching is enduring and infectious.”

Instructor in English Todd Hearon also reflected on having a classroom next to Burke and the crullers she brings. When asked how long he has known Burke, he responded, “15 years, maybe? We got to know each other well when she shared a basement classroom adjacent to mine in Phillips Hall. She’s always providing her classes and advisees with goodies, and she supplies the English Department with delicious crullers periodically.”

Hearon described her as “generous, empathetic, [and] genuine.”

Consistent with her teaching philosophy and interactions with colleagues, Burke strongly values community building in the dorm. “I think the most important part of being dorm head of Langdell, besides keeping everybody safe, was having fun activities —pool parties and skating at Strawberry Banke. If you do things together with other people, you get to know them rather than if you just go to your room and do homework,” she said.

“She was very attentive to hearing about our highs and lows. We did rose, bud, thorns every week in advisory,” alumna and past advisee of Burke, Dorothy Baker, said.

Baker also reminisced about her time in the quarantine unit due to COVID-19. “It was my upper year, so 2020 to 2021. I was in the quarantine trailer and she brought me a bunch of the things that I needed from my dorm room. She brought me socks and clothes and books and along with that she brought me Dunkin Donuts and it was just so out of her way and so thoughtful for her.”

Bonanno also reflected on Burke’s love for sharing baked goods. “When she was affiliated with Gould she would bake brownies and cookies, and when I tell you they were the best things I have ever eaten I am so serious. We all looked forward to the days she was on duty because they were delicious.”

“I would say Ms. Burke is the most trusted and the best person you could have as a faculty member on campus,” Baker concluded. “Every student should seek out someone like Ms. Burke. She’s awesome.”

Burke used to coach the cycling team and shares a passion for cycling, cooking, baking, and hiking. “I don’t have too much patience for things that require me to be still,” she said.

Fitting that sentiment, when asked for an unexpected fact about her, Burke shared that she has worked as a wilderness EMT and in mountain rescue in Colorado. “[It was] when I wasn’t at school in class, so it tended to be in the middle of the night working with mountain rescue in these remote wilderness areas when people were in trouble. So sometimes I’d be out all night rescuing a hunter who had fallen off his horse and broken his hip and then have a full day of classes. The school was in a valley at the convergence of three rivers. I also worked with the ambulance and did some avalanche training…I’m fairly calm in emergencies.”

“I’ve enjoyed observing how the campus has changed over the years,” Burke shared near the end of her interview. “I love what I do and I’m so grateful to be doing what I’m doing, and I feel really fortunate to be in this position and to be at Exeter.”

To students, she encourages them to take a wild chance and “go, go, go” on one of the trips abroad. “The world is such an amazing place and you’re not going to learn to be independent in a classroom. There are many things you will learn in the classroom, but there’s so much that you just have to learn by doing. All of a sudden you have missed your train. You don’t panic. You just say, ‘Okay, let’s figure out when the next train is, and if it’s not until tomorrow, let’s figure out what we need to do and what resources we have to help us.’ That’s another important lesson you learn out there that you don’t have to do it alone. And even if you’re alone at a particular moment, you have so many resources and there’s a network that you can tap into. I mean that’s sort of how you grow up,” she concluded.

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