50 Stories for 50 Years: Alfons Gunnemann ‘73

September 7, 2022

To celebrate our 50th anniversary year during 2018/19, we collected stories and profiles of people and institutions that have helped us build our organization, which first began as one person’s dream in 1968. We will feature one story per week on our blog. Please enjoy these “50 for 50” profiles featuring ASSIST’s dedicated board members, dynamic staff, welcoming host families and enthusiastic ASSIST Scholars.

Alfons Gunnemann ‘73
Germany, St. Andrew’s School, P’ ’06, ’08‚ ’11

The ASSIST year abroad has fundamentally shaped the way each alumni in our family – Charlotte (2010), Julius (2008), Frederic (2006) and myself, Alfons (1972/73) – thinks about the world today. I am humbled to be able to share our story for this wonderful organizations’ 50th anniversary today.

ASSIST was a fairly small group in 1972, when I first read about the opportunity to go abroad to the U.S. in a flyer handed out by my English teacher. What if I could live overseas in the USA for an entire year, and study at an American boarding school? It sounded like the coolest idea I ever had, and certainly like the biggest challenge of my youth.
And it was. Interviewing for the scholarship at the consulate-general in Düsseldorf, I was amazed by how interested my interviewers were in what we had to say. I was also shocked by the difficult questions they asked “Why would you be a good ambassador for our transatlantic relationship? Why do you shoot animals?” (Note: I grew up on a farm and had a hunting license.)

Getting the scholarship and being placed at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware for me was like winning the lottery. Soon, me and several fellow Scholars landed at JFK where Paul Sanderson, the founder and first director of ASSIST, gave us a warm welcome right by the runway. A lovely host family picked me up and drove me to their home in Upstate New York so that I could catch up on my summer reading – a new concept to me – before heading to Delaware to attend boarding school. My host dad proudly told me he owned 4,000 cows and showed me the powers of his Lincoln Mark 4.

Soon on campus, I was struck by the exciting community I discovered. My time at boarding school fundamentally shaped the way I think today. What I learned during my ASSIST year is best summarized by the movie Dead Poet Society, which fittingly was filmed in the very same school fifteen years after I graduated. “Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” Robin Wiliams — as the very liberal English teacher Mr. Keating — famously reminded his students. I studied in the very same classrooms that Knox Overstreet and Neil Perry & co would fifteen years later. And it was there that I learned to question the obvious, to stay curious, to not give up easily, and to live life to the fullest. Back in 1973 I knew that this was an experience I wanted to pass on to my children if I was ever fortunate to have any.

And so it came. At the occasion of one of my class reunions I took my boys — aged 13 and 15 — to campus. Even at the young age, they were inspired much the same way I had been back in the 1970s. A few years later in 2006 and 2008, respectively, my sons Frederic and Julius were also lucky in receiving a generous ASSIST scholarship and ended up attending the very same school as I had – a dream for any dad! In 2011 my youngest daughter, Charlotte, had a wonderful time at Wyoming Seminary in Pennsylvania.

The years with ASSIST have also permanently shaped the way my children think about our global world – and their ASSIST experiences motivated them to keep pursuing international experiences, studying and working in the US, the UK, France, and across Africa. We are all excited to join the 50th ASSIST Celebrations today — except for Julius. He has a good excuse though, he’s celebrating his 10th reunion on campus at his ASSIST school instead.

About Alfons:
Alfons Gunnemann, ASSIST class of 1973, completed his medical degree at the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität in Münster and his PHD in France, and now works as Surgeon in Chief of the Urology department of Klinikum Lippe in Detmold – part of the newly founded medical faculty of Bielefeld. He specializes in pelvic floor surgery and retains membership of several international professional organizations.