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Most prefects for the High School Summer Program sacrifice several weeks of precious time with their families, but not Mikaela (Heal) and Dillon Raum (both ’21). The alumni newlyweds are happily returning to their alma mater to help with this year’s program, along with their first baby — who is due to be born in December!

“My parents sent me kicking and screaming to the Summer Program back in 2015,” Mikaela recalls. “I was expecting to be bored out of my mind for two weeks, surrounded by a bunch of a nerds. Now, here I am, married to a fellow TAC graduate, and four months pregnant, back again for another life-changing summer!”

Both of Arizonan extraction, the Raums have been friends since the first week of their freshman year. “We met at an ice cream social,” Mikaela remembers. “Dillon asked me to be his little dance partner while a prefect taught us how to swing dance.” With a grin and a sidelong glance at her husband, she adds, “Then he forgot about me and fell in love with my roommate.”

Unfazed, Dillon interjects: “Well, one thing led to another, and I fell in love with Mikaela.” They started dating after sophomore year, were engaged a semester before graduating, and were at last married on October 9, 2021.

The Raums have brought the College’s formation in faith and reason to their marriage. “We are of one mind on the most important and crucial things,” says Dillon. “But when we ��Dz�’t think similarly about something, it’s an incredible gift that we both received four years of dialectic: We’re able to work through things reasonably.”

For her part, Mikaela finds echoes in marriage of the mutual trust that gave life at the College its inimitable warmth: “Community on campus was so good, it’s special to go out into the world — which ������’t always so good — with at least one person you still have from TAC.”

Since graduating, the Raums have taught high school in their beloved Arizona, making them not only veterans of Summer Programs past, but also alumni actively engaged in leavening the culture with Christ. They are, in short, ideal prefects for the High School Summer Program. “It is truly a joy to come back to our little haven in the hills for fellowship, good conversation, and prayer alongside new friends experiencing the College for the first time,” Mikaela reflects. “It never gets old.”