Chip Hall ’88 had a love-at-first-sight experience when he visited Northfield Mount Hermon as a prospective student. “You walk around and feel like: This is a place that feels like home. I really could see myself being here.” From the campus farm to the hilltop perspective of the Connecticut River Valley, with its beautiful views across seasons, “that was something that attracted me from the get-go, that natural beauty,” he says.

But it was in a required 9th-grade religion class that Hall knew that he’d found his intellectual home. At the time, he was grappling with his feelings about organized religion, he recalls. “So I was a little apprehensive about this religion class, someone telling me how to think.” Instead, he was surprised when the teacher kicked off their study of Genesis by telling the class, “You've got three good options in terms of looking at this and learning from it: You can choose to look at it as a religious text, because it's certainly a religious text. You can look at it as a work of philosophy, because that's one way you can always look at religion. Or you can look at it as a work of history. I'm not going to tell you how you're going to look at it; that's up to you. But I'm going to ask you to choose for yourself, as we do this as an academic study, one of those viewpoints and have that guide you.”

Decades later, Hall points to that moment as definitive of the NMH educational experience: one that’s respectful of the individual, that acknowledges the value of different viewpoints and calls on students to take responsibility for their own learning. “As a 14-year-old, that was very, very powerful and made me really appreciate the place,” he says.

Hall’s deep appreciation of NMH has manifested in the many ways he and his family have supported the school, including through numerous volunteer roles. He currently serves on the NMH Board of Trustees, following in the footsteps of his sister, Elizabeth Hall Olszewski ’87, a trustee from 2008 to 2011. The siblings, along with their mother, Francine Hall, established a scholarship fund, the Hall Family Fund, among other gifts they’ve made over the years. 

Most recently, Hall and his wife, Christina, made a generous gift to the ongoing This Place, This Moment: The Campaign for Northfield Mount Hermon in support of The Ice Barn, the school’s new hockey arena, due to open for next year’s season. The gift, he notes, represents the support of the entire Hall family, including his father, Tim Hall, and his and Christina’s children, Sabrina and Tommy.

The benefits of the Hall family’s gift extend even further, since it qualified for the campaign’s Our Moment Match, a dollar-for-dollar match, with half going to the endowment and half to establish an endowed scholarship. The match program was made possible by the $50 million bequest left to the school by the late John Mitchell ’56, a former trustee who benefitted from financial aid as a student and was committed to opening doors for future generations of students to have the opportunities he did.

Hall, too, is motivated to help others benefit from the formative experience he had at NMH, where he sang in the choir, was a writer and editor on The Bridge, and was an accomplished athlete who earned varsity letters in hockey, football, track, and cross-country. After NMH, he went to Stanford University, where he studied history, wrote and edited on The Stanford Daily, and ran track. He earned an MBA at the University of California, Berkeley before going on to a successful career in tech, at companies including Google and Yahoo! Hall now serves as executive director of Lifetime Cardinal, a nonprofit that supports student-athletes at Stanford through NIL (name, image, and likeness) opportunities and career development. 

In all his various communities and teams, Hall has felt a desire to be an active participant and builder. "Investing back in the places that teach and give you so much is a privilege,” he says. “NMH taught me to take pride in not just being a part of a community but also feel pride in making that community stronger. Helping NMH build a stronger foundation for the next generation of students really fills my heart with joy."

Throughout his career, Hall says, he’s brought the values he learned at NMH — about the importance of mutual respect, candid conversation, and openness to diverse viewpoints — not just to his personal life, but also to his professional life. “Cultivating an environment where people can talk about things and not get mad at one another, but actually debate and be critical, are things that I always lived with, and they’re also the bedrock of how I built the global teams that I've run in my various positions.”

He continues, “[NMH’s] ‘head, heart, and hand’ notion of educating the mind and educating the heart and the soul and paying attention to wellness in your body and having all of those things work together in concert — I've sort of always lived my life that way. 

“What I was taught at the school very much plays into how I continue to live my life, having a full life. None of us are one-dimensional. …  The head, the heart, and the hand is a wonderful philosophy to live life.”