Aidan McGlaze ’97

“I’ve always felt more like a ‘Crossroads person’ than the product of any other institution I’ve attended,” said Aidan. His parents, Greg McGlaze and Janice O’Connor, taught at Crossroads, so the School’s values were intertwined with his family’s. Aidan grew up with the perspective that “we’re not here to take advantage of the world around us. We’re here to take care of it and to take care of each other.”

Aidan earned a bachelor’s in English from Yale and attended law school at Stanford. He feels strongly about believing in his cases and the people he’s representing. After two years in structured finance litigation and one year clerking for a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Aidan worked his way up to partner at the boutique, public-interest firm Schonbrun Seplow Harris Hoffman & Zeldes in Los Angeles. Aidan is currently of counsel at the firm, focusing primarily on class action, employment and civil rights litigation.

Looking back at his years at Crossroads, Aidan appreciates the “incredible breadth and depth of academic and extracurricular excellence.” His memories range from the improv battles known as Theater Sports to an EOE trip when it snowed 36 inches overnight. In Jim Hosney’s classes, he wrote about Dostoevsky’s “Demons” and co-authored an “experimental essay” on Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Through it all, he felt that teachers wanted to see their students grow to be the best versions of themselves, rather than conform to traditional academic programming and learn only what conventional wisdom suggested they “should” know.

Aidan credits the ethos at Crossroads with helping him understand how to bring his whole self to whatever he was doing and how to listen and connect emotionally with the people around him. The friends and families he grew up with are still important in his life; he finds the community’s support “truly invaluable.” He shared, “I feel so lucky that I got to be in a place where lifelong connections were fostered.”