As Albuquerque Academy celebrates its 70th year, we’re highlighting one of the community’s core values: education. To mark this milestone, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is focusing on the impact of graduates who have dedicated their careers to teaching, learning, and inspiring others. These stories show the powerful ways Academy alumni are shaping classrooms and communities — continuing the school’s legacy of impact well beyond campus.
A public school on the south side of Chicago is an unlikely place for fabricating robots. But at Lindblom Math and Science Academy, nearly one in ten students spend class time doing just that. There, Albuquerque Academy alumnus Nick Anaya ’00 has grown a fledgling engineering program into one of the school’s most popular activities. “It’s more prominent than the basketball team,” he joked.
These are not your grandparents’ Roombas. Lindblom students build sophisticated machines that can outmuscle and outrun humans, then pit them against rival schools in competition. Lindblom’s varsity squad is the top team in Chicago and has gone to the world championships three times.
An engineer by training, Nick adores the machines, but they aren’t really the point. In his classroom, students gain hands-on experience in STEM, practice design-thinking, learn teamwork, and grow in confidence. “The robot is the tool that we use to build better humans,” said Nick.
As a kid himself, Nick never imagined he’d end up a teacher; it was hard enough being a student. But he knew he came alive playing tenor saxophone in John Truitt’s band classes and during physics and engineering lessons from Tom Buchanan.
Both men had a reputation for infusing learning with humor. Buchanan and other mischievous physics faculty illustrated lectures about velocity and inertia on the football field, where they fired off massive home-made potato cannons. During cafeteria lunches, Truitt was known to carve apples into flutes, then solo on them during announcements. “Learning is an important thing, but it’s not necessarily a serious thing,” Nick said, “and perhaps shouldn’t be.”
Truitt and Buchanan were “transformational” not only because of the material they taught but also the passion they inspired. “If you can help a person develop that love for whatever the subject, then they’re going to do the work to be successful — because they care about it,” Nick said. Few people enjoy playing scales, he explained, but if you love music, at some point you’ll realize how foundational they are to everything else you want to play, and then it’s much easier to put in the necessary work.
After graduation, Nick sought a career that braided his passions for music and engineering. He survived a grueling electrical engineering program at Rice University, then spent years doggedly applying for jobs at the premier audio equipment company Shure. “I’m just going to keep doing it until they put a restraining order on me,” he reasoned. Eventually, they gave him a job.
But upon attaining his professional goal, a funny thing began to happen. A colleague invited Nick to volunteer with Lindblom’s robotics program. Even as he climbed Shure’s ranks, he realized that what he loved most was watching students grow.
So in 2016, when Lindblom found itself short a full-time teacher, Nick took a leap of faith and asked Shure for a leave of absence. He’s never looked back. When he began, the school had a single robotics team; now it has five spanning grades 7-12. Each year, at least one of Nick’s students has been admitted to Rice’s engineering program.
This year, Nick was one of a handful of Illinois teachers honored with a prestigious Golden Apple Award. His students were taken aback to learn he spent the $5,000 prize money on a motorcycle. “I am a bad influence, but that’s what makes me an interesting teacher worth listening to,” Nick told them. He could have done something “boring” like saving the money for retirement, he reasoned, but that’s not what excites students. “If you do a really good job, you can buy whatever toy you want: that’s a way cooler lesson.”
