The English Department at Oak Knoll had an outsized influence on Catie Cambria ’02, who joined Upper School in 1998. In a particularly memorable unit on Irish literature, former English teacher and current Head of Pingry, Timothy Lear, introduced her to the poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. Heaney once said, “I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.” That line encapsulates Cambria’s journey to Oak Knoll and beyond.

Considering that the original center of one’s life is usually one’s family, the first gigantic ripple occurred only months before Cambria entered high school. Her mother passed away in the fall of 1997 after a long bout with cancer. 

Entering grade 9 can challenge one’s vulnerability during the best of times, so Cambria and her father sought a school that would provide a stellar academic program coupled with a caring and nurturing culture.

“Oak Knoll was a place with such a loving and warm community,” Cambria explained. “I knew it was a place that would take care of me and help me grow. The community was transformative in my life. It was a place that opened my mind and made me the reader and the intellectual person I am today.”

As life continued to ripple outwards during high school, Cambria formed lasting relationships with members of her class and, with faculty encouragement, found her strength in creative and intellectual pursuits. She loved working on the school’s literary magazine. Though she excelled in other subjects, the English Department was the most influential in her choice of secondary education.

The pedagogical style of the department provided Cambria with an understanding of the value of liberal arts as early as age 14. “I ended up choosing Princeton initially due to the reputation of their great English, poetry, and creative writing departments.” Cambria related. “I studied art history, but Oak Knoll’s support of creativity and this idea of thinking for thinking’s sake made the liberal arts route an obvious choice.”

After graduating from Princeton, Cambria’s ripples widened as she combined her innate creativity with an acute business sense and obtained an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business. That powerful combination of left and right brain balance has led to an astonishing career.

Currently, she is the Vice President of Marketing at Clinique, overseeing the execution of Clinique’s North America marketing strategy. She has an impressive track record in brand building and marketing with experiences at  Cartier, Donna Karan, Gucci Lancôme, Viktor & Rolf, and Valentino. 

“There’s a deep creativity in marketing,” she explained. “It exists in terms of your intuition into a consumer, how you bring a product to market, how you create a campaign, how you build buzz across different channels, and that’s what I love about it. Having the education I did between Oak Knoll and Princeton made me a creative thinker who can also gain insights from data and facts and use that insight to tell a story.”

Throughout her journey and the many ripples that have propelled her forward, there is the constant center of her family and the recognition that Oak Knoll was the right choice at a critical time.

In addition to Catie, two younger sisters, Jean Cambria ’05 and Lucia Cambria ’08, attended Oak Knoll. To provide opportunities for future students to join this caring community and to acknowledge the partnership Oak Knoll provided in raising three daughters, Catie’s father, John Cambria, made an extremely generous donation in 2020 to establish the Cambria Family Scholarship in memory of his wife.

“Oak Knoll’s values are kindness, giving back, and having pride in who you were as a girl and a woman. That was tremendously important to my father and me in choosing the school,” Cambria stated. “That foundation of generosity and being a good person, I could not trade that for anything, especially at such a fragile point in my life. I wanted a deeply loving place where I was very much seen and understood as a unique individual. Oak Knoll was that place.”