“I came in with a much clearer understanding of the world,” says Evans, comparing his perspective to those of his classmates. As a reminder of the disparity between Evans and his fellow freshmen, he often slips and refers to them as “kids.”
But with a child of his own, maybe that is not surprising. Two and a half years into his time in Korea, the couple’s daughter, Haley, was born in March of 2010.
Evans and Stephanie met as high school students in Abu Dhabi and serendipitously reunited in 2007 while Stephanie was a student at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Evans was stationed just up the California coast at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey where he studied to become a cryptologic Korean linguist, a job that includes analyzing reports in Korean.
The couple spent weekends on the coast between Monterey and Los Angeles. They married in 2007, shortly before departing for Korea, where Evans spent his first tour.
In 2009, Evans was selected for the Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program, which provides approximately 90 Marines each year with the opportunity to take time off from regular service and attend a college of their choice. Marines that participate in the program are required to remain in the Corps for at least four years after graduation.
So with a baby on the way and a wife on his arm, Evans applied and was—to his surprise—admitted to Harvard.
While the couple also considered Georgetown and Notre Dame, Harvard’s allure and financial aid package proved too good to turn down.
Stephanie had been accepted to several law schools, but that was before her daughter’s birth and her husband’s acceptance at Harvard. While she has put her plans to attend law school on hold to take care of her daughter, she says she plans to enroll in law school somewhere in the Boston area while Evans is at Harvard.
AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK
While visiting Cairo as a high school student, Evans was approached on a street corner by two children begging for money.
Around the corner, Evans could see the man for whom they worked and who probably abused them. Evans could not decide whether helping the children was worth lining the pockets of their abuser.
“I can’t help but think about what it is like to live an existence like that,” Evans says. “Maybe now I can understand a little bit of the violence that occurs.”
Evans spent his childhood moving from place to place around the world, an experience that informed his understanding of the United States. As a child with a father in the Air Force, Evans lived in four states and three foreign countries but describes his time in the United Arab Emirates as especially influential on his world-view.
He moved to the Middle Eastern nation after starting high school in what he describes as “a very Christian oriented, family-focused Colorado town.”
“There are truths to some things that you hear, but there are also many falsehoods,” Evans says in reference to the American perception of the Middle East.
After living in such a radically different environment, Evans returned to Colorado with a more open view of the world, a view that he says did not necessarily align with the culture he had left behind in the United States.
“These conservative Christian truths that I had never questioned before, I all of the sudden could not let stand,” Evans says.
But the time spent overseas also resulted in a stronger appreciation of America and the values it espouses, which inspired him to consider a career in the military.
“The ideas of justice and equality have so much more meaning to me because of what I’ve seen,” he says. “The spirit of the military is in the noble defense of the values that America thinks are important, that are good for all of humanity. That’s the military at heart.”