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Long before she commanded the , Alison Lanz MacDonald ’10 was a high schooler from upstate New York standing on The Hill for the first time. A Girl Scout camporee brought her to Norwich one summer; Future Leader Camp (FLC) brought her back the next. That second visit sealed it. “I was hooked and had to attend Norwich,” she said of her experience.

Nearly two decades later, MacDonald is coming back to where her Norwich story began. She will deliver the graduation address at this summer’s FLC on Sunday, July 19, closing the loop for a program that first showed her what she was capable of.

Finding her Footing in the Corps

MacDonald entered the Corps of Cadets in 2006 and wasted little time seeking out challenge. As a sophomore, she joined Norwich’s , training alongside a mostly male unit in land navigation, mountaineering, and cold-weather survival. She was one of just three women in a company of 100 at the time, a ratio she took in stride. “I guess I am just so used to being one of the few women,” she told Vermont Woman magazine in 2007, adding that the training pushed her in ways the classroom could not. Strapping on an avalanche beacon before a winter rescue simulation, she said, was a “reality check” — a reminder that the skills cadets practiced on Vermont’s mountains carried real consequences.

That same steadiness marked her rise through the Corps. In her senior year, MacDonald was selected as Norwich’s regimental commander — only the third woman in University history to hold the position. She led alongside Deputy Commander Jessica Corl ’10, marking the first time in Norwich’s then-191-year history that both top cadet leadership posts were held by women. Both cadets were quick to deflect attention from the milestone itself. “We don’t want to be glorified because we’re women,” Corl said at the time, a sentiment MacDonald shared.

Her focus, instead, stayed on the job: holding every cadet to the same standard. “I hate to say this, but I think there may be some females who use being a female as an excuse,” she said bluntly in a 2010 Seven Days interview, highlighting her no-exceptions approach to leadership.

A Career of Leadership

MacDonald graduated in 2010 with a degree in criminal justice and commissioned into the U.S. Army as a military intelligence officer, training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, before deploying to Afghanistan. She served during a pivotal stretch for women in the military — years before the Department of War formally lifted the Combat Exclusion Policy in January 2013 — at a time when, as she put it, “there are no front lines” in the wars American forces were fighting. Her service placed her among the Norwich women in the University’s Women Kicking Glass initiative.

Today, MacDonald continues to put that leadership to work off the battlefield. She serves on the Global Security Team at JPMorgan Chase & Co., where her focus includes mitigating workplace violence — a role that draws directly on the same vigilance, discipline, and calm-under-pressure judgement that defined her time in the Corps and Army.

A Role Model for Campers

MacDonald’s path traces almost every thread of the Norwich mission and its Guiding Values: honor, integrity, disciplined leadership, and a commitment to service that carried her from the Upper Parade Ground to a war zone to the corporate security world.

For the high schoolers completing FLC this month, she is proof of where that first spark on The Hill can lead. FLC is designed to build confidence and leadership skills through the same kind of hands-on challenge that shaped MacDonald’s own Norwich journey. On July 19, she will stand in front of this year’s graduates as living evidence that the program works.