Andrew Jillings

2025 Distinguished Service Award
Citation for Andrew Jillings

You came to Hamilton in 1997 to assume leadership of Adirondack Adventure, Hamilton’s nationally acclaimed outdoor program for incoming students.

With unbridled energy and enthusiasm, you are the perfect person to help anxious students transition to college life, encounter new experiences, make new friends, and just have fun. And, for the record, there’s no truth to the rumored strategy that after students spend four or five days sleeping in a tent in the Adirondacks, a double in Dunham feels a whole lot less spartan. 

You also oversee the Hamilton Outing Club — or HOC — the largest student organization on campus, and in recent years you find yourself increasingly being asked to join College committees because of your keen insight into student life and culture. 

Your office is located in the Glen House, a homey base camp for the programs you administer as director of outdoor leadership, but your best work is done in the fields, mountains, waterways, and rock faces near and far from campus. HOC overnight trips have ranged from the D’Agostino Forest adjacent to the South Campus during the pandemic, to the majestic Adirondack Park, to the Everglades, Nepal, Ecuador, Kenya, and anywhere else students want to go. 

The approach is always Challenge by Choice, a leadership practice that allows participants to choose when and where to stretch their comfort zone. And for students who make the choice to try something new, you offer plenty of challenge, from hiking, to canoeing, to rock climbing, to sea kayaking, to winter camping, and lots more. 

You made your own choice to tackle a new challenge when — having never competed in a kayak race — you won the 2007 Yukon River Quest, which at 444 miles was the world’s longest annual canoe and kayak competition. You were on the water for 47 hours and 37 minutes. More recently, in 2022, you circumnavigated the “Eye of Quebec,” a ring-shaped lake providing a mere 125 miles of paddling challenge. 

“My job at Hamilton is to take students out into places that are beyond their normal bounds,” you said. “If I’m going to do this, I should be doing it myself.’ 

Your nominators for this award called you caring and compassionate, Hamilton’s Director of Fun, Protector of Tall Tales of the Root Glen, and a leader of leaders. We call you a one-of-a-kind Hamilton treasure and the 2025 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award.

Presented by Laura Anne Engelhardt ’95
President of the Alumni Association
September 26, 2025

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