Talia Toland - Class of 2017

While everyone else was learning how to swim, Talia was learning how to sail. Class of 2017 graduate Talia Toland has always loved the water. “I grew up racing competitively across the country before and during my time at Overlake, and then went on to race in college at Tufts University in Boston,” she shares. In that time, Talia earned her skipper’s license and worked as a skipper in Europe and earned her US Coast Guard Captain’s License, later going on to become a Royal Yachting Association Yachtmaster.  As part of her Yachtmaster certification, Talia had to spend more time on longer passages, even sailing a catamaran from Florida to California through the Panama Canal. 

Talia now resides in Hood River, Oregon, where she works as a mechanical engineer at a company called Advanced Navigation and Positioning Corporation, a company that designs the transponder landing systems that provide landing guidance without GPS to planes on existing runways, and especially in rugged terrain where other traditional landing systems do not function.  

Since moving back to the PNW, Talia has taken up the sport of foiling, literally moving from sailing across seas to flying across rivers. Her love of the outdoors roots back to her Overlake days where she “learned to be a whole person, not just an intellectual in the classroom,” acknowledging how her Overlake education helped her to “think broadly and to ask questions.” Though many of her favorite Overlake memories stem from Project Week experiences like tearing apart a car and replacing every component, traveling to Cuba for her Senior Project, and Outdoor Ed trips such as backpacking in Bryce Canyon, she notes “the best interactions happened on the path walking from class to class or heading down to the fields to support a sports game.”  

The next time you drive by The Gorge, keep an eye out for a former Owl flying across the river on a wing foil.