ALUMNI
Alumni Profile | Class of 2005
Davis Mello
Then & Now
After CPA, I attended Miami
University in Oxford, Ohio,
where I continued my studies and
also my swimming career. I met
my wife at Miami and ended up
moving back to Nashville after
graduation to attend law school
at Vanderbilt. These days I am
practicing law with Bass Berry
& Sims in Nashville. I spend
most of my time helping a wide
range of businesses (large and
small, public and private, local
and not) in various industries,
complete mergers, acquisitions,
and other strategic transactions. I
raise venture capital and navigate
federal and state securities laws,
though I also advise clients on
more routine operational and
corporate governance matters.
I love my family, and one of the most fulfilling
things for me outside of work is spending time
with my wife Kersta and our one-year-old son.
Kersta is the girls soccer coach at Brentwood
High School, and I also enjoy supporting her at
those games whenever I have the chance.
How did your experience
at CPA prepare you for
your current pursuits?
Emily Smothers Cox ’07
mission of the school permeates
so much of student life. I think it
is important to understand that
there is a world outside of the walls
of Christ Presbyterian Academy,
but those walls can foster a pretty
special learning environment.
How do you feel
you may have an
influence on
today’s culture?
CPA provided me numerous opportunities to
take some particularly rigorous classes (e.g. AP
Latin, AP Chemistry, AP Calculus). I appreciate
the encouragement I received at CPA to take
those classes, and they were helpful with respect
to my college education both because of the
inherent value of taking challenging courses
with very talented teachers and also because
those AP classes enabled me to earn some credit
toward my college degrees. I think teenage years
are profoundly formative, even in ways that you
might not realize until much later. One of the
things that’s great about CPA is that the spiritual
I believe my sphere of
inf luence starts small, with the
people closest to me—my wife,
my son—and then expands to
my friends, colleagues, and
acquaintances. I certainly
strive to be a positive inf luence
on my family and model to my
son what it looks like to be a man who works
hard at his craft, a husband who loves and
honors his wife, and a father who invests in
his children. Similarly, I hope that the way I
conduct myself at work, in social settings is a
positive inf luence on others. I’m well aware
that I’m a f lawed human being, of course, but
I certainly desire that God might use me to
inf luence those around me.
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