In this repeating guest column, we encourage all student writers from around the community to share their memorable experiences while at the Upper School.

Please email all column ideas to [email protected].

I began my high school career feeling as though my interests and the prominent interests of the quintessential Harker student were entirely different. That I would have to carve out a little corner of the school for myself and not tread over the line that separated my artistic pursuits from scientific research and multivariable calculus. I never had a way with numbers, and the rules of chemistry had always seemed like science-fiction to me. And while my aptitude for the subjects never changed, my interests did. I didn’t become an ardent chemist or a biology devotee, but had it not been for my incessant exposure to the world of science, due to Harker curriculum and the enthusiasm for science in the Harker population, I would not be the writer and artist that I am today.

During the second half of my junior year, I became friends with two people in my grade who were physics aficionados. They let me talk about Kerouac and Matisse all I wanted, but they also took it upon themselves to explain to me Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the way Quantum mechanics, at its heart, is really about philosophy. I was hooked, and because science was never a professed interest of mine, I never found my lack of knowledge embarrassing. I asked a myriad of questions. It felt as though a door to a world I had never known existed had finally been opened. I wasn’t suddenly grabbing graph paper and spewing out mathematical equations, but glimpsing at the world the way a physicist might—it changed the way that I wrote, and it changed the way that I approached art. I had never looked at the universe as a series of patterns and principles, only as a place of words and oil paint and stories. I spent much of my free time during my second semester in Mr. Spenner’s classroom. I’ve found it’s a nice place to write.

Harker often gets pigeonholed as a school for mathematicians and scientists. Despite our efforts to diversify, it’s a reputation that sticks. But in my three years at Harker, what I’ve found is that no passion exists in a vacuum. Every young writer is trying to find their voice, every young painter their aesthetic, every young actor the root of their performances. What helps Harker students who identify in these categories is their personal proximity to worlds and interests so unlike their own. Certainly Harker has the most resources, for now, for its science students, but this, I think, is what makes the experience for artists at Harker so unique. And maybe with the opening of the Performing Arts Building next year, the reverse will soon be true as well.