Sophia R.
About Me
Hello! My name is Sophia. Towards the end of the sophomore year – partly due to Covid, partly due to having recently come out, and largely due to how much Stanford OHS has changed me in the past three years – I had the courage to reinvent myself. For as long as I can remember, I was on the path to becoming a professional ballet dancer. More importantly, I was so preoccupied with not disappointing people, of meeting their expectations, of not speaking up to say I did not know who I actually was, that I was carried along living a life that felt like I had borrowed it from someone else. When I arrived at Stanford OHS as a freshman, it was the first time in my life that I saw a glimpse of myself as something other than a dancer. I began to see myself as a student. I use the word student not to convey the image of someone merely enrolled in a school and taking a requisite number of credits, but as someone whose full-time activity is immersing themselves in learning. The breadth of what I was exposed to in my Stanford OHS classes, especially as a full-time student who has distribution requirements to meet across each department, ignited in me a passion for learning.
Who I am, more than anything else at this point in my life, is a Stanford OHS student. I spend my time trying to wring from this experience everything that I can. I love going to class, doing my readings, writing papers, pushing myself to frame my paper topics in original ways, spending time really getting to know my instructors, and being able to have more and more substantive conversations with them. I love going to Ethics Bowl practice and getting into heated debates over deontology vs. utilitarianism, and I even love commiserating in the chat rooms or on midnight Skype sessions with my friends when labs seem especially time-consuming or certain readings are particularly impossible. I am proud that what defines me right now and takes up my time is being a Stanford OHS student in all of its many facets. But I appreciate that being a Stanford OHS student cannot be an end in itself. The education I am privileged to receive requires me to move outside of Stanford OHS into the wider world and put it to use. I have tried to do that in several ways. With languages, which I studied even before I got to Stanford OHS, I have pushed into territory that requires more confidence than I had when I arrived here several years ago. I have ventured into studying Old French and reading 14th century medieval literature about same-sex love, I've spent a summer reading Don Quixote in Spanish in its entirety with a Stanford University professor, and another summer pursuing research on feminist critical theory. All of those would have been impossible undertakings had it not been for my time at Stanford OHS where I've learned that there isn't any subject that I can't at least become reasonably proficient in so long as I keep at it no matter how difficult in the beginning.
Why I Chose Stanford OHS
I was nervous when I made the decision to apply to Stanford OHS as a full-time student. It was clear from everything I had heard about the school and just looking at the course catalog and instructor bios that this place is a hub for intellectual and hardworking students. I wondered if I would be able to cut it here, especially because I had spent my entire life homeschooling with my dad, and I worried that I would feel isolated and have no social life because of the online format. But what made me nervous also was what attracted me to Stanford OHS because no place else offered the opportunity at such a young age to be immersed in a community where students are so valued for their ability to think and engage, and where it seemed like the melodrama and petty distractions of a typical high school might be lessened in an environment where students didn't face the same social pressures to conform as at some brick-and-mortar schools.
During my first month at school, I was sure it was a mistake that I had been admitted to Stanford OHS. Whatever I thought I knew about the school did not even begin to describe the thrum of intellectual inquiry - the students are brighter than I could have imagined, and the work was more challenging than I had anticipated. But what got me through that first month and what has helped me to grow over the past three years not just as a student, but as a person, were the people who make up Stanford OHS. Everyone from the peer tutors who were so kind to a new student who was equally lost in MWA as in MSB, to instructors who responded to emails late at night with encouraging words not to worry about my first attempts at doing textual analysis, to the counselors who cared not just about how I was faring inside the classroom but outside as well, everyone I met was invested in my success. Stanford OHS was more of a community than I ever imagined and one in which I was free to take risks academically, go outside my comfort zone socially, and continually reevaluate who I want to be. By the time I graduate in June, I will have taken every single advanced class that there is in Core, Literature, and History; I will have pushed myself farther than I thought possible in science and math; I will have charted a course for myself that is meaningful to me because Stanford OHS has given me both the intellectual and emotional tools to do so.
What I Love About Stanford OHS
At the heart of what I love about Stanford OHS are the instructors and the curriculum – which often seem as if they are inseparable from one another. This is not a place where instructors are teaching some rote curriculum about which they never had an interest or have become numb from years of repeating the same material. There's not a single class I have taken at Stanford OHS – over four years and across five different departments – where my instructor hasn't exuded passion for the subject matter. What adds to the experience are the interactions with instructors outside of class time. Every instructor holds office hours at least once a week and often they are willing to meet outside those times if extra help is needed.
Beyond the academic help that is so readily given, there is an incredible generosity of spirit among the instructors to truly get to know students outside of the classroom and to help students figure out what is important to them beyond just academics. I have instructors at Stanford OHS who know me so well that they have been invaluable in giving me advice as I start to look beyond high school. The same goes for the counselors at the school, some of whom I have formed just as close relationships with and whose guidance I trust because it is so tailored to who I am and not just generic advice. Then there are the students. The Skype groups and the chat rooms, even when they devolve into what passes for insane chatter among teenagers, have a different quality about it than at other schools. A large part of what informs even our inside jokes and good-natured teasing of one another is the shared experience of having gone through Core classes together, which really have the ability to turn your world upside down and reorder it in ways that cause you to reevaluate how you look at everything. That we go through this process together, and that so many of the students have a preternatural ability to appreciate just how special our access to these types of classes are, makes for a social environment that not only tolerates but encourages, being open about loving learning for the sake of learning. But the thing that makes Stanford OHS most unique is what a perpetually hopeful place that it is. The confidence in and respect for the students that all of the adults exhibit, from instructors to counselors, to administrators, makes students feel as if anything is possible.