By Matt Waite
Staff Writer
Summer is rarely a time when students choose to think about school, much less willingly attend one. However, for the seven now senior students at Northwood who earned a spot at Governor’s School, that was not the case.
Each student had to complete a challenging and possibly nerve-wracking admissions process, which eliminated the majority of applicants before admittance into the six week North Carolina program for the academically gifted.
“[It] was kind of like applying to a college,” said Jessie Vohwinkle. “You would list all of your experiences and you had to take an academic test to qualify.”
The application and test scores were then sent to Governor’s School to be reviewed and used to narrow down the field of applicants. If the students successfully completed this part of the process, they then had to write two essays and, depending on their subject, do an interview or deliver a prepared monologue in front of an admissions board.
“The audition was very stressful,” said Vohwinkle. “We had to go into a room [where] there were two judges and a video camera and we had to present a two-minute monologue and that was it. It was basically your two minutes to be able to get in or not.”
Henry Stokes agreed that the process was stressful.
“[The monologue was] nerve-wracking,” Stokes said. “Though all auditions are like that and after a while you get used to [it].”
The students had three classes during the day that were referred to as areas one, two and three. According to Stokes, area one classes focused on the subject that a student was selected for, area two classes covered philosophy and area three classes attempted to take what had been learned from the first two classes and ground it by using the student’s personal experiences. The class also tried to apply it to the student’s social worlds by helping them make links between ideas, actions, theory and practice.
Depending on their subject of interest, some students had to complete a research project, such as Rodrigo Catalan-Hurtado, who attended Governor’s School for natural sciences.
“We had to make a poster about a topic that was in natural science,” Catalan-Hurtado said. “I chose one about psychology in apes: how gorillas, chimps and monkeys see each other and how we see each other and what the difference is between them.”
April Gibbs described the teachers as having “a mindset that you should not learn to get good grades, but should learn for the sake of learning.”
According to the students that attended, there were many differences between Northwood and Governor’s School.
“At Governor’s School you don’t have any homework and you get to learn what you want to learn, unlike [Northwood] where there are so many different subjects that they give you homework in,” said Catalan-Hurtado. “[At Northwood] you really don’t get a choice about what you want to learn.”
When not in class students could play sports, talk with each other, watch films and listen to guest speakers. There were a wide variety of speakers who shared their stories and talked about a variety of different topics, such as a woman who founded a dance company and a man who was found innocent after spending 20 years in prison.
When commenting on their favorite aspects of the experience, Sterling Logan, Vohwinkle and Stokes all mentioned how they enjoyed the other students.
“Governor’s School is full of students exactly like you,” Logan said. “They actually care [about academics and] you don’t have to try to hide the fact that you are doing your work when you go home.”
“You could walk up to anyone and strike up a conversation and they would just be the nicest people on earth,” Stokes said. “It was an environment of complete openness and respect. They wanted to understand what you thought about, what you did, and just having three hundred people your own age with those things was so powerful.”