Hey! I’m Julia Burnham, a current senior who’s capping off seven years at the Davidson Academy. My story is a bit unusual in that when my family moved to Reno we actually had no clue about Davidson, considering how my older brother and I were still rather young. We ended up learning about it slowly through local pipelines, and what seemed like fate eventually brought us to what I can now imagine is the only education that ever could have truly “fit.”
In elementary school, my parents would ask me every day what I learned from school and I would reply with “nothing,” as I spent most of my time reading and doodling various ice creams and flowers all over my notebooks. I took online math classes outside of school but slacked off in my attendance as it didn’t feel like an actual “school” to stare at a wall of moving text for an hour. When my brother was accepted into the academy, I naturally wanted to follow him and ended up taking a virtual writing class from Davidson Academy Online (DAO). I remember how for the first time I, who had gotten 100s for every piece of half-hearted schoolwork, was suddenly receiving Ds and Cs on every other assignment. That class, which was at the time DAO’s easiest introductory to writing course, taught me about the type of rigor that I could expect at the academy every day.
When I first entered the DA in middle school, it felt magical. From the moment I stepped foot into the DA until today, I have never had a teacher who was not amazing. It makes it very difficult to choose a favorite subject because every teacher is so passionate about what they do and provides a curriculum so engaging that you can’t help but become invested as well. I remember in my first-year science class we went to the university mineral museum and walked across the campus placing down a scale model of the solar system, I remember our English class visited an escape room to teach teamwork, and I remember how every student who’s taken Spanish knows the lyrics to certain songs so well that we can play them at karaoke.
What I also learned about the DA, however, was that aside from the teachers, your classmates also make a big difference in your learning experience. The other students here are incredible. Every group discussion is fruitful, every team project has members who are willing to participate, and every interest under the sun somehow has a club made for it. A lot of what I’ve learned has come from other students who are not just brilliant but are inspiring to be around.
I don’t think it would be an exaggeration at all to say that this kind of education can’t be found anywhere else in the world. DA is not focused on test scores, or being able to give your child a more advanced math textbook. Sure, there are people writing quantum physics proofs on the whiteboard and middle schoolers hiding graduate-level literary talents, but ultimately what DA does is allow students to be both exceptional and at the same time to be a kid. We might not exactly have the most “popping” social life and our dances are unique, but the ability to interact with peers of one’s own age who can relate and sympathize with one another and doing such in a communal school setting is invaluable.
The DA has opened me to paths I never thought I could take. Being supported by friends and academically challenged has fostered a sense of “I can do it” regardless of the task. As a rare humanities student, I found my love for economics and business through school organizations and clubs that pushed me to interact with the topics on a deeper level. It helped that so many DA classes include long-form essays or projects that allow you to explore potential interests on your own giving you the chance to “try on” academic topics without committing to them. The biggest risk of attending the DA is that you might get too invested in academia and end up becoming a professor.
If this wasn’t enough, my final, and perhaps favorite, part about the DA is balance. Sometimes I like a challenging, rigorous environment, but I also enjoy eight hours of sleep and time for leisure activities. Although the DA is most certainly difficult, the difficulty is from critical thinking and not from excessive homework. Going to the DA allows you to take more time to explore your own interests and passions both outside of school and within it simultaneously satisfying your academic needs and allowing you to find yourself as a person too. Had I not gone to the DA, there is no doubt that I would be a very different person right now as the value it has imparted to me is incalculable.
If you feel unsatisfied with conventional academics and want to experience a truly unique community of thinkers so fast that they’ll make your head spin, then I can imagine no better place for you than the DA.
– Julia Burnham, Davidson Academy Senior
Adapted from a “Student to Student” profile originally shared in our newsletter. Subscribe >