Blythe

I have always ridden, and so, like a few students, I brought my own horse to school. I'm a show jumper, and I travel with the school's group to shows in the region.

While I spend almost every afternoon in the ring, I'd have to say that horses are not the biggest part of my life here. I'm very, very busy with a five-class schedule, the madrigal group, and acting. I'm thoroughly enjoying my physics class even though I don't think of myself as having a particularly scientific mind. I'm also taking French Literature; we began this semester with some beautiful, little-known Proust stories. We speak only French in class unless the concept we're discussing becomes too esoteric, in which case our teacher lets us momentarily revert to English. We're now reading Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, or Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, which isn't just science fiction but is also a witty commentary about the English empire. In French Lit we also do translations and presentations.

I always enjoy talking about history, and we talk, in French Lit, about the wild technological advances of Verne's era that inspired Le tour du monde and also about the political upheaval of Verne's era in France. Because I'm a junior I'm taking U.S. History now, and have gotten into some great classroom conversations with our teacher about the Civil War. One of the ideas that I have for college is to study musical theatre at a conservatory affiliated with a university and to either double-major or minor in history. We'll see….

In U.S. Literature we're studying the same periods we study in U.S. History. And in Precalculus—as I said, I don't consider myself to have a scientific mind—we're studying topics that make Physics, one of my favorite courses, understandable to me.

One night a week I rehearse with the madrigals group. We do some pop songs. I had a lot of fun with a solo of Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" in a recent performance. But right now we're learning "As Vesta Was," an extraordinary English madrigal written for six voices, and we're having additional section rehearsals to help us with that. I'm a dorm head, which means that I also attend Student Council meetings.  And then there are always, always the school musicals.

(Blythe graduated in June 2011 and is currently a freshman at the Savannah College of Art and Design, majoring in Acting.)