Intersession is an idea that many high schools are not familiar with, though it is a typical university event. The idea is to have a period of time where instead of classes, activities, seminars, and intensives are held. At my school, The Nueva School, intersession is a week-long period in which we can sign up for three types of activities – intensives, activities, and seminars. The five day week is split up into blocks of 2 and 3 days. Intensives are full day activities that run the full course of the two-day block, and the full course of the three-day block. A person could sign up for two intensives if they wished – one in the two-day and one in the three-day block. Seminars are another option – signing up for this means that during the 2 block or the 3 blocks, a person will take 1 morning seminar for all two / three days, and 1 afternoon seminar for all the days. In between, before lunch, a person takes place in a short, 1-hour activity.

Intersession 2019

I had my first intersession in January of 2019 since my school holds it in between the two semesters. My 2 block was on Thursday and Friday, the 3rd and 4th of January, and my 3 block was the next week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. It was certainly a new experience for me, this being my first intersession. It was also rather odd starting school after winter break on a Thursday.

I took an intensive for my 2 block, a class called Python for Social Good. The teacher, Robyn Allen, was a graduate of MIT who has a degree in aerospace engineering. She was an entrepreneur who had started 2 startups and was working on her third – on a whole, definitely qualified to teach a class about Python to a group of high school students.

The idea was to create programs that would help people in society. Focusing on outer space, as she was an aerospace engineer, she gave us a project based on a book she wrote called Astronaut Essay Challenge. After reading through it I started coding the solution to her first problem – make a program that sorts formal from informal essays so newspaper companies don’t spend hours reading through informal essays that they will never publish.

For this, I decided that there have to be parameters – a list of forbidden words, no words in ALL CAPS, no double punctuation, and the like. Every time a certain mistake happened, a black point was added to a variable. If there were too many mistakes relative to the length of the piece, then it was marked Informal. The activity was a success and I had a great deal of fun. The link to the code can be found here.

The next part was to work on my own program of my own liking for coding a project for children. I worked with my two of my friends. We decided that data analytics and sorting would be the focus of the activity, and gave it three parts after some deliberation, going in ascending in difficulty as one moved onto the next part. The goal was to launch a rocket, however, the data was scrambled and had to be reorganized based on certain mathematical parameters. Part 1 involved a simple reorganization of data. Part 2 was for the user to create a program that sifted out incorrect amounts, and Part 3 was an open-ended data set creation program. The link to these programs can be found here.

The next week, Monday, found me going into my new activities. This time, for my 3 block, I had activities and seminars. In the morning I would be part of Journalism, the afternoon Github and the Command Line, and my activities were Firemaking, Muay Thai, and The Danger of Books in that order for all three days.

I had Journalism first – my teacher was Katya Cengel, a journalist with NPR. She published many articles previously, her most recent on the 5th of January about a Mongolian Rock band known as The Hu. The class was interesting, and I was captivated as we went over the basics of Journalism, Interviewing, and Lifestyle. Many members of our school newspaper, The Nueva Current, were there. The entire class, 2 hours a day for 6 hours overall, was very productive. We brainstormed later in our time for topics until we had narrowed them down, and then split up into groups. My group was looking at students who had joined our school halfway throughout the year. My friend and I interviewed someone, took the notes down, and wrote an article in the seminar. The link to it can be found here.

My afternoon seminar was Github and the Command Line. As one might imagine, after the Python for Social Good this was a fun way to spend my afternoons. Robyn was my teacher again, and we spent our three days learning the two things. The first day was dedicated to Github as we played a fun branching game and learned the commands. The second was devoted to the Command Line on Terminal, though I use iTerm, and we played another game called Terminus created by one of her MIT friends for mastering the use of the Terminal. The third day we combined the two, coding and using the Terminal to pull codes and merge them in Github.

I had Firemaking the first day- this was fun for me. Outdoors, we were introduced to different types of fire making equipment, going from a bow drill to a box of matches. After my friend and I created our own tinder (kindling for the flame, like paper or something flammable) by unraveling twine from a burlap sack, we took a knife and a block of wood and got to work. By positioning the knife over the block of wood and hitting it down with a big stick we were able to split the wood efficiently until it was nothing more than a pile of twigs for us to burn. Placing these together with our tinder, we set them alight by creating sparks using two pieces of metal. The one-hour activity was extremely fascinating to me, and I learned a lot throughout the time.

My second activity was Muay Thai, a type of boxing that originated in Thailand, and my teacher was a coach who owned his own gym and taught Muay Thai to workers at Google and various other companies. After a warm-up involving jump rope, burpees, pushups, and mountain climbers, we wrapped our hands, put our gloves on, took our shoes off, and started the activity. He demonstrated various moves, such as the jab, cross, kick, knee, and elbow. Then, he put them together into a pattern and had us practice them, one punching and one defending with a pad. I partnered up with two of my friends, taking turns with everything, as there was an odd number of people and we couldn’t all be two. I was sweating at the end, and my thighs ached, but I was extremely satisfied.

The third and final activity was a lecture on the Danger of Books. Here, our teacher, a professor of literature at Stanford, read excerpts from the works of Tacitus, a Roman historian, and gave us a history lesson on how his thoughts regarding Germania, the Roman name for what would later become Germany in the 19th century, ended up being a major influence and push for the Nazis. He stated in his works that Germania was a land that couldn’t be conquered and that the people didn’t let any outsiders in. This evolved over time, after many translations and interpretations, into the idea of Germany being pure and unpolluted when there weren’t any outsiders, and how if one wasn’t the perfect idea of the German race, then they weren’t a full, proper German. The danger of books and scholarly texts was evident after this lecture, seeing as how it led to one of the worst genocide attempts in history, and I can only wonder if any of the books that I read influence me in any way like Tacitus’ writing did.

Intersession was overall a valuable week for me, and I learned a lot from the various activities. Other activities at my school included Aerial Succulents, Enneagrams, Blacksmithing, Metalworking, Glassblowing, Improv, Dialects, and Boxing. Though intersession is generally a university activity, it was a valuable thing for me as a high schooler.

Intersession 2020

This year’s intersession was a bit more interesting, mostly due to the fact that in a recent skiing accident I was concussed and gained an orbital fracture on my face. Due to this, I ended up missing the first two days of Intersession, which was a glass-blowing intensive. I was really excited for it, unfortunately, but hopefully I would get it next year. I did manage to attend my morning seminar and activity for the last three days, however. I ended up leaving before my afternoon seminar to get some rest because a concussion is a brain injury, and I needed to give myself as much time as possible to rest while still giving my brain some intellectual exercise.

My morning seminar was a class called When Civilizations Clash: Exploring Ancient Medieval Battles. It was taught by Dr. Patrick Hunt, an archeologist, historian, and traveller who works for National Geographic and teaches at both Stanford and Berkeley. We were also given a book for the course that he had written called When Civilizations Clash: Twelve Ancient Battles in Antiquity. The overall course was about different battles from the past, such as the Battle of Nineveh between the Babylonians and the Assyrians, or the Battle of Marathon, between the Greeks and the Persians, and the way they played out, the strategies, and their relevance to the modern day.

I found the entire course interesting and impressive. Dr. Hunt is very well travelled, having been numerous times to places such as Israel, Iran, Russia, Canada, and all around Europe to study the archaeology and talk to people about the political state of their country. The actual battles themselves were also well-presented; the book is a college text, but it was written in a way that was digestible for us high school students and a good read. This three day seminar had us go through five different battles including the two mentioned above, all of which were important at the time thanks to strategy and archaeological relevance. I thought the Battle of Masada was particularly fascinating to learn about though for a morbid reason—during a siege by the Romans against a group of Jewish zealots locked up in a fortress, the Romans found a way to break in. Knowing that hope was lost, around 1000 Jews all committed mass suicide rather than be captured and enslaved.

I also had a different seminar each day. My first activity was called Conservation Ambassadors: Vanished. It was from a group called the Conservation Ambassadors who take care of animals that are unable to be released into the wild, but unable to be taken care as pets or put in regular zoos. Most of the time this happens because people attempt to tame an animal that cannot be tamed such as an alligator, and then, when the animal grows too big or wild for them they abandon it. This creature now is used to living around humans and is unable to live in the wild, so thus gets taken in by this group. They perform at different schools and zoos across the US, and our school is the only high school they perform for since their consumers tend to be elementary and middle schoolers.

This seminar was about creatures that were endangered or once endangered. I got to meet and pet creatures such as the American Alligator, the Ring-Tailed Lemur, the Serval cat, and the Bald Eagle. It was amazing to learn about the histories behind these fascinating creatures, be in the same room as them, and even get to pet some of them. I did this seminar again on Friday, my third day, though this time it was called Amazing Animal Adaptations and was about how the animals adapt to their environments. This time we were introduced to creatures like two types of porcupines, a type of frog, an Eurasian Eagle Owl, an otter, a chinchilla, and a lemur that wasn’t the ring-tailed type. It was overall astounding, the history behind these animals and how they were found by Conservation Ambassadors.

My Thursday activity, the one in the middle, was about suturing. We learned about the achilles tendon and different methods of suturing before partnering up and being handed a pigs leg. That’s right, a pig’s leg. We gave it anesthesia, sliced it open, cut open the tendon, and then practiced suturing it back shut before suturing up the cut we made in the leg in order to get to the tendon. I wasn’t fazed by the blood, having dissected an entire fetal pig in 7th grade and a cows eye in 8th grade, though my mother found the entire idea disgusting. It was really cool, touching the tendon. It was kind of like one of those sticks of white string cheese you can get at Trader Joes or Wholefoods, but a bit stringier and rounder.

I overall really enjoyed my second intersession. Even though I had to skip my afternoon seminar, Knitting 101, I still found all of what I learned in the mornings informative and fun.