Our Wildwood, Summer 2016, Volume 39

AMANDLA Amandla Stenberg, attending New York University Laura Forsythe, visual arts teacher

How has the sense of community at Wildwood impacted you as a learner?

letting other people dictate your choices and you fall into the college process just because that’s what everyone else is doing. Something I had to learn was that you go to college for your own learning and to shape your own life and what you want to do. What motivates you as a learner? How did you figure it out? I had to figure out how to handle hardship in my junior year because I was balancing so much. I had a lot of changes in my life that gave me a lot more responsibility, and at school, I was suddenly so deep in the college process. I had to figure out where my motivation for my schoolwork was coming from. Something that I learned in elementary school—just because that’s how the public system works—was to be motivated by other people, to be motivated to work out of fear—fear of getting a bad grade, fear of not going to college. I had this shift in 11th grade at Wildwood where that sense of motivation was no longer working for me. I had to figure out where it would come from. Part of that grit was learning to bring it out of myself, which is probably the most challenging thing that I’ve gone through, learning how to self-motivate instead of have other people motivate me.

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One of the things that Zach [Menzer] and Lori [Strauss] were saying during our senior breakfast is that Wildwood students have this ability to reflect, and that has been integral to my education. I recognize now that I have this automatic notion to reflect after I’ve completed something, or after I’ve made a mistake, or after I’ve had a success. I just have this inclination to reflect on myself, reflect on how I’m changing, reflect on what I need to do next time. I’m not sure if that’s a thing that people learn very often in their lives, let alone learn in their school. That’s been very special for me. What was the college process like for you? Did you receive any useful advice? It was different for me because I was applying to a film program. My application was a film that I worked on really intensely. I think the best advice that I got from a lot of teachers—I think you gave me this advice and Julian [college counselor] gave me this advice—was to just do it, not stress out too much, and realize that the college process wasn’t for anyone else, that it was for me and for my own future. When you go through the education system, oftentimes you get caught in this cycle of A