Our Wildwood, Summer 2019, Volume 45

ALUMNI REFLECTION by Owen Leddy ’15

Science for Good

in an autonomous but collaborative manner. In traditional high-school classes, students interact with science primarily as a body of settled facts to be assimilated, whereas WISRD gave me a chance to experience science as an intellectual community grappling with unsolved, open-ended problems—a side of science that most students don’t get to see directly until college, if ever. Participating in WISRD required being able to clearly articulate the motivation for a research project and communicate my methods and results in the form of papers, posters, and presentations. More generally, by emphasizing oral presentation skills and discussion-based lessons, Wildwood prepared me to communicate research findings and engage in critical discussions of primary scientific papers. While WISRD is located at the upper school, it is a natural continuation of the types of creative

Every learning process at Wildwood is centered on an essential question—from individual projects to yearlong classes to biennial, self-reflective “Gateway” presentations. When I was in 9th grade at Wildwood, my teacher Levi Simons opened the first meeting of the Advanced Topics in STEM elective class with the question, “What is science?” In the discussion that followed, we considered what types of research questions characterize the natural sciences. From there, we began generating the research questions that each of us would develop into an independent, original research project over the rest of the academic year. Like other essential questions, a scientific research question is a concise expression of intellectual curiosity that establishes one’s intentions for a process of inquiry. Formulating such questions is one of the most important, exciting, and challenging aspects of scientific research, and

participating in the Advanced Topics in STEM elective gave me an exceptional opportunity to practice this skill relatively early in my education. Wildwood’s internship program gave me a further chance to develop my capacity for original research through an internship in computational biology at the University of Southern California. In my final year at Wildwood, the Wildwood Institute for STEM Research and Development (WISRD) was established under the leadership of Joe Wise. WISRD elaborated the Advanced Topics in STEM elective into a community of students conducting original research

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