Wildwood School Viewbook: Brave Learners, Thinkers, and Doers

It wasn’t love at first sight, but close enough, when Ruby Erdmann and Spencer Ferguson met at Wildwood School when she was in 7th grade and he in 8th. Within two years, they were dating and attended prom together. Now, 10 years later, they’re engaged and planning their wedding. Each can trace who they’ve become back to Wildwood. For Ruby, who calls herself “a total nerd” in high school, Wildwood fed her project-oriented skills. She appreciated Wildwood’s tight-knit community that gave her the encouragement and space to think big. For Spencer, Wildwood’s advantages included classes that afforded him the opportunity to develop personal relationships with his teachers. He still calls on the Habits of Mind and Heart and says, “Wildwood gave me the infrastructure to excel.”

Ruby studied jazz, ballet, and modern dance, part of an early dream of becoming a contemporary ballet dancer. Then an unexpected passion intervened—“I fell in love with chemistry,” she says. Now she holds a bachelor’s in psychology and chemistry from Spelman College, along with a master’s in education in exercise physiology from Auburn University and a master’s in nutrition sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago. “At Wildwood, I gained the confidence to become the student I saw myself evolving to,” says Ruby, a registered dietitian nutritionist in Chicago, currently applying to medical school. Spencer played basketball and immersed himself in Wildwood’s hands-on engineering and arts programs. This creative fusion forecast his master’s degree in architecture at Hampton University, an urban design fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University, and a master’s in community and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In his junior and senior years, Spencer did his Wildwood internship at OJMR Architects. His contact there recently led him to his new job as an architect in Chicago. It is, Spencer notes, “a classic full-circle moment.”

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