An Examined Education

Transcript: (Auto-generated)

Welcome to An Examined Education, a podcast from the Cambridge School. At Cambridge, we often say that education is never merely about what students know, but about who they are becoming. For 20 years, our community has been shaped by conversations that ask enduring questions about truth, goodness, and beauty, and by a shared commitment to forming students who think well, love rightly, and live wisely.

Today, the Cambridge School is honored to be ranked the number one private K-12 school in San Diego, but rankings tell only part of the story. Our deeper aim, our telos, has always been the formation of a whole person, intellect, wisdom, virtue, and faith, integrated and ordered toward a life of purpose and service. In this series, we turn to our alumni.

Through their stories, we explore how a Cambridge education continues to echo long after graduation in college classrooms, careers, relationships, and callings. These are reflections on learning, on becoming, and on the ways a formative education shapes how we experience and engage with the world around us. This is An Examined Education, stories shaped by the belief that a flourishing life begins with cultivating good habits alongside great people toward noble ends.

Enjoy. My name is Katelin Sung. I just graduated from Cambridge in 2025, and I'm currently a first year at Berkeley majoring in rhetoric.

I was at Cambridge for the long haul, K-4 through 12th grade. College is basically the first time in my memory that I've existed away from the Cambridge community, so I've had lots of prompting to reflect on my elementary through high school experience and the way it's shaped me up until this point. I've become appreciative of the both and aspect of Cambridge, specifically both humanities and STEM, after having been in college at UC Berkeley for a few months.

Something about Berkeley that I've been learning isn't really true at some other colleges is that nearly every freshman comes to Berkeley knowing exactly what field they want to go into, and although there are many intellectually curious and open-minded students there, they pretty much just stay in their own lane in terms of the subjects they study. The engineers are there just for engineering, the biology majors are there just for biology, the English people are there just for English, and so on. And most people see what we call breadth classes or just just general education classes outside of their major as annoying requirements they just have to get out of the way because they don't have to do directly with their major.

I think coming to Berkeley after having grown up in Cambridge, I came in with a pretty different perspective. I do have a career goal in the field of medicine, but I'm not approaching education and the college experience as mere means to get to that. Cambridge definitely instilled in me the idea that education is not just stuffing information into my brain to get a piece of paper that says I have a degree, but rather a joyful, or mostly an ideally joyful, privilege meant to enrich my life, not just monetarily in the long run, but intellectually and characteristically.

Learning is about understanding the human experience, and I think when you look at learning like that, it's ridiculous to think that you could really learn without valuing both STEM and humanities. My choice to major in humanities, rhetoric to be specific, so the Cambridge influence is very very apparent, in addition to the pre-med courses is certainly a result of that idea of learning as understanding the entire human experience. The prospect that I had to choose only one subject to study for the next four years was quite saddening when my time at Cambridge had sparked my interest in both, and it wasn't just that Cambridge did a good job of teaching both sciences and humanities independently, but the subjects themselves were often intertwined and teachers themselves embodied an integrated approach to their subjects.

The Cambridge curriculum was carefully crafted so that each year's subjects overlapped in meaningful ways, and that each year as a whole fit into the grander scheme of the entire K through 12. I didn't fully appreciate this until late in high school, but I still remember many like whoa moments when I made connections with other things I was concurrently learning. This includes small things like in grammar school when scientific discoveries I was learning about were made in the same era as the era of history that I was learning about, or more impactful realizations in rhetoric school like the application of a rhetorical concept to enact in history that also related to a principle in computer science.

I feel like I was trained to start seeing these patterns across classes more, which just further augmented my education and grew my appreciation for all subjects both STEM and humanities. An example of a teacher embodying multiplicitous and interdisciplinary interests is Mrs. Hahn, my beloved chemistry and physics teacher. She was not just trying to make us learn the cold hard facts and procedures of science.

She had an infectious interest in the history behind scientific discovery and cared about the way we were able to communicate ideas. Also, outside of the classroom, she was the person that I talked to the most about books more than any other student, the literature teacher. Mrs. Hahn inspires me not only because of her incredible ability to make tricky chemistry, physics concepts understandable, but also because of how much value she puts on reading, evidenced by the amount of time, even in her busy schedule, that she gives to books.

Mrs. Hahn is a great example of someone with interests in both STEM and humanities and has definitely inspired me to keep both in my academic life. Mr. Goodwiler is another teacher who is knowledgeable about humanities, given that he's a rhetoric and literature teacher, but also about science and other general topics. He would say to my class that he knows nothing about science or math, but that's just not true.

If it pertained to the context of a literary work or current cultural movements, he would come to class prepared to converse about the relevant science of a topic, too. Examples that come to mind are discussions surrounding AI that my senior thesis class had and the way that Mr. Goodwiler approached a modern sci-fi novel that a group of us read in book club and the way he thought about which parts were feasible because, to me, it seemed like he approached it with a mindset of a scientist, regardless of how much technicality there was to his knowledge. Mr. Goodwiler, someone who shows deep appreciation and has curiosity for fields in humanities and STEM, and has definitely been a role model in the way I approach all topics open-mindedly and with a stance of wanting to understand more about the world we live in.

So, because of Cambridge's both-and model and their goal for education to be about preparing students for the entire human experience, not confined to one area of study, I've been formed to care about both STEM and humanities and see them as necessary pieces for the same puzzle, inspired both by the integrated curriculum I've experienced since I was four and by the great teachers who live that out in their own ways. If there's one thing my gratitude for the both-and posture of Cambridge has taught me, it's that academia has so much to offer in both fields, and that learning one does not weaken but rather enriches the other. Thank you for listening to An Examined Education.

Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and if you like what you hear, reach out to the Advancement Office. Check out our website and schedule a tour at cambridgeclassical.org. Until next time, think well, love rightly, and live wisely.