46 / matters magazine / school 2017 finalmatters I n September, I’m going into my senior year of high school. The fall is college application time for us seniors, and I’ll be applying to a lot of liberal arts colleges, the kind with tiny student bodies and old-fashioned architecture. Strangely enough, as I fill out applications for schools miles away, I find that I’m looking for a Maplewood education. I decided early on in my college selection process that I would attend a liberal arts college. A liberal arts education is supposed to “impart a broad general knowledge;” in other words, it teaches you a bit of everything, allowing you to sample a variety of interests. Recently I’ve been thinking that I already received a sort of liberal arts education in Maplewood. I’ve been ex- posed to a wealth of ideas, a wide variety of subjects and a smorgasbord of extracurriculars, even at an early age. In fourth grade, my teacher took us out onto the front lawn of Jefferson school, and dropped seeds of varying sizes on the grass to show us the scale of the solar system. I still remember the wonder of that day, of thinking “How small we are!” when I compared our salt grain-sized Earth with the basketball-sized sun. My Maplewood education feels like more of a collegiate experience than I believe other educations would in large part because of our joint school system. It exposes us to a larger number of people, as two classes are added in middle school, and three more in high school. As a result, your social circles are forced to change. Maplewood may be a suburb, but there’s no risk of spending your entire childhood with the same 200 people. Again and again, I find myself impressed with the autonomy of our large student body. I don’t mean privileges granted to us by teachers (although I have no complaints about open-campus lunch since freshman year); it’s more about how much we govern our own high school experience. CHS experiences are planned by students, for students. The resources to which we have access still stun me after three years. I walked Preparing to leave How I plan on continuing my liberal arts education BY LUCY LEONARD into my last day of AP Chemistry to see a boy toying around with a 3-D printer that he had found in a physics teacher’s closet. Within a few minutes we had fig- ured out how to print plastic pen caps. My friends taking Synthetic Biology are editing the genetic code of coral using E.coli samples (don’t worry, it’s deactivat- ed!) They have already translated DNA sequences of water plants and put their results online; they have published scientific data with their names attached. These resources are not restricted to class time: I remember walking to my locker one afternoon when a friend asked me if I was in the mood to dissect a cougar head. A biology teacher had ordered one for her class but was unable to use it. So she invited everyone in the school to go dissect it, and 45 kids crammed into a classroom to do so. I think some of them might have done it out of a morbid since of irony, since our mascot is the cougar, but at least it resulted in some pretty fantastic (albeit gory) group selfies. Although lockers are next-to-impossible to open, cafeteria food is subpar, and Monday mornings are a headache – just like any other high school – I’m begin- ning to appreciate how weird and wonderful Columbia is as I’m preparing to leave it. We casually walk by the hallway styrofoam cadaver splattered with fake blood for the forensics class. The cafeteria flash mobs orchestrated by the Special Dance Company are commonplace. I take high-quality photos of Jupiter’s moon in Astronomy Club on Monday nights, on the very top of the CHS clock tower. I can see for miles and miles, and I feel the same sense of wonder as I did on the Jefferson front lawn eight years ago. Lucy Leonard is a summer intern at Matters Magazine and senior at Columbia High School. n