An Examined Education

Caleb Kapusinski graduated with the class of 2021 and now works in sales as an account manager for a general contractor. His episode is organized around two convictions he has carried into the workforce and has not stopped thinking about since. The first is that a smaller school creates space for a fuller person. At Cambridge, Caleb played basketball, ran cross country, performed in theater, and served in house leadership, not because he was exceptional in all of those fields, but because the school was small enough to say yes to all of it. He believes that habit of saying yes is increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable. The second is that Cambridge taught him to ask why. In his work, that translates to getting past a client's first answer to find the real problem underneath. In the classroom, it meant Socratic discussions oriented not toward the right answer but toward genuine understanding. The two convictions are, he argues, more related than they appear: a well-rounded person who knows how to ask good questions is, in his experience, exactly what the labor market is not producing and very much needs.

Stephen Priest graduated with the class of 2020 after attending Cambridge since second grade. He went on to Baylor University, where he majored in mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics, and is now completing a master's in philosophy at Georgia State, where his research touches on AI ethics and moral cognition. The throughline connecting all of it runs directly back to Cambridge. Stephen's episode is a sustained meditation on how ideas connect. Latin and Ancient Greek taken simultaneously led him to linguistics. Logic opened the door to set theory and philosophy of mathematics. A senior thesis topic became an undergraduate thesis topic and remains an area of active inquiry. The Cicero he studied in rhetoric class became the subject of a first-semester college research paper, written in Latin, drawing on three distinct strands of his Cambridge education at once. What he finds most striking is that it was not only his training in mathematics that prepared him for advanced mathematics. It was his training in the humanities. Upper-level math is about proofs, and proofs are arguments, and knowing how to find, develop, and communicate an argument clearly is the same skill Cambridge builds through essays and debate. The disciplines were never as separate as they appeared. For Stephen, philosophy is where all of it converges. It is the discipline that asks what the other disciplines are actually doing, and Cambridge, without ever teaching a philosophy course per se, spent years preparing him to love exactly that question.

Josh Kapusinski arrived at Cambridge in eighth grade expecting to enter ninth. His first lesson was in humility. His second was that literature could do in a classroom what it had always done for him alone at home. Josh now teaches rhetoric, speech and debate, and senior thesis at the Geneva School, a classical Christian school not unlike Cambridge. He spends a good deal of his time thinking about what his Cambridge teachers did and how they did it. The answer he keeps arriving at is that they modeled the virtues they asked of their students, brought genuine love for their subjects into the room, and held their students to a standard high enough to mean something. That combination lit a fire in him that eventually became a vocation. His episode is as much about teaching as it is about being taught. The skills Cambridge gave him, how to write, how to speak, how to think, are worth something. But what he treasures more, and what he is now trying to pass on, are the relationships. The teachers who pursued him, challenged him, and eventually became people he could call friends. Cambridge, he says, set him on a trajectory. He is still on it.

Aksel Yoder graduated with the class of 2023 and spent eleven years at Cambridge. He is now in college, and on Saturday mornings he meets with a classmate to read through the Gospel of John. That Bible study is the heart of his episode. Aksel's reading partner is a committed Christian, but one whose biblical foundation runs narrower than his own. What Aksel discovered in their conversations was not just that he knew more than he realized, but that he knew how to think about what he knew. He could trace the theological argument, hold his ground in genuine disagreement, and do it without making the other person feel diminished. Cambridge, he says, taught him how to read well, argue well, and love rightly in the same breath. The thread running through his reflection is the difference between receiving information and learning how to think. It is the latter, he finds, that proves irreplaceable.