A Summer of Discovery, And Growing Confidence, for a Quartet of Upper Schoolers
By Dylan Howlett
Days of blissful idleness and indulgent lazing are nigh for most this summer. But it will also be — as it was last summer — one of fulfilling, invigorating pursuits for Durham Academy students. We first explored enriching student summers in August and returned for more in October. Our third installment features a quartet of Upper Schoolers who spent their summers making discoveries both external and internal. From examining forever chemicals in the North Carolina water supply to braving the culinary adventures — or misadventures — of poutine, these students found the “Moral, Happy, Productive” life within research papers, lines of code and animated llamas.
Welcome to the third part of our series that highlights the mission-driven summer life. Grab your passport, pour a glass of filtered drinking water, open a webpage and get ready to quash persistent stigma. There’s no better time for discovery than summer.
Know any Durham Academy students
who have mission-driven plans for Summer 2024?
Email communications@da.org with more information
to merit inclusion in our continuing series.
Robert Liu ’24
It was only a few years ago that Robert Liu — who last summer presented to university-level science professors and lead authors of a Nobel Peace Prize — felt adrift in, of all things, science class. He experienced anxiety over not having the right answer, and he often refrained from raising his hand. That all changed during his junior year, when he enrolled in Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics with Dr. Aleks Kaplon-Schilis, an Upper School math teacher.
After he took the AP exam, Liu and his classmates pored over troves of data from Duke Energy to develop and test a question of their choice. Liu compared DA’s electricity usage to the national average for K-12 schools. He relished the opportunity to engage in hands-on learning, and to search for answers where no clear solution existed.
“As someone who’s not been a fan of STEM their whole life, it was definitely something that completely transformed me,” Liu said.
That’s why Liu was receptive when Mukta Dharmapurikar ’22 encouraged him to apply for the Summer Ventures in Science and Mathematics program. Dharmapurikar participated in the program, which is organized by N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, as a virtual participant in 2020 and focused on creating datasets for rigorous exercise tests. The program accepted Liu to its Appalachian State University campus and could have placed him in a number of disparate programs, but Liu earned a seat in the only course dedicated to data science.
“That was Dr. Schilis,” he said. “They saw that passion that I had cultivated in her class.”
“It felt like it was one of the only programs that had a specified action,” he said later. “You’re not just playing with data on a computer. You’re actually making a policy suggestion. You’re actually trying to drive that action through data.”
Along with two other teammates, Liu examined the correlation between socioeconomic status and the preponderance of PFAS — manmade chemicals found in common household items, such as nonstick cookware — in supplies of North Carolina drinking water. Liu and his team found that as wealth increases, so too does the level of PFAS, which are also known as forever chemicals, in drinking water samples. “Economic growth is the reason why PFAS is so prominent, not in spite of it,” Liu said.
He and his group presented the findings of their research paper to an audience that featured university professors and the lead authors of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize-winning IPCC award. Liu’s group won the program’s Catalyst Award, which is given to the team with the best research paper on each of the Summer Ventures campuses. The honor landed Liu and his fellow researchers an invitation to share their conclusions at the State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium in November 2023.
None of this would be possible, Liu said, without a timely statistics course during his junior year. In August, he wrote a lengthy email to Dr. Schilis in which he thanked her for helping him find joy in STEM. “After essentially over a year of applying myself to data science, I realized that statistics was the only area of science and math that I couldn’t get enough of,” Liu wrote. “Even if I stopped directly exploring statistics, I found myself unable to fully escape its wide-reaching applications.”
That includes, Liu found, our drinking water.
Everett Wilber ’24
Everett Wilber was only a week into his two-week internship at GreenPlaces — a Raleigh-based software platform that allows businesses to monitor its sustainability goals — when a product manager approached him.
“You said you never worked in PHP?” the manager asked, referring to a scripting language used for web development.
“No,” Wilber said.
“And you’re creating this all on your own?” the manager asked, referring to the visualizer that Wilber created to help companies view a private chronology of an activity log.
“Yeah,” Wilber said.
“OK,” the product manager said. “If you ever want a place at GreenPlaces, we’d be happy to have you.”
“It was really exciting,” said Wilber, who also served as a captain of DA’s robotics team, The DARC SIDE. “I don’t feel like that’s a very common thing to have happen. I just thought it was so cool.”
The opportunity came about during his junior year. Wilber knew he wanted to complete an internship, and he knew he wanted one in software engineering. He describes himself as a self-taught programmer who fell in love with the field at 9 years old, when he participated in Durham Academy Summer. “I’ve always had the curiosity to do engineering,” Wilber said. “That’s just the way I think.”
He asked his advisor, Lori Reade, whose role as student development and career exploration counselor made her the ideal resource. She soon discovered a willing partner in GreenPlaces, which has partnered with Durham Academy to help the school calculate and reduce its carbon footprint.
Wilber learned as much about programming — including PHP, in which he indeed had never worked previously — as he did about product management. He applied those lessons, and structures, to the workflow of the programming team with The DARC SIDE.
Should he one day take up the product manager’s offer and return to GreenPlaces, Wilber won’t have the benefit of using the company for the purpose of procrastination as he did last summer. “It was an excuse not to do my SAT prep,” said Wilber, laughing.
Alexandria Parker Horton ’27
She knew her daughter always wanted to visit France, so Meriel Parker made a deal with Alexandria Parker Horton: If Alexandria could commit to four years of studying the same language, she would go to France with her family. Parker Horton, a descendent of French Huguenots, enrolled in French starting in fifth grade. During the summer before eighth grade, her mom had a surprise: They would travel to Europe for the first time.
Parker Horton, her mom and her aunt went to the United Kingdom for two weeks before spending a week in Avignon. On their final night, she and her mom stopped in Paris and ate dinner in the Eiffel Tower. It was merely an hors d'oeuvre to last summer.
Parker Horton was one of 31 students who traveled to France last June with a group led by Middle School French teacher Teresa Engebretsen. They visited the beaches of Normandy, toured Paris and took a boat tour down the Seine. They did not find, however, willing practitioners of the language.
“People can detect if you’re American just by being there,” said Parker Horton, laughing. “Madame Engebretsen would always be like, ‘OK, you have to speak in French to the people.’ We would start speaking French to them, and they would just start speaking in English to us. They wouldn’t even bother.”
Their French pen pals were more hospitable. Parker Horton and her classmates visited their school, and the host students led their DA counterparts on a scavenger hunt. Parker Horton is still in touch with one of the students at the school; she texts her friend in French, and her friend responds in English.
The cuisine was, to little surprise, “amazing,” Parker Horton said. Nothing, however, could compare to the wonders of Président butter. “You can get it at Wegmans,” she said, “but it’s so much better when you have it in France.”
That wasn’t the end of Parker Horton’s French connection. In July, Parker Horton attended a French immersion camp in Montreal. It was her first time in Canada, and her first time at an overnight camp. “It was so much fun,” Parker Horton said.
She tested into the camp’s advanced class. Parker Horton took three-hour French classes five days per week, including Saturdays, and toured Montreal in the afternoons. She made friends with fellow campers from Utah, Maine, Thailand and Taiwan. She attended a jazz festival and bumped into her mom, who was staying in the city separately.
Before her stay ended, Parker Horton relented: She let her mom persuade her to try poutine, the French-Canadian delicacy of French fries and cheese curds smothered in gravy.
“Personally, I can’t stand poutine,” Parker Horton said. “I can’t eat it. I physically can’t eat it.”
“One soggy French fry in my mouth,” she said, “and it was over.”
Kate Parker ’24
Before her six-week internship last summer with Alongside, a mental health resource app geared toward high school students, Kate Parker had no experience in coding or web design. But there were inklings that Parker would find harmony between her passion for mental health and her curiosities about technology.
She completed an independent study at DA on the science of well being and its place in a changing technological and social media landscape. There was something about technology, Parker found, that might alleviate one of the most prevalent issues among teenagers and their mental health: asking for help.
“We don’t reach out to authorities as much,” Parker said. “This is generalizing, but we feel more comfortable reaching out to our peers and maybe talking to our peers.”
Closing that divide was one of the charges given to Parker and a team of 13 other high school interns this summer. They comprised a student advisory board at Alongside, which uses language written by clinicians and therapists to respond in real time to a student’s concerns. A user, for instance, might type into the chat module that they recently got into a fight with a good friend. The app employs an AI-generated algorithm to assess the response and reply with language previously approved and written by a therapist.
Parker and her team worked to make that language as accessible, and welcoming, as possible. If a therapist scripted a response that felt too formal or stilted, a member of Parker’s team would soften or tweak the response. They were also responsible for choosing, and naming, the chat module’s avatar: a llama named Kiwi.
Once they refined the language, Parker and the student advisory board spent the final three weeks redesigning the journaling feature of the app. She used Figma, a design program, to improve the aesthetic feel of the feature and implement gentle incentives for everyday use. Parker loved prototyping most, particularly as she watched her primitive designs take shape within the app.
“You can adapt, and you can learn,” Parker said. “And in a positive environment, that learning is viewed as a good thing. I just would ask some of my friends, ‘How do I do this?’ And then they would help me, and in turn they might ask me questions and I would help them. I think we were all better for it.”
The team also received training in VAR: Validate-Appreciate-Refer, a model created by the mental health organization Active Minds. It emphasizes listening to, and honoring, someone else’s feelings without proposing a solution. Parker has started practicing this in her own life. If her younger sister, Addison, approaches her and says she had a tough day, Kate will say, “I’m so sorry to hear that. What can I do to help?” rather than trying to fix it all at once.
It’s just one of multiple shifts she experienced during her month and a half with Alongside, which hired Parker and four other interns to continue working part-time during the 2023–2024 school year.
“I viewed mental health very singularly,” Parker said of her mindset before the internship. “We are diagnosed with anxiety, depression, all of that. But I think there are so many perspectives and different experiences that it’s really more of this big spectrum. A lot of people go undiagnosed, and a lot of people experience stress and mental health issues and don’t reach out or do anything about it.
“I think that’s something we saw through the app. A lot of kids were expressing really negative feelings and hadn’t talked to anyone about it. I think reaching out is a really big thing that we need to do a better job of advocating for so people get the help they need.”
Know any Durham Academy students
who have mission-driven plans for Summer 2024?
Email communications@da.org with more information
to merit inclusion in our continuing series.