Summer Endeavors: DA Upper Schoolers Dream Big, Find Community and Set Sail
By Dylan Howlett
10-minute read
We’ve learned over the past two years — through competitive rock climbing, archaeological digs, water-quality research and excellence in debate and dance — that Durham Academy students don’t see summer as a time of pure idling. It is a time of action, of growth, of experiences moral, happy and productive.
The summer of 2025 was no different. This year’s opening installment of a two-part feature showcasing the mission-driven summer life brings us to Michigan, North Carolina and Massachusetts, where — as they share here in their own words — three Upper Schoolers found vessels both literal and metaphorical for self-discovery.
Welcome back to Summer Endeavors.
The following responses have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
KINGSTON HURT '27
Dunning Fellowship: Automotive Design
College for Creative Studies
Detroit, Michigan
The fellowship featured a three-week Automotive Design studio course taught by CCS faculty, with assistance and regular visits from professional designers at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. Hurt stayed at a campus dorm — and earned college credit — as part of the properly pre-college experience.
I’ve always been design- and creative-oriented, and that kind of led to being more mechanical-oriented. I was always interested to know how things worked, like machines or gears. And that led to cars. Within a car, there’s pretty much every mechanical thing you can think of. It’s the perfect tool. I like cars for the mechanical aspect, but then I started to think they look cool, and I became more interested in the design.
My mom found the opportunity at CCS. She was Googling things to do over the summer and knew I was interested in design and cars. It seemed like a good fit.
I thought it would be work 24/7. It somewhat was, but at least it was fun work. At the beginning, we were probably working about 12 hours a day. A lot of it — around seven hours — was instruction. We had around three hours to work on homework without the instructor.
We had 15 students in our group from all over: North Carolina, California, Virginia, Georgia. I was actually surprised by how similar everyone was, and that was probably because it’s all car-oriented. It was less about where you were from and more about what you were doing. I definitely found a lot in common with those people.
My most memorable days were probably those where we had a few hours at the end of the day to hang out with friends or to do whatever you wanted. And since it was in Detroit, they let us go downtown. I thought it was really cool. It’s definitely busier than here.
Our overall objective was to produce the next generation of car. It could be whatever type you wanted — an SUV, a sports car. It just needed to fit the needs of your client that you created. At the very beginning, it was primarily just ideation and making a customer, or a target audience. You’d pick keywords and then design based on those. After that, we homed in on it, chose one and started making a full-scale sketch of the car from three different angles so that we could then turn that into a clay model.
The audience I landed on was someone who needs something practical but also somewhat fun. They live a fairly monotonous life, and they want to make it a little interesting. So the car is supposed to help do that. I like cars and driving is kind of fun — but driving around in, say, a McLaren to get groceries isn’t necessarily practical. I wanted to combine those two ideas into one.
I think it encouraged me to work in something related to cars — whether that be mechanical or the design — but I don’t think I’d like to be the person sitting down and drawing for 24 hours per day. I like design and drawing, but not solely the design and drawing. I’m more about making it functional rather than having it look a certain way. With the design, it’s less problem-solving and more creativity, and I like being creative — but more than anything, I like the mash-up.
What will stick with me is you have to dream big about it and look to the future. They really encouraged us not to just make something that already exists, but also have some key aspect that imagines a car 40 years in the future. The car takes a while to get into production, so you’re not necessarily designing for the present.
I called my car the ‘Aether Sport.’ I was trying to come up with a cool name for a quick car. I’m happy with how the entire project turned out: I have the two-foot model on a shelf on my bedroom wall.
I would recommend doing something similar to anyone. It opens up your horizons on what you could do in the future, and it gives you a taste of what going to college at an art school would be like. It was pretty similar to the actual campus experience because our mentors were current students, and it’s a lot of fun to meet people with similar interests.
LEILA NAMBO ’27
LatinxEd Fellow
North Carolina
LatinxEd is a North Carolina-based nonprofit that was founded in 2018 to advance Latine leadership in higher education and to reduce and remove barriers that have marginalized the Latinx community. In the state of North Carolina, 2% of all school principals; 4% of all teachers; and less than 1% of all school board members are Latine. The LatinxEd Fellowship is a multi-month, immersive leadership development program for aspiring Latine advocates in North Carolina.
I wanted to be a part of something bigger than just me, and I wanted to be someone that was helping in both big and small ways when it comes to representation. I’m also a member of the Student Ambassador Leadership Council (SALC) at DA, and that has given me a bit more perspective on one of the ways I can show representation.
I was also aware of that lack of representation in education. My dad’s Mexican, and he’s an assistant principal. He’s also taught his whole life, and our family has been in North Carolina for more than 20 years. I was also really fortunate that I went to a bilingual elementary school, Frank Porter Graham, in Chapel Hill. I’ve seen both sides of it, and I also get to see it from my dad’s point of view. There aren’t many people who are aware of that cultural practice. They don’t understand how to handle certain situations, such as the language barrier. This fellowship was something I was really excited for, just so I could continue my learning on the topic of representation and seeing more ways I can be an advocate within the DA community and outside of it, too.
We had a couple of welcome brunches in April and July so we could all kind of get to know each other and our families. The program is for rising juniors in high school through rising seniors in college. We realized that the youngest person there was 15 and the oldest was 22. At the end of July, we had a weeklong retreat at Cary Academy, and it was amazing. It was so much fun. We had some ‘getting to know you’ activities, some circles where we stepped forward if you agreed with a statement. We did some writing reflection, some reading, some research on different movements of how Latino students have made an impact.
After the retreat, we were broken up into smaller groups based on grades. I’m with four other juniors, and we have a coach. We have meetings on the first Monday of every month. Our coach mentors us on college-related topics, like how to fill out different applications. We have individual meetings with her, and then we complete reflections about our values and how to keep those as a core part of ourselves while going through the application process. We all just talk about what we’re worried about or things that are going well in our lives. When we graduate from the fellowship on Nov. 8, we’ll fully be a part of the LatinxEd program.
I’m interested in healthcare. At first, I was kind of nervous because I thought there wouldn’t be a correlation between healthcare and LatinxEd — but it’s everything. There’s a huge connection. It’s made me realize that I’m more interested in advocacy work, too, and owning my voice and owning the power that I have.
I want to continue getting in contact with different people. We had a little networking session one day where we could go to different tables and talk to visiting professionals. I got in contact with a student who’s about to start grad school at Duke. We immediately clicked. He was telling me about a lot of programs that he could recommend me for, and that he’d be willing to read over my applications. He’s also working in global health and advocacy, and he works on ensuring statistics accurately reflect certain communities.
It gave me a lot of confidence. It kind of put a lot into perspective about what I have accomplished so far. And I kind of owned that. It’s great that I’m doing this. It’s great that I’m putting myself out here in the community. It also gave me more drive to realize, “There are others who aren’t able to have this opportunity. I have to take advantage of this.”
The importance of community will stick with me. Once you notice its benefits, the absence of it feels even greater. I had never really been in a space where I was around that many Latino students before. We had a lot of moments where we could just look around and say, “We’ve never been a part of something like this before.” That kind of drove us to continue speaking up and saying, “There needs to be more of us in all different types of spaces.”
You’re in a room with people who look like you, who have the same experiences as you. You realize that you’re not really alone, and that we all experience this. We understand that we shouldn’t have to experience this, and we’re all passionate about wanting to change that. We all were really passionate about giving back to our own communities. Being in that space, everyone agrees with you that these outcomes shouldn’t be happening. And so it’s all about brainstorming how we can make advances. At the root of it all is education. We’re all really pushing each other.
It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. It was amazing.
ALEX LEIDERMAN ’26
Sailing Instructor & Counselor
Namequoit Sailing Association, Junior Sailing Program
Cape Cod, Massachusetts
For each of the past three summers, Leiderman — who started sailing when he was 7 — has taught sailing to kids between the ages of 8 and 11.
My grandfather sailed obsessively in the Northeast. He bought his own boat. I never got to sail with him because he passed away when I was 3 years old. But I am partial to sailors and sailing instructors.
My family has been going to Cape Cod my entire life. I was born in Boston, and I lived there for two and a half years before we moved west of Chicago to Oak Park, Illinois. I lived there for 14 years, and I moved to Durham before my junior year at the Upper School.
We started vacationing in Cape Cod before we bought a tiny cottage about 10 years ago. Since we started spending more time up there, my parents wanted their vacation time, so my two brothers and I started going to camp — and we were down the road from the sea camp. I did all of these activities, and that’s when my older brother and I both started sailing when I was about 7 years old. We loved it.
The camp where I learned to sail on Cape Cod closed during COVID. In 2021, I started sailing at another camp called Namequoit. I was a camper there for two years, and I’ve been a counselor for each of the past three years.
Our motto at Namequoit is “Learn to Sail.” We have two classes — a younger class for 8- to 11-year-olds and an older class for 12- to 15-year-olds. With the younger class, we really place an emphasis on learning parts of the boat and points of sail. We explain the course or the activity for the day, and then we usually sail for about an hour and a half.
Points of sail are where your boat is in relation to where the wind is coming from. Directly into the wind is called “irons,” and you don’t go anywhere. That’s just not the way physics works. But all the way away from the wind is the fastest. It’s called “downwind,” so you let your sails out all the way, and that’s when you’re going fastest.
We sail three types of sailboats. We have six 420s — the most popular high school, collegiate and pro sailboat. We put two to three advanced sailors in a 420, and those are generally three-person boats. They’re super light fiberglass hulls because they’re made for racing. We have Catalinas, which are a little bigger and a little wider, and they rest a little higher in the water. We can fit six younger campers with a staff member. And then we have “Optis,” or Optimist Dinghies. They’re like one-person bathtubs with one sail. We usually give those to the younger kids who are more experienced. They’re very small boats, and they’re super fun to sail by yourself.
For new sailors, it’s about overcoming the stress and fear they experience in the water. I have this anecdote in my personal statement of my Common Application essay about a capsize this summer. It was a little bit of a puffy day: There are certain points when it’s not windy at all, and then the wind will pick up very rapidly. We got hit by a gust. The main sheet is the rope that controls the main sail and the tilt and speed of your boat. One of the campers in the boat didn’t realize that if you’re tipping a lot, you’re supposed to let it out to ease the boat back. He sort of pulled everything in. We capsized. It was all right, but the little kids generally freak out the first time they capsize. It may seem like an unforgivable sin, but they eventually realize that it’s not that bad at all. I’m just getting in the water when it’s 90 degrees out. It can be really nice. A lot of the kids have a fear of the water. I have assured them there are no sharks, but they still think there are, and it’s definitely the biggest challenge in managing their stress.
As a counselor, I try not to tell them every single move to do, and it’s very stressful for them to decide what to do — especially when there are other kids in the boat with them and they’re making the decisions for them.
But you can’t freak out as a counselor. It will never go well for the kids. I definitely have to keep a cool head because they’re just picking up cues from you, right? If we’re going at another boat and I scream, “Tiller to the left!” they’re not going to do anything. They’re just going to freeze. I have to calmly say it to them and really understand that they’re under a lot of stress. Using empathy and not anger is the biggest way that you can actually get things done with kids.
Sailing camp has become a running joke in my family. My older brother has a friend who goes to Harvard, and she used to do Arabic and astrophysics camp all summer. It’s become a joke that my brothers and I don’t do that. We do sailing camp. I choose to do it because I love sailing and it’s a lot of fun, and I have so many friends at the camp — but also, the lessons that I learn are much more valuable to me than the lessons I’d learn at astrophysics camp. I’m not learning like I am in a classroom, but I’m learning how to work with kids. I’m learning how to manage all of these emotions. I’m learning how to work with other counselors.The real-world lessons that I take from sailing camp, while also having a lot of fun, is definitely why I come back.”
Stay tuned for Part II of our Summer Spotlights feature in the spring.