IMPACT

MATTHEW MEISEL: "ALWAYS CHALLENGING"

After his 1999 graduation from St. Edmund's Academy, Matthew Meisel attended Pittsburgh's Taylor Alderdice High School where he was a National Merit Scholar. This month he begins his junior year at Harvard, majoring in chemistry. We asked him to reflect on his experience at St. Edmund's.

Meisel's report:

During my time at St. Edmund's Academy, it never seemed like I was doing anything extraordinary to prepare myself for future academic challenges.

But after having graduated from high school and moving on to college, it's easy to see how St. Edmund's laid the foundations for my progress in the years to come.

For starters, St. Edmund's taught me specific skills that have guided me over the past six years and will continue to serve me well.

Certainly, two of the most important ones were – and it sounds so simple – presenting a dynamic speech and writing a strong research paper. But neither was taught as a skill in a vacuum – it was always in the context of another topic that was both exciting and worthwhile. I spent nearly a month working on a speech about a particular comedy writer and, in the process, began to learn to analyze television and print media. In the three months spent on my senior research paper, I learned a substantial amount about research, the writing process, and, not to be forgotten, Cold War history.

But my overwhelming memory of my schoolwork at St. Edmund's was that it was always challenging. Sometimes, it was because of the high expectations of my teachers. Other times, it was due to the uniqueness of a project that forced me to explore creative techniques, or devise creative solutions, in ways I hadn't had to previously. None of Mr. Jenkins' French worksheets were ever fini until it was parfait, and no piece of art was ever complete without a critical glance along the way. And along the way, I learned to set high expectations for myself as well. The senior paper I mentioned earlier went through a half-dozen major revisions with my teachers, but by eighth grade I knew that I had to be as much of a driving force in the revision process as they were.

My academic toolbox was quickly growing by the time I graduated. And the tools I acquired along the were not disparate – over the course of nine years at St. Edmund's, I learned how to combine them to be confident, analytical, creative, self-critical – and all at the same time.