During the summer students are able to explore, forge friendships beyond Lick and pursue their passions and challenge without the stress of school. This summer, in the Bay Area and beyond, students learned and grew from their experiences.
John Peabody ’20: This past summer, Peabody continued his family’s long-standing tradition of volunteering for Amigos de las Américas. Amigos is an organization that sends youth to Latin American countries where they live in a rural community and implement a community-based service project. After five months of training with the San Francisco Chapter of Amigos, Peabody lived in Paris de Parita, Panama for six weeks.
Peabody, his partner and the members of the community there held a community meeting to assess the community’s most pressing needs and decide their work project, “We wanted to make sure it was a project that everybody was on board with,” Peabody said. At the meeting, “we ended up with fifteen really passionate people trying to help us, but with those fifteen people came with six hundred opinions.”
After weeks of planning, Peabody and his partner created a project focused on waste management. They built and set up waste bins around Paris de Parita and educated the community on the importance of recycling and composting.
In addition to his service project, Peabody spent a lot of time learning about Panamanian culture. An important aspect of his stay was the time he spent with his host family. Almost every afternoon, Peabody played soccer with his host father’s grandson, Edison. Peabody also shared many simple magic tricks with Edison. They now communicate over Whatsapp, sending voice messages to each other in Spanish.
After six weeks in Panama, Peabody notes the uptick in his Spanish fluency: “The verb tenses that I learned have become a lot quicker, it’s not as mechanical as before…The best part is that I don’t have to think about rules as much anymore, even with the grammatical things; it’s more about what sounds right and what doesn’t sound right.”
Rafi Donohoe ’19: Every summer since her freshman year, Donohoe has gone on trips with Overland Summers, a company that offers programs both in the U.S. and abroad. The trips emphasize hiking and biking. This year, Donohoe biked across the United States. Her group of 13 started in Charleston, South Carolina and rode to Santa Monica, California, each day for six weeks they rode riding an average of eighty-five miles a day for six weeks. They passed through ten states.
“There is something to be said about having a singular purpose everyday of getting up and going somewhere…[Biking] is the perfect speed to see a country or the world,” Donohoe said.
The group biked all day and spent the nights in community centers, churches, and occasionally campgrounds.
“The hardest days are always the best days,” Donohoe said. One of the most challenging days was when her group passed through the Four Corners, the area where New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah meet. The area was hot, flat, and barren, and the only roadside structure for 125 miles was a single gas station. The group began to run out of water. The bikers constantly had to stop and take breaks due to headaches and heat exhaustion. Finally, as they were riding on a flat plain the could see a Burger King in the distance—which seemed like the ultimate reward. When they finally reached the Burger King, they were completely exhausted,but extremely happy.
Within the first days of the trip, the members of Donohoe’s group formed strong bonds. Donohoe explains, “Knowing that you as a group have to get somewhere is very powerful…That will really get you out of the bed in the morning…You get tired, your body becomes very numb to it and you are sore every day and your body hurts, and it hurts to sleep, but you get used to it.”
The Overland program has a special tradition: at the start of the trip, all of the riders dip their front wheel in the Atlantic Ocean and at the end of the trip they ride onto the Santa Monica Pier and dip their wheel into the Pacific Ocean to finalize the end of the journey.
Ylva Bosemark ’20: Last spring, Bosemark enrolled in the BlendEd #Entrepreneurship & Design Thinking course. The class helped her brainstorm a business plan and create a website. Having always been interested in fashion and technical arts, Bosemark created White Dune Studio, a laser cut jewelry business named after her happy place: the beach.
Photo by Christina Bosemark
After the class ended, Bosemark devoted her summer to making her business a reality. Bosemark became a member of TechShop, a membership-based chain of workshops and fabrication studios. She began to design, cut, and paint earrings and pendants, which are “inspired by a floral design or mandala patterns.”
Bosemark is in charge of every aspect of her business, including photography, finances, and maintaining her Etsy account.
Throughout the summer, Bosemark went to various craft fairs and flea markets to sell her jewelry. To her surprise, she was extremely successful. Through a contact she met through the BlendEd class, Bosemark was able to design and sell earrings at Google for the ten year anniversary of Chrome. Bosemark is currently designing a line of earrings for an upcoming fashion show for Monique Zhang, a designer who saw Bosemark’s work at one of the craft fairs she attended over the summer.
Emma Dean ’21: This past summer, Dean worked at Rothy’s, a San Francisco company that makes women’s shoes from recycled bottles. Dean wanted to work in retail, but she was unsure where. Dean set up an interview at Rothy’s, and before she knew it, she had the job. Starting her work in June, Dean worked thirty-five hour weeks for ten weeks. One of the most challenging parts of the job was constantly being on her feet and dealing with difficult customers. She thinks the job was a valuable work experience: “I really felt integrated into the team, even though everyonr\ else who worked there was over twenty-one.”
Zach Vachal ’20: Vachal began rowing at Pacific Rowing Club in eighth grade. In his novice year, his team went undefeated in the freshman category in the Southwest region. Since then, Vachal has been in the top eight at his club. He rowed on the United States High-Performance team, raced and won his age group and event at the Club National Championships, and went to the Head of the Charles Regatta, the largest 2-day regatta in the world.
“Last year I wanted to make a big push because I wanted to be the best in the country. I trained seven days a week, probably ten sessions a week,” Vachal says.
This past summer, Vachal’s rowing escapades reached new levels. He started the summer by breaking his boathouse’s two-kilometer record with an outstanding 6:06 time. In June, Vachal rowed at Nationals, later spending two and a half months in San Diego for the US Selection Camp, an intensive training camp that determines who makes the national team for rowing. After weeks of training, he was selected for the men’s four team (a boat with four people and no coxswain) for the World Championships in the Czech Republic later that summer. At the World Championships, Zach and his team rowed a 5:59 time in the semi-finals. Zach is addicted to self-improvement and being the best rower he can be.
“I have one more year that I am eligible for the under 19 [a team for people under the age of 19] national team and we are going to be rowing in Tokyo on the new Olympic course. I really want to come back and be in the four again and win. It is my biggest goal.”
Sophia DiSabato: For the past two summers, Sophia DiSabato ’19 has interned at Geiszler Architects in North Beach, San Francisco. DiSabato entered Lick not knowing whether she wanted to take architecture, having always thought she would be an engineer. After hearing glowing reviews of both Goranka and the class material, in her sophomore year, DiSabato enrolled in architecture.
The summer between her sophomore and junior year, DiSabato was assigned to redesign the tennis facilities at Saint Mary’s college. She designed the floor plans and created a three-dimensional model of the facilities.
“I was really nervous about [the presentation] … It was actually fun to have a conversation about something I had worked really hard on all summer…They were super into it. For non-architecture people, seeing that 3-D rendering and being able to virtually maneuver through the building was really cool,” said DiSabato.
This past summer, Sophia worked again for a month, but on a broader array of projects with different architects. She was able to see the engineering notes for buildings and see the architecture process in its many stages. One of the most valuable experiences Sophia had through her internship was learning how to take into account all of the real-world regulations for buildings, such as the number of inches that need to be on one side of a door to make it wheelchair accessible.
Working for the past two summers, Sophia has gained a lot more confidence in her architectural skills and is more efficient with her time working on her Lick projects.
