Here’s a story of comfort, heartbreak, learning, helping, love, and friendship—a story that began on the fourth day of June, year 2012.

There were 48 students sitting anxiously excited in a room filled with friends and acquaintances alike, all of whom they’ve met one time or another in the past two years.

Smiles of recognition were exchanged, and faces of reminiscence were made at good measure. But as the minutes tick on and the hours pass—so do anxiety and the jittery nerves. By the end of that first day, all was but afraid.

As the days wore on, as the students spent more and more time together, they learn lessons both that are confined within one’s classroom and those that are learned without. Doing and saying as they observe of others, learning as they do things themselves... these students spend 10 hours in one day with one another, learning from each other or otherwise, and they have school five times in one week. With what they experience and what they learn, it’s a schedule worth keeping for time and effort.


Ten months.


That’s how long they’ve spent with each other—getting to know each other, working with one another, fighting among themselves—and all in all, being one class.

It’s been ten months since forty-odd students entered each class as one section: Discovery. Since then, two have transferred out, many have gotten sick... but none has dropped out.

Ten months.

That’s how long we’ve been stuck in the classroom with forty five others learning and living right beside us. It’s how long we’ve fought battles and wars against deadlines and rush hours among ourselves and beside one another.

It’s almost the end of the school year. The end of the year we’ve been studying over six subjects—one of which is Advanced Biology. As sophomores, we defined Biology simply as the study of life. By the end of junior year, we’ll be able to give Biology a whole new meaning.

All of us started off as acquaintances—or, in some instances, strangers—only slowly getting to know each other by talking to others, listening to them, spending time with them and understanding one another.

Unconsciously, we start seeing these people as part of our pictures of the future. And then we start experimenting and taking risks with what we do—and that’s where we learn what’s good and bad, what’s right and wrong, usually what we’ve never and will never be taught in school or even by our parents. These are the things we learn that we will carry for the rest of our lives.

Don’t you think that life is like the steps you take in Research and in your experiments? You observe first to get data, and then you analyze your gathered data.

After that you start your experimentation and you take your results up for discussion.
We’re sure that now, after all this time with each other, we’ll be able to find out answers to questions we’ve been asking for a long time and, other than that, have an understanding as to why that is the answer.

Life is not always about the lessons you learn or the grades you earn within the classroom. It’s also about what you learn from your experiences, from people, from your relationships, and from the world. Part of it is about the people we meet, the relationships we develop, the smiles we share, the laughs we have, the tears we shed, the mistakes we make, the risks we take and the experiments that are, as of now, a little something we call adolescence.