An Examined Education

Isaiah Francisco enrolled at Cambridge in kindergarten and graduated thirteen years later with the class of 2023. He is now a junior at the University of Notre Dame, majoring in history and minoring in International Security Studies, and is preparing for a commission as a Naval officer. His story is one of formation meeting vocation. When Isaiah reflects on Cambridge, he reaches naturally for the school's telos: think well, love rightly, live wisely. Not as a slogan, but as a lived framework he can trace through his college experience with remarkable specificity. The habits Cambridge built in him, seeking out professors, pressing through difficulty, asking for help before the difficulty became crisis, proved to be precisely what his freshman year demanded of him. The holistic curriculum that once felt like a burden became the foundation for navigating a major in history alongside two semesters each of calculus, physics, and naval engineering. But Isaiah's formation at Cambridge runs deeper than academic preparation. The rightly ordered affections Cambridge cultivated in him, his love of service, his commitment to Christ, his sense of what deserves his time and attention and what does not, are the values he is now carrying into a calling. He wants to serve as a surface warfare officer not out of ambition but out of gratitude, and he traces that impulse directly to the ministerium Cambridge wove into the fabric of daily school life.

Nathan Kim enrolled at Cambridge in its founding year in 2006 and graduated with the class of 2020. He went on to study economics at Gordon College and now works as an implementation specialist at Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin. But the most formative part of his story has less to do with where he ended up than with what it took to get there. Nathan didn't have an easy run of it. There were years where the distance between who he was and who Cambridge was forming him to become seemed impossibly incongruous. What closed that gap wasn't a single turning point but the steady presence of teachers who pursued him with patient care, who asked enduring questions, and who came alongside him through trying seasons. Through daily effort alongside trusted mentors, Nathan nurtured a resilience that he would carry well beyond graduation, one that continues to serve him in college, in the workplace, and in life. In his resilience, his love of learning, and his ability to engage people from every walk of life, Nathan continues to see the fruit of a Cambridge education long after the season in which it was planted.

Ethan Chin graduated with Cambridge's eighth class in 2025 and has been part of the community since junior kindergarten. Now a freshman at Harvey Mudd College, he reflects on what it meant to spend formative years in a place that valued depth over speed, discussion over delivery, and formation over output. Ethan unpacks two ideas that have stayed with him: coherentism as an epistemological model, the web of interconnected beliefs that deepen and reinforce one another, and the paradox of the "inefficient education." At a rigorous science college surrounded by peers who took organic chemistry in high school, he's finding that what Cambridge gave him can't be replicated later. Rightly ordered affections, the capacity to think at depth, the groundedness to know who you are amid a sea of competing ideas: these don't come from a textbook or a summer of self-study.

In this episode of An Examined Education, we hear from Emma Kim, Class of 2018, now a UC Berkeley graduate and returning faculty member at The Cambridge School. Emma reflects on her journey from student to teacher and the profound gratitude she feels as she celebrates Cambridge’s 20th anniversary from the other side of the classroom. Looking back, she considers how the school’s guiding vision, to think well, love rightly, and live wisely, quietly shaped her long before she fully understood its depth. She shares how learning to ask thoughtful questions, especially in moments of uncertainty, prepared her for the academic rigor of a large university and continues to shape her teaching today. She reflects on the formation of well-ordered affections through the partnership of school, family, and church, and how that foundation has guided her priorities, relationships, and sense of purpose. And as she considers adulthood and vocation, she returns to a simple but enduring question: How then should I live? This episode is a warm and thoughtful meditation on gratitude, formation, and the joy of returning to invest in the very community that once formed you. It is a celebration not only of 20 years of Cambridge, but of the enduring fruit of a classical Christian education lived out in faith, humility, and hope.

In this episode of An Examined Education, we hear from alumna Anna O’Neill, Class of 2025, now a freshman at Colorado State University, as she reflects on her 13 years at The Cambridge School. Anna shares how the house system and three years of student leadership shaped her growth, strengthened lasting friendships, and cultivated a deep sense of community. She highlights two enduring gifts of her education: learning to engage in thoughtful, charitable dialogue and developing a confident, well-grounded understanding of the Christian faith through years of biblical study, logic, rhetoric, and apologetics. Through a candid story about an unexpected conversation while upgrading her phone, Anna describes how her Cambridge formation prepared her to articulate and defend her faith with clarity, composure, and grace. Her experience illustrates how a classical Christian education equips students not only for college, but for meaningful, everyday conversations about truth. This episode is a reflection on formation, friendship, and the lasting impact of an education ordered toward wisdom and virtue. Think well. Love rightly. Live wisely.

In this episode of An Examined Education, we hear from Mason Settergren, Class of 2024, now a sophomore at Hillsdale College studying Classics and Math. Mason reflects on how 13 years at The Cambridge School cultivated a deep and abiding intellectual curiosity. From physics and Greek to neuroscience and theology, he describes an education where subjects were never siloed but woven together, each illuminating the other. A memorable moment in 11th-grade physics, wrestling with the implications of the double-slit experiment, sparked not only scientific wonder but philosophical and theological reflection. Rather than dismissing those connections, his teachers encouraged them. At Hillsdale, Mason continues to see the fruit of that formation. In studying the history of mathematics, even the words of Bertrand Russell prompt him to consider beauty, order, and perfection as reflections of a Creator. For Mason, math, language, science, and faith are not competing domains, but harmonies within a unified vision of truth. This episode is a thoughtful meditation on curiosity, integration, and the distinctly classical Christian conviction that all truth is God’s truth. It is a reminder that education, rightly ordered, forms not only knowledgeable students, but worshipful learners. Think well. Love rightly. Live wisely.

In this episode of An Examined Education, Sara Spinar, a member of the Class of 2025, reflects on spending her entire fourteen-year education at The Cambridge School before preparing to study Humanistic Studies at John Cabot University in Rome. Sara shares how the house system and Cambridge’s both and vision shaped her most deeply. While the school is known for academic rigor, she reflects on how that rigor was never merely about grades or performance. It was about virtue cultivation, about forming a conscience, and about asking not only what you know, but who you are becoming. Through challenging Latin translations, demanding junior year coursework, and lively hallway debates, Sara began to see how diligence, humility, patience, and intellectual charity were being quietly formed alongside academic skill. She recounts moments when slowing down, admitting she did not understand something, or listening carefully to another perspective became acts of courage rather than weakness. Looking ahead to college, Sara recognizes that Cambridge did not simply teach her how to study well. It trained her to honor texts, pursue truth in conversation, and approach learning as a moral endeavor that shapes character as much as intellect. This episode is a thoughtful reflection on formation, gratitude, and the enduring integration of knowledge and virtue that students carry long after graduation.

In this episode of An Examined Education, Emma Mohler, a 2023 graduate of The Cambridge School and current student at Hillsdale College, reflects on how her time at Cambridge shaped both her intellectual curiosity and her understanding of what it means to care for others. Emma shares how the sacrificial investment of teachers and the depth of relationships within the community formed her attentiveness to people. Through ordinary moments, conversations during lunch, after school help sessions, and mentors who remembered small details, she began to see that true education involves the giving of time and presence. She also recounts wrestling with profound questions first encountered in eighth grade while reading Augustine’s Confessions, particularly the tension between a good God and a world marked by evil. Rather than offering easy answers, Cambridge cultivated in her a love for lifelong inquiry, teaching her that some questions are not problems to solve once but mysteries to pursue faithfully over time. This episode is a thoughtful reflection on mentorship, curiosity, and the kind of education that forms not only the mind, but the heart.

In this episode of An Examined Education, Alex Chin, a member of Cambridge’s eighth graduating class, reflects on spending twelve formative years at The Cambridge School before heading to Duke University. From pre-K through high school graduation, Alex describes Cambridge as home, a place shaped by deep relationships, rigorous academics, and a community that continually pushed him to grow. He shares how virtue formation, house leadership, and the rhetoric curriculum expanded his capacity for thought and cultivated a lasting awareness of how environments shape identity. Now navigating college life, Alex considers what it means to remain attentive to the cultural waters we swim in and how a classical Christian education equips students not only to think critically, but to love rightly and live wisely. This episode is a thoughtful reflection on formation, friendship, leadership, and the enduring gift of a school that becomes home.

In this episode of An Examined Education, alumna Jasmine Rupani Gingrich (Class of 2019) reflects on how her years at The Cambridge School shaped not only her academic path, but her understanding of grace, vocation, and faithful presence in the world. From discovering a love of rhetoric that led her to study communications at Gordon College, to working as a barista in Berkeley and later serving in church ministry, Jasmine shares how a classical Christian education formed her confidence, humility, and sense of purpose. With honesty about performance anxiety and gratitude for mentors who pointed her toward God’s grace, she explores what it means to apply a rigorous education beyond prestigious titles — into hospitality work, community life, children’s ministry, and everyday faithfulness. Jasmine’s story is a compelling reminder that the true aim of education is not status, but formation — shaping men and women who love the Lord, serve thoughtfully, and carry wisdom into every sphere of life.

In this episode of An Examined Education, Cambridge alumna Haley Hom, Class of 2018, reflects on her full journey through a Cambridge education and beyond, from grammar school through law school and into her calling as an attorney. Through a series of formative moments, Haley shares how the habits of thought, discipline of writing, love of learning, and support of a gracious community prepared her not for an easy life, but for a meaningful one. Her story traces the cumulative power of a classical Christian education that shapes students to think well, love rightly, and live wisely through both triumph and trial.

In this episode of An Examined Education, Cambridge alumnus Josh, Class of 2018, reflects on how a Cambridge education continues to shape his life well beyond graduation. Now a University of Chicago graduate and founder of a venture-backed AI company serving biotech and pharmaceutical firms, Josh traces a clear throughline from his time on Cambridge’s debate team to the work he does today. He shares how Cambridge’s distinctive approach to debate emphasized clarity, reasoned discourse, and pursuing truth over technical wins, and how those habits of thought continue to inform his professional life, relationships, and decision-making. Josh reflects on the formative power of conversations with teachers, peers, and mentors, and on the lasting value of an education aimed not at formulas or shortcuts, but at cultivating wisdom, virtue, and a grounded vision of human flourishing.

Transcript: (Auto-generated)Welcome to An Examined Education, a podcast from the Cambridge School. At Cambridge, we often say that education is never merely about what students know, but about who they are becoming. For 20 years, our community has been shaped by conversations that ask enduring questions about truth, goodness, and beauty, and by a shared commitment to forming students who think well, love rightly, and live wisely. Today, the Cambridge School is honored to be ranked the number one private K-12 school in San Diego, but rankings tell only part of the story. Our deeper aim, our telos, has always been the formation of a whole person, intellect, wisdom, virtue, and faith, integrated and ordered toward a life of purpose and service. In this series, we turn to our alumni. Through their stories, we explore how a Cambridge education continues to echo long after graduation in college classrooms, careers, relationships, and callings. These are reflections on learning, on becoming, and on the ways a formative education shapes how we experience and engage with the world around us. This is An Examined Education, stories shaped by the belief that a flourishing life begins with cultivating good habits alongside great people toward noble ends. Enjoy. My name is Katelin Sung. I just graduated from Cambridge in 2025, and I'm currently a first year at Berkeley majoring in rhetoric. I was at Cambridge for the long haul, K-4 through 12th grade. College is basically the first time in my memory that I've existed away from the Cambridge community, so I've had lots of prompting to reflect on my elementary through high school experience and the way it's shaped me up until this point. I've become appreciative of the both and aspect of Cambridge, specifically both humanities and STEM, after having been in college at UC Berkeley for a few months. Something about Berkeley that I've been learning isn't really true at some other colleges is that nearly every freshman comes to Berkeley knowing exactly what field they want to go into, and although there are many intellectually curious and open-minded students there, they pretty much just stay in their own lane in terms of the subjects they study. The engineers are there just for engineering, the biology majors are there just for biology, the English people are there just for English, and so on. And most people see what we call breadth classes or just just general education classes outside of their major as annoying requirements they just have to get out of the way because they don't have to do directly with their major. I think coming to Berkeley after having grown up in Cambridge, I came in with a pretty different perspective. I do have a career goal in the field of medicine, but I'm not approaching education and the college experience as mere means to get to that. Cambridge definitely instilled in me the idea that education is not just stuffing information into my brain to get a piece of paper that says I have a degree, but rather a joyful, or mostly an ideally joyful, privilege meant to enrich my life, not just monetarily in the long run, but intellectually and characteristically. Learning is about understanding the human experience, and I think when you look at learning like that, it's ridiculous to think that you could really learn without valuing both STEM and humanities. My choice to major in humanities, rhetoric to be specific, so the Cambridge influence is very very apparent, in addition to the pre-med courses is certainly a result of that idea of learning as understanding the entire human experience. The prospect that I had to choose only one subject to study for the next four years was quite saddening when my time at Cambridge had sparked my interest in both, and it wasn't just that Cambridge did a good job of teaching both sciences and humanities independently, but the subjects themselves were often intertwined and teachers themselves embodied an integrated approach to their subjects. The Cambridge curriculum was carefully crafted so that each year's subjects overlapped in meaningful ways, and that each year as a whole fit into the grander scheme of the entire K through 12. I didn't fully appreciate this until late in high school, but I still remember many like whoa moments when I made connections with other things I was concurrently learning. This includes small things like in grammar school when scientific discoveries I was learning about were made in the same era as the era of history that I was learning about, or more impactful realizations in rhetoric school like the application of a rhetorical concept to enact in history that also related to a principle in computer science. I feel like I was trained to start seeing these patterns across classes more, which just further augmented my education and grew my appreciation for all subjects both STEM and humanities. An example of a teacher embodying multiplicitous and interdisciplinary interests is Mrs. Hahn, my belo

As The Cambridge School marks twenty years, An Examined Education opens a new season by turning to the voices that know its formation from the inside: its alumni. In this season-opening episode, we hear from Alyssa Kim, Class of 2022, now a senior at Georgetown University studying history on a pre-med track. Alyssa reflects on a journey shaped by Cambridge from pre-K through graduation, one that cultivated not only academic excellence but a way of seeing the world. From “living history” in grammar school to translating Latin and Greek in the upper school, Alyssa describes how the humanities at Cambridge became more than a subject of study. They became a practice of immersion, context, and empathy, training students to understand people across time, culture, and circumstance. History, literature, and language were not merely facts to master but lenses through which to inhabit another’s world. As she prepares for a vocation in medicine, Alyssa connects the humanities to the sciences, arguing that education aimed at excellence must also train us to understand the human person. At its core, she reflects, education is ordered toward people, toward service, wisdom, and a life lived with purpose. This episode sets the tone for a season of alumni stories that explore how a formative education continues to echo long after graduation, shaping habits of mind, guiding vocation, and reminding us what it means to live a fully human life.

In this episode of An Examined Education, we sit down with Cambridge School Latin teacher Donny McNair to explore the Roman historian Livy and the power of narrative in shaping a civilization’s moral compass. Livy lived through the collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of Augustus' empire—a time of immense political and cultural upheaval. Through vivid, almost novelistic storytelling, Livy didn't just recount events; he sought to guide readers toward virtue and civic responsibility. Join us as we discuss how Livy's philosophical lens, his critique of Rome’s moral decline, and his belief in the transformative power of history remain strikingly relevant today.

What holds a society together when factions clash and partisanship rises? In this episode, Kelsey Bonilla, history and government teacher at The Cambridge School, unpacks the deep connections between law, government, and a flourishing civil society. We trace the founders’ inspirations from Rome to the Enlightenment, explore the responsibilities of citizenship, and ask how education can ground us in civic virtue today. Whether you’re a student of history or just wondering what keeps the American experiment alive, this conversation offers timeless insights and practical hope.