Cambridge High School seniors Jared Keim and Sutton Dunwoodie met with Governor’s Honor Program social studies department head Ben Crosby on Oct. 3. Keim and Dunwoodie spent four weeks at the program in Valdosta, Ga. as social studies majors and were taught by Crosby and other social studies department teachers. Photo courtesy of Jared Keim.
By SUTTON DUNWOODIE – Guest Writer
Cambridge High School senior Sutton Dunwoodie reflects on his time at Governor’s Honors Program, a four week summer program featuring teacher nominated rising juniors and seniors from a variety of subjects.
The Governor’s Honors Program is a four-week summer enrichment program for high schoolers that features administrators who sweat details, students with tremendous intellectual horsepower and teachers who are the very best.
Beyond the physical components, GHP exists at a deeper level as an aura or a feeling. GHP is best described as a current– a current made up of the attitudes and energies of 876 driven people.
It is the current that swirled in Los Alamos when Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb. It is the current of energy that flowed in the Googleplex when the engineers unleashed the modern search engine. It is the current that dripped softly in the corner of a Beatles recording session.
The atmosphere at GHP is like a whirlpool— a swirling, tangled mix of ideas, relationships, love and loneliness. Its pull draws 800 of the best and the brightest students from around the state into its spiral. They bump into each other, trading ideas, phone numbers and dreams.
GHP attendees learn to inhale the energy around them and to use it as fuel for their own intellectual endeavors. They will learn to see through the murkiness and discern truth for what it is.
At the end of four weeks, they will climb out of the vortex, dry off, and shiver from the water evaporating off their skin, and long for its warmth. Those who emerge from GHP never forget what it is like to be caught up in the whirlpool. They miss the energy, and look for it everywhere afterwards.
From the Ivy League to Google, and from the Peace Corps to Athens, their search for the kind of energy that exists at GHP propels them across the globe.
But, like all currents, it always propels them forward to something greater.
