Let’s find out the answer together

Briana Das ’17 shares a few words about the impact that her Nueva education has had on her life.

I went to a public school for middle school. I knew exactly what I needed to do to do well: memorize textbook pages, regurgitate them onto a page. I tested very well. Doing these rote activities meant that I was also a little bored, so all of the things that made me excited to learn were things I did outside of school.

When I was looking at high schools, I thought I would end up in a similar environment, until one day that literally changed my life.

A friend said to me, “I’m going to learn about this new school, Nueva. Would you like to come?”

I decided to go. My friend and I rolled up to a Nueva open house event, and I had the best time. I fell in love with the way people were thinking and talking about what it meant to be at school. It was not a place for you to sit down, face the board, write things down, and then regurgitate them later on a test. So I went home and declared to my parents—I’m sure they loved this—that I was going to go to Nueva.

In the week before the start of the school year, Nueva organized an event to give us the opportunity to meet with people at the school. I was a little terrified. At this point, I had really only met teachers. I had no idea who I would be spending my time alongside in the classroom. I thought to myself, “These kids are gifted! These kids are smart! These kids are child prodigies!”

But I went, and surprisingly I had the absolute time of my life. I also made some really good friends, to whom I still talk to this day. I felt immediately at home. All of those weird random questions that I thought I had to pursue outside the classroom were suddenly things we were talking about at a social function.

And that didn’t stop when school started. The questions I used to think would make me sound dumb in front of my peers were questions that my peers also had. I was often told, “Let’s find out the answer together.”

One moment that particularly stands out to me to this day, was in my ninth-grade math class with Erin Walker. Up until this point, I was used to math teachers giving timed multiplication tests and lots of work to keep up with the textbook. This class was not like that. First of all, we never sat in chairs—thank you, Erin, for putting up with that chaos—because we were always up at the whiteboard. We were doing proofs, we were solving problems. Whenever I had a question, Erin said, “Oh, you know who else had that question? Why don’t you two go work on it together?”

To say that was revolutionary to me, as a 13-year-old, cannot be overstated. It blew my mind. I felt so, so lucky to be there. And it wasn’t just in math class. This was in every single one of my classes.

In those years, I often described myself as a perfectionist—someone who needed to know exactly what I was walking into every single day. One of my biggest transformations at Nueva was learning to be able to say, “I don’t know, but let’s find out.” Feeling safe enough to do that was huge for me.

I give all credit to the Nueva faculty for creating this environment of learning. By the time I graduated from Nueva, I was a different person than the scrawny little perfectionist that I came in as. I was someone who was ready to tackle the world. I had big dreams. I was going to take science classes at Brown and all my design classes at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). I was going to have a great time and it was going to be perfect.

But my first year at Brown was not perfect. I felt really lost. I had come from this place— Nueva—where the answer was always, “Yes,” and I was now at a place where the response was, “Why are you asking me this question?”

During a lecture class my first year, I asked a question and the TA told me, “You don’t need to know that. It’s not on the test.”

I was shocked to my core, and I began to wonder if college was the right place for me. That summer, after my first year of college, I visited Nueva several times. I talked to my Nueva teachers, who helped me gain a sense of perspective and helped me believe there were ways I could make college work for me. I went back to Brown with a whole different perspective, which was, “I’m going to find the things that I loved about Nueva on this campus.”

So I went out in search of Nueva people, which is an ambiguous term for what I like to call “the only people I like spending time with!” These are people who are incredibly nice and incredibly funny. More importantly, they deeply care about themselves and their place in the world.

When I went searching for these people, I found them, and I felt extremely loved. They came from all sorts of backgrounds, but they were quintessentially Nueva people. They were worried about social impact. They wanted to explore things that were not necessarily standard on the menu at Brown, and we all just explored those things together.

One of the things Nueva taught me that I brought to college was a love of design and design thinking. As a standard liberal arts school, Brown does not really offer design and design thinking. It’s one of those things where you just walk down the hill to RISD and you do your “little artistic free expression.”

But to me, that’s not what design or design thinking was. It was a holistic process of looking at the world and solving problems in a very empathetic way. I tried to convince the Brown administration of that, which they didn’t love. But I found this group of friends that really did believe it, and I found professors who were very much like Nueva teachers—who even let me call them by their first names. And together we were able to create something: a class in design engineering. We even convinced the school to fund it, found teachers for it, and made it happen.

This class is still being taught at Brown— it’s in its fifth semester. I credit this all to being able to come back to Nueva and talk to my teachers, gain a new perspective, and then take that with me to my last few years of college.

Now I’m back in the Bay Area, and I have a real job, and Nueva still impacts me to this day.

I work at an immigration start-up that is using legal collaboration technology to help people apply for asylum, work visas, green cards, and other immigration documentation.

The projects I am working on are so quintessentially Nueva. They are the types of opportunities I was looking for when I was doing my Quest project all those years ago. Now I get to bring all that to life—and get paid for it.

I would not be the person that I am today if it had not been for those four years, plus all of those text messages, random meetings on campus, grabbing tea with one of my old teachers, hanging out with all my old high school friends that happened over my four years in college and the years that have followed.

I’m incredibly grateful to Nueva and will probably be grateful for the rest of my life.