Views From New Mexico

This past summer, RTC Scholar Leevon Mathews’19 attended his Summer College Program at St. John’s Summer Academy in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Even two months into the school year, Leevon still draws from this experience and hopes to bring back lessons to the RTC community. What follows is a reflection from his time at St. John’s.

My summer college program was an amazing experience that I will never forget. This summer, I visited St. John’s Summer Academy in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There I took seminar classes based on different kinds of literature. The curriculum was challenging because I was given text that I had never seen before: there were Greek, and even Chinese, readings assigned. After reading texts, we would sit in a classroom and have long discussions about what we read. Outside of the courses I took, the program was amazing. I loved the city of Santa Fe; it was completely different from Chicago. The city was definitely smaller, but I felt like I was in a completely different world, and that wasn't a bad feeling for me at all. During my time, we visited downtown Santa Fe multiple times, where I saw that the people in the city had a great taste in art. Although I loved my classes and Santa Fe, I did have challenges there. Sometimes, I would feel extremely isolated: many people at the academy were from Santa Fe, and like I said before, Santa Fe is a completely different world. It wasn't that people were mean to me, everyone loved me, it was that I felt like they didn't get me. In a place where everyone has to talk about their point of views on many things, I felt as if no one understood me. I say this because for most of the time I was there, I was the only African American student. This didn't bother me a lot, but it definitely impacted my point of view in the seminar. In the long run, St. John's Summer Academy was one of the greatest experiences of my life, and I would definitely suggest it to anyone that may be interested in the program

Leevon Mathews ‘19