Meet Vincent Fumo ’16


Vincent Fumo
Currently Attending:
Johns Hopkins University
Years at Shipley: 7

Activities & Positions Held: Orchestra, Peer Tutoring, Crew, Cross Country

Discovering Passions
I was initially overwhelmed by the extensive list of activities and clubs that Shipley offers. For the first time in my life I was building robots, playing African drums, studying ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, learning to edit videos with professional software, and organizing events for awareness of those with disabilities, among many other activities. Venturing into these diverse pursuits was perhaps the most important part of my growth in my time at Shipley; I was able to have a taste of such a wide variety possible interests that I may never have been able to engage in elsewhere, allowing me to discover what I am most passionate about. These experiences have helped me learn who I am and what I love to do.

Academic Depth & Breadth
The academics at Shipley have prepared me for success in any of these passions that I may pursue in the future. The content of my classes has been vast in both breadth and depth due to the diversity of available courses and the greatly detailed material that we cover, so that my academic groundwork is beyond ready to support future studies. Shipley gave me the privilege of building my schedule around my favorite subjects. I have been able to study two languages during Middle School and all four years of Upper School and still take other classes that I like; for example, senior year was especially tailored to my intellectual interests since I took two science courses on top of the two languages.

Delving Into the Classics
While many teachers who taught me at Shipley have positively impacted me, none have done so more than Mr. Rich, my Latin teacher for all of Upper School. Over the course of those four years, I experienced immense growth not just as an aspiring scholar of the Classics but also as a strong critical and analytical thinker. Mr. Rich takes a significant period of time in ninth grade to build a solid foundation in grammar so that, by the time his students are seniors, they can enjoy translating many of the greatest pieces of literature in the ancient western world, such as the works of Vergil, Catullus, and Ovid. Few other teachers could make translating and analyzing Latin as gratifying a learning experience as Mr. Rich does.

Taking the Perilous Plunge
I will never forget some of the labs we performed in physics and chemistry, such as one lab (I think it was called the Perilous Plunge Lab) in which we dropped dolls attached to rubber band bungee cords from a few meters high and calculated how long the cord must have been so the doll fell as close the floor as possible without touching. It was such a fun challenge that finding elasticity constants and deriving Hooke’s Law seemed more like a game than work. We carried out labs like these all the time and I think the hand-on experience helped me to learn the content just as much as, if not more than, any lecture would have.

Plans for Fall 2016
I am looking forward to attending Johns Hopkins University, where I can continue to pursue the courses I loved most at Shipley. In particular, the Classics and chemistry, for both of which Shipley has sufficiently prepared me, are the fields I plan on studying in the fall. Outside of the classroom I hope to pass my time doing the activities I already know I enjoy and to discover new ones.

Future Ambition
My ambition is to do research and to discover or create something that no one has before and that can benefit others. For one project in biology class, I wrote some articles about recent advances in science and was surprised to find that many were driven by young people who were eager to make a change. I hope to do exactly that myself.

Shipley has prepared me to apply what I learn to make a difference in the world.
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The Shipley School is a private, coeducational day school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade students, located in Bryn Mawr, PA. Through our commitment to educational excellence, we develop within each student a love of learning and a desire for compassionate participation in the world.