Meet Alexa ‘21 and Ava ‘22, Student Experience Specialists

Meet Sora Alumni, Alexa ‘21 and Ava ‘22, current college students and Sora employees on the Student Experience team. Recently, Jane Castro, Student Experience Manager, interviewed Ava and Alexa on the 2nd episode of the Sora Journal Podcast and chatted about their experience as alumni and employees. Enjoy their conversation!

Jane: My name is Jane and I'm the student experience manager here at Sora. As a part of Sora's student and family experience team, this means I plan events, support student clubs and committees, communicate with students, answer questions, and do all the things related to students' daily experiences at Sora.

I'm fortunate to have the assistance of two Sora graduates as Student Life Specialists, Ava and Alexa. Ava and Alexa, can you introduce yourselves, what year you graduated from Sora, and share what you are doing now? 

Ava: Hello, I'm Ava. I graduated from Sora in 2022. I took a gap year to dance ballet professionally, and now I am a rising sophomore at Connecticut College, intending to double major in psychology and philosophy.

Alexa: Hello, I'm Alexa. I graduated a year before Ava in 2021. I'm currently a rising senior at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I'm majoring in statistics with minors in math and philosophy. 

Jane: It's rather unique to work for your former high school. What made you both decide to do that?

Alexa: At the time, quite honestly, I just didn't want to leave Sora behind. There were a lot of people that I became quite close to, both students and faculty, and I wanted to do something to help out and keep contributing to what meant so much to me. Kind of like passing it forward, I wanted to help shape a space to make sure other students got that same special experience that I did.

Ava: Similar to Alexa, I'm someone who took a pretty nontraditional path through education up until college. I feel really strongly about Sora’s mission to create a school of the future that gives students the agency to pursue their passion. Sora is unique in that students are given the opportunity to help influence the school's development while they're still students.

And I wanted to be able to take that work to the next level after I graduated. And then, like Alexa said, Sora has a very tight-knit community, and I wanted to stay connected to everyone that I knew here in any way possible. 

Jane: Well, we are glad you both are still here. Can you share more about what you do at Sora to support today's students?

Ava: I always find it kind of tricky to describe my role because there's always a new meeting to pop into or a project to work on. I help to structure and implement student experience programming in all non-academic areas. A couple of things that I do are I run the Inkwell, which is Sora's high school literary magazine.

I help to coordinate student events like Spirit Week, Homecoming, Prom, Graduation, all of those fun things. And I generally try to instill the sense of community and engagement that I felt during my own time as a student here. 

Alexa: Piggybacking a little bit off of what Ava said, it's definitely a mix of everything.

Ultimately, my role and hers are about supporting our community in whatever ways we can. I typically work on the virtual platform side, though, doing things like organizing students into the right places, restructuring what people can see, and making sure that everyone is getting the best use out of it as possible. 

I also help our team with running reports from our database, fetching things like lists of students per state or parent emails for all of our middle schoolers. Just whatever is necessary. 

Jane: Thank you so much for all that you're doing to support our student life here at Sora. Since you are both current college students, I'm curious to hear how Sora helped you prepare academically and for balancing your college schedules.

Alexa: Sora definitely helped. I think time management was a big thing I got to practice, as Sora Expedition schedules are more similar to college schedules than traditional schools. But another thing was that prior to Sora, I didn't really have a good way to explore my interests. I knew by then that I wanted to go into statistics, but what else?

That's such a broad field. Through Sora, I got to explore philosophical thought, psychology, and even a bit of architectural history and design. Having some experience with a variety of different disciplines helped me narrow down exactly what type of student I would be and am currently, and what type of industry I want to go into after I graduate.

I didn't know before Sora that I liked education as a field so much. 

Ava: Just like Alexa said, at Sora, unlike the more traditional high schools, I didn't have classes all day long, and I had to learn how to manage my own time and be my own engine. So to minimize the procrastination, I actually got my homework done.

So I already had those skills when I got to college, which was immensely helpful. Sora also really strongly encourages students to set their own goals and make a clear roadmap for attaining those goals. So I was able to do just that, heading into my freshman year of college and taking an active role in my learning, instead of just sort of sitting back, taking classes that I thought could maybe be interesting or helpful in the future, and waiting for a path to masterfully appear.

Jane: Out of all of the different traditions and processes and all things student experience, what is your favorite thing to work on?

Alexa: I love, love, love seeing what song students choose for graduation. I feel like it really defines each graduating class and you can feel how they felt and how they feel about graduating through what song they chose. And I feel like that's really special. The other thing that's also very important to me at the end is seeing how the yearbook turns out.

Like, I feel like I get such an intimate view of what goes on, working on it, and how much effort the students put in, how much effort I put in, and how much effort our team puts in, and seeing the end result is always so cool. It makes everything feel worth it.

Ava: As a very nice bookend to that, Alexa, you're interested in the end of the year. One of my favorite things to work on is the beginning of the year programming, the welcoming programming, onboarding, and getting everyone all ready and set up to succeed at Sora. That's always something that's really exciting for me as a student going into the year and having it be so full of promise. And it's fun every year to pull together all of the exciting things that students get to do at Sora.

Jane: Well, thank you both so much for joining me today to share more about your experiences with life after Sora. You are clearly amazing examples of what Sora graduates can accomplish, and I feel so lucky to work with you both daily.