To many of those who didn’t know the Class of ‘23 on a personal level, they remain the person who smiled at them once in the hallway, or the person who skipped them in the lunchline, but in fact, there is somewhere they go after the hallways of The Emery/Weiner School and it’s called… college.
The college counseling department at Emery works with individual students beginning sophomore year, in order to “provide strong advocacy…both collectively and personally” (Emery/Weiner Website), to ensure each student is presenting the strongest application of themselves to the colleges they apply to. The Class of ‘23, a diverse grade of students who made their mark on the school underwent this rigorous process in the fall of 2022, leading them to where they find themselves today and how they will spend the next few years of their lives. Three impressive Emery alumni: Blythe Mogil, Sophie Halperin, and Brooke Bersin, share their experiences as freshmen in college, sharing the information provided by Emery that helped them cross this important threshold in their lives.
Students have noted that Emery and the college counseling office have done an amazing job in preparing them for what life beyond high school may look like. Blythe Mogil, a freshman at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill believes, “Emery prepared [me] very well. As a three-sport athlete, I came into college with good time management skills which has helped me greatly.” In a similar manner, Brooke Bersin, a current Texas Longhorn mentions, “Emery honestly prepared me. My study habits that I accumulated through my years of high school and feedback from teachers have served me well.”
Sophie Halperin, a freshman at the University of Indiana Bloomington comments on the way leaving Emery’s Jewish bubble has affected her college life, “Especially right now with everything going on, I feel like I never left the Emery community, because they are all still on my side no matter how many miles I am from Houston, TX. Correspondingly, Blyhte Mogil feels, “grateful for the education [she] was given specifically about Israel,” taking into account that her college is only 5% Jewish.”
Leaving Emery, a small Jewish private school that houses roughly 350 students is hard for alumni who attend schools with roughly 35,000 students. Bersin comments on this, “Being around such a big environment can feel like a shock sometimes because you go from knowing everybody to having to find your friends on campus actively.”
Comparably, Halperin mentions, “It’s so shocking coming from a school where you know everyone walking down the halls to going to a school where I see new people every day, but it has ultimately allowed me to grow.”
It is clear that Emery has done an amazing job planting the seeds for its seniors for college, and life beyond. Besides that, it is safe to say that recent alumni are having an amazing time at each of their chosen colleges. Mogil notes being, “thankful that [she] went to Emery,” Halperin is, “having so much fun in college,” and Bersin, “thinks [she] has learned that college is very romanticized, but it doesn’t mean it’s not fun.” The beautiful stories of Mogil, Halperin, and Bersin, should help ease the possible fretful minds of the future graduation Class of ‘24.
