Caleb Kapusinski graduated with the class of 2021 and now works in sales as an account manager for a general contractor. His episode is organized around two convictions he has carried into the workforce and has not stopped thinking about since. The first is that a smaller school creates space for a fuller person. At Cambridge, Caleb played basketball, ran cross country, performed in theater, and served in house leadership, not because he was exceptional in all of those fields, but because the school was small enough to say yes to all of it. He believes that habit of saying yes is increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable. The second is that Cambridge taught him to ask why. In his work, that translates to getting past a client's first answer to find the real problem underneath. In the classroom, it meant Socratic discussions oriented not toward the right answer but toward genuine understanding. The two convictions are, he argues, more related than they appear: a well-rounded person who knows how to ask good questions is, in his experience, exactly what the labor market is not producing and very much needs.

Stephen Priest graduated with the class of 2020 after attending Cambridge since second grade. He went on to Baylor University, where he majored in mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics, and is now completing a master's in philosophy at Georgia State, where his research touches on AI ethics and moral cognition. The throughline connecting all of it runs directly back to Cambridge. Stephen's episode is a sustained meditation on how ideas connect. Latin and Ancient Greek taken simultaneously led him to linguistics. Logic opened the door to set theory and philosophy of mathematics. A senior thesis topic became an undergraduate thesis topic and remains an area of active inquiry. The Cicero he studied in rhetoric class became the subject of a first-semester college research paper, written in Latin, drawing on three distinct strands of his Cambridge education at once. What he finds most striking is that it was not only his training in mathematics that prepared him for advanced mathematics. It was his training in the humanities. Upper-level math is about proofs, and proofs are arguments, and knowing how to find, develop, and communicate an argument clearly is the same skill Cambridge builds through essays and debate. The disciplines were never as separate as they appeared. For Stephen, philosophy is where all of it converges. It is the discipline that asks what the other disciplines are actually doing, and Cambridge, without ever teaching a philosophy course per se, spent years preparing him to love exactly that question.

Josh Kapusinski arrived at Cambridge in eighth grade expecting to enter ninth. His first lesson was in humility. His second was that literature could do in a classroom what it had always done for him alone at home. Josh now teaches rhetoric, speech and debate, and senior thesis at the Geneva School, a classical Christian school not unlike Cambridge. He spends a good deal of his time thinking about what his Cambridge teachers did and how they did it. The answer he keeps arriving at is that they modeled the virtues they asked of their students, brought genuine love for their subjects into the room, and held their students to a standard high enough to mean something. That combination lit a fire in him that eventually became a vocation. His episode is as much about teaching as it is about being taught. The skills Cambridge gave him, how to write, how to speak, how to think, are worth something. But what he treasures more, and what he is now trying to pass on, are the relationships. The teachers who pursued him, challenged him, and eventually became people he could call friends. Cambridge, he says, set him on a trajectory. He is still on it.

Aksel Yoder graduated with the class of 2023 and spent eleven years at Cambridge. He is now in college, and on Saturday mornings he meets with a classmate to read through the Gospel of John. That Bible study is the heart of his episode. Aksel's reading partner is a committed Christian, but one whose biblical foundation runs narrower than his own. What Aksel discovered in their conversations was not just that he knew more than he realized, but that he knew how to think about what he knew. He could trace the theological argument, hold his ground in genuine disagreement, and do it without making the other person feel diminished. Cambridge, he says, taught him how to read well, argue well, and love rightly in the same breath. The thread running through his reflection is the difference between receiving information and learning how to think. It is the latter, he finds, that proves irreplaceable.

Samuel Gingrich graduated with the class of 2019 and now works in market research, analyzing survey data for business clients. It is exactly the kind of work that demands the full breadth of a Cambridge education at once. His episode centers on what Cambridge calls the "both/and" approach to the humanities and the sciences. In his professional life, that integration is not philosophical; it is practical. Understanding what a set of numbers means is one skill. Knowing how to shape those numbers into a narrative that is persuasive and worthy of a busy client's attention is another. When the moment came to draw on both, he knew exactly where to reach. He draws the same line through debate. The capacity to reason live, to go toe to toe with a client about what the data actually shows, is not something cultivated quickly or easily. It took years of practice doing exactly that in a Cambridge classroom. Cambridge turns twenty the same year Samuel turns twenty-five. He has spent his entire conscious life shaped by it, and he is grateful for every year.

Sophie graduated with Cambridge's eighth class in 2025, having spent the better part of her life in the community from junior kindergarten through senior year. She is now a first-year at UC San Diego studying molecular biology. She is two quarters removed from graduation and already finding Cambridge everywhere she looks. The idea Sophie carried out of Cambridge is that there is always an occasion to learn. Not as a platitude, but as an epistemological posture, one that refuses to silo intellectual habits from the rest of life. When months of work in her research lab produced discouraging data, her professor asked her to sit with it: what worked, what didn't, and what can we do to move forward? She recognized the framework immediately. Cambridge had been teaching her to ask that question since kindergarten. What a Cambridge education produces, Sophie argues, is not merely academic preparation but a kind of groundedness, an internal assurance that one is equipped to go about the world, to do one's studies well, to cultivate good friendships, to navigate the inevitable difficulties of life with patience, charity, and humility. Her college peers see it in how she carries herself. She sees it in her Cambridge classmates as well. She is only two quarters out and already she cannot stop noticing it. Check back in ten or twenty years, she says, and she suspects the sentiment will be the same.

Isaiah Francisco enrolled at Cambridge in kindergarten and graduated thirteen years later with the class of 2023. He is now a junior at the University of Notre Dame, majoring in history and minoring in International Security Studies, and is preparing for a commission as a Naval officer. His story is one of formation meeting vocation. When Isaiah reflects on Cambridge, he reaches naturally for the school's telos: think well, love rightly, live wisely. Not as a slogan, but as a lived framework he can trace through his college experience with remarkable specificity. The habits Cambridge built in him, seeking out professors, pressing through difficulty, asking for help before the difficulty became crisis, proved to be precisely what his freshman year demanded of him. The holistic curriculum that once felt like a burden became the foundation for navigating a major in history alongside two semesters each of calculus, physics, and naval engineering. But Isaiah's formation at Cambridge runs deeper than academic preparation. The rightly ordered affections Cambridge cultivated in him, his love of service, his commitment to Christ, his sense of what deserves his time and attention and what does not, are the values he is now carrying into a calling. He wants to serve as a surface warfare officer not out of ambition but out of gratitude, and he traces that impulse directly to the ministerium Cambridge wove into the fabric of daily school life.

Nathan Kim enrolled at Cambridge in its founding year in 2006 and graduated with the class of 2020. He went on to study economics at Gordon College and now works as an implementation specialist at Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin. But the most formative part of his story has less to do with where he ended up than with what it took to get there. Nathan didn't have an easy run of it. There were years where the distance between who he was and who Cambridge was forming him to become seemed impossibly incongruous. What closed that gap wasn't a single turning point but the steady presence of teachers who pursued him with patient care, who asked enduring questions, and who came alongside him through trying seasons. Through daily effort alongside trusted mentors, Nathan nurtured a resilience that he would carry well beyond graduation, one that continues to serve him in college, in the workplace, and in life. In his resilience, his love of learning, and his ability to engage people from every walk of life, Nathan continues to see the fruit of a Cambridge education long after the season in which it was planted.

Ethan Chin graduated with Cambridge's eighth class in 2025 and has been part of the community since junior kindergarten. Now a freshman at Harvey Mudd College, he reflects on what it meant to spend formative years in a place that valued depth over speed, discussion over delivery, and formation over output. Ethan unpacks two ideas that have stayed with him: coherentism as an epistemological model, the web of interconnected beliefs that deepen and reinforce one another, and the paradox of the "inefficient education." At a rigorous science college surrounded by peers who took organic chemistry in high school, he's finding that what Cambridge gave him can't be replicated later. Rightly ordered affections, the capacity to think at depth, the groundedness to know who you are amid a sea of competing ideas: these don't come from a textbook or a summer of self-study.

In this episode of An Examined Education, we hear from Emma Kim, Class of 2018, now a UC Berkeley graduate and returning faculty member at The Cambridge School. Emma reflects on her journey from student to teacher and the profound gratitude she feels as she celebrates Cambridge’s 20th anniversary from the other side of the classroom. Looking back, she considers how the school’s guiding vision, to think well, love rightly, and live wisely, quietly shaped her long before she fully understood its depth. She shares how learning to ask thoughtful questions, especially in moments of uncertainty, prepared her for the academic rigor of a large university and continues to shape her teaching today. She reflects on the formation of well-ordered affections through the partnership of school, family, and church, and how that foundation has guided her priorities, relationships, and sense of purpose. And as she considers adulthood and vocation, she returns to a simple but enduring question: How then should I live? This episode is a warm and thoughtful meditation on gratitude, formation, and the joy of returning to invest in the very community that once formed you. It is a celebration not only of 20 years of Cambridge, but of the enduring fruit of a classical Christian education lived out in faith, humility, and hope.