Maddie Melton
Class of 2008
What kinds of things did you like at Nysmith?
I was always a Humanities student at Nysmith! I loved my Language Arts and Social Studies classes, and I was an avid reader at home (this has not changed!). I remember in 5th grade we had a reading competition, and each time we read a new book we could add a construction paper scoop of ice cream to our cone on the wall. I spent all year working hard to make my stack as high as possible! I also enjoyed writing, and I remember working very hard on my personal essays for the annual competition (I can’t remember the name!) and writing stories at home. I loved the free writing time in middle school English class as well. Outside of school, I did Tae Kwon Do competitively, and earned my black belt when I was eleven. In middle school, I took the Filming and Editing elective, and really loved creating stories through this new medium. My editing skills have come in handy many, many times in the years since.
What did you do after Nysmith? Tell us about your unique high school experience at School Year Abroad in China and Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong! How did you get interested in immersing yourself in Chinese culture and its people? Are you fluent in Chinese?!
After graduating from Nysmith, I started ninth grade at Episcopal High School in Alexandria. They offered the option to study Chinese, and I chose it my freshman year partially on a whim and partially at the encouragement of my dad. I had never had much natural inclination for Romance languages, and I thought something totally different might work better for me. This turned out to be true, and I was hooked from my first day of class. I was particularly interested in the beauty of the stories behind written Chinese characters.
After going through a difficult time personally in my sophomore year, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I knew I wanted to start seeing the world from a new perspective. By that point I was hoping to study in China on a summer program because of my love for the language, but then representatives from School Year Abroad came to give a presentation about the opportunity to spend a whole year studying in Beijing. It seemed like exactly the kind of fresh start I was looking for, and I was so excited to immerse myself in the language I had spent two years falling in love with. I applied right away, and my parents agreed to let me go for my junior year. I have always been blessed by their unwavering support in pursuing a somewhat unconventional path.
In Beijing, I woke up early to bike across the city for Tai Chi classes, and at school I studied Mandarin intensively for several hours a day along with Chinese history, literature, and politics. After class, I had a lot of freedom to explore the city independently, and it is in the afternoons and weekends I spent getting completely lost on bustling streets and narrow Hutong alleyways with my friends that I really developed a strong connection to China and began to consider it home. In the evenings, I went home to my host family and practiced Chinese over dinner and conversation. At SYA, I also had the opportunity to travel extensively to both rural and urban regions of China, including a whole month spent in China’s beautiful southwest Yunnan province. What I loved most about my year there was that I woke up each morning never quite knowing what was going to happen and where I was going to end up by the evening. To be surrounded by so much newness and so many learning opportunities in every conversation was such an amazing and intense experience. I feel like I was there for ten years instead of one!
As the year continued, I knew that I wanted to stay and finish high school overseas rather than returning for my senior year in the U.S. After some research online about different options, I ultimately applied and was awarded a full scholarship to spend two years completing an IB diploma at Li Po Chun United World College, an international boarding school in Hong Kong. While I was there, I had the opportunity to study with classmates from more than eighty countries, and made many incredible lifelong friends. Like at SYA, I had a lot of freedom to explore, and during my two years there I loved learning about Hong Kong’s fascinating history and wandering through its mountains, beaches, and bustling downtown. I continued to travel as well, and my friends and I backpacked independently through China and Southeast Asia. Extracurricular activities at LPC were numerous, and I became very involved in the school’s theatre program acting in school productions and a Playback applied theatre group for audiences across the city. I even had the chance to direct a full-length play. I received training to become a ‘peer supporter’ to classmates who were struggling, and also served as North America Representative in student government. However, the two undertakings that became most important to me were founding and leading LPC’s first Gay/Straight Alliance and becoming involved as a volunteer with an organisation called AFESIP which fights sex-trafficking in Cambodia. Over two years, I spent a total of six weeks in AFESIP’s three rehabilitation homes across Cambodia, developing friendships with the women and girls who lived there. I continued to raise money for the organisation in university.
I am very hesitant to use the word ‘fluent’ when talking about my Chinese because it can mean so many different things and I still have so much to learn! But I do speak and read Mandarin with good proficiency, and can navigate work, travel, and everyday life in China comfortably and confidently.
Talk about your college experiences and what you’re doing now at grad school.
After graduating from LPC, I was eager to continuing study internationally (which was also a much cheaper option than studying in the U.S!) and learning through travel and cultural immersion. I started university at a school called University College Utrecht in the Netherlands. My freshman year I stumbled upon Anthropology, and found a discipline that allowed me to give structure to the way I had spent my whole life observing, thinking, and understanding the world. I also enjoyed the opportunity to travel around Europe independently, and loved how easy it was to hitchhike from the Netherlands to surrounding countries! My favourite trip from that time was volunteering on an organic sheep farm in Estonia for a couple weeks and swimming in beautiful lakes along the Russian border. In my fourth semester I had the opportunity to go on a semester exchange to Rhodes University in South Africa, and knew from the first moment that I arrived that I wanted to stay (yes, this is a theme!) I transferred and completed my final two years of university there, and I was lucky to be able to graduate in 2016 with four majors in Anthropology, Chinese, Drama, and Psychology. South Africa has become home as well, and is a place I hope to continue returning to.
Shortly after I arrived in South Africa, I broke my ankle badly in a car accident, and the months of recovery really threw off my sense of balance, physically and psychologically. After it healed, I found that hiking really re-grounded me in my body, and I began to spend all of the time I could in the mountains. I started regularly going on multi-day hikes, and in my final year at Rhodes I became the hiking coordinator of the Mountain Club, leading day and overnight trips to beautiful locations across the province. Hiking has since been a very important part of my life. I also continued my involvement in LGBTQ issues from high school, and I was elected Vice President of OutRhodes, the university’s society for queer students. Our team had a lot of success, and won Most Improved Society at the end of the year! I stayed busy with work opportunities, too, and was a TA to first year students in Anthropology, Chinese, and Philosophy & Ethics classes.
After I graduated, I decided to stay in South Africa for one more year to complete a graduate degree in Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. As is common in Anthropology, my thesis research was derived from deeply personal experiences and explored questions of language and labels as they relate to queer/LGBTQ identity. I was most interested in how we use language to tell our stories, what the advantages and limitations of that language can be, and how we find ways to understand experiences beneath or beyond the vocabulary and/or cultural narratives we have to describe them. I’m now working on turning this research into a fiction writing project. We’ll see if anything comes of it!
Cape Town is a hiker’s paradise and I took advantage of that as much as possible! I was also able to keep my connection to Chinese language alive from afar by participating in two Chinese speech competitions hosted by the Confucius Institute, and won 3rd and 2nd place in consecutive years. I continued to work as a TA in Cape Town, and also began teaching English online to young students in China full time through a company called VIPKID to support myself while I studied and to save money to hike the 2,659-mile Pacific Crest Trail this coming May. I left Cape Town in December 2017, and while I’m waiting to start the hike in a few months VIPKID has allowed me to try out the ‘digital nomad’ lifestyle and work on the road while I spend a few months traveling and writing. I’ve been living overseas for more than seven years now and I’m curious what it will be like to spend six months back in the U.S. later this year!
Tell us about your internships.
After my first year at Rhodes University in South Africa, I came home to Virginia for our ‘summer’ holiday (November to January!) and continued work in the field of anti-human trafficking as an intern in the Development Office at Free the Slaves in Washington D.C. The following year I was able to return to Beijing during the holidays for an internship with the JUMP! Foundation, an experiential education organisation that designs immersive learning experiences for middle and high school students throughout China and other parts of Asia. It was very valuable to have work experience at both an NGO and a social enterprise.
My favourite holiday work experiences in college, however, were the two summers I spent as a facilitator and mentor for a summer study abroad program for high school students in Beijing. The programs were run through an amazing organisation called Americans Promoting Study Abroad (APSA) which endeavours to bring international exposure to students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in study abroad programs. I loved working with high school students and bringing all of my language skills, knowledge of Beijing, and personal experiences as a study abroad student to my work each day. I also have a little bit of trouble sitting still, so working outside of an office in an environment that was constantly shifting, changing, and asking me to draw on completely different skill sets was very exciting and definitely better suited to my personality! I’m looking forward to working for APSA again on a spring program in April. This work has convinced me that my career trajectory at this point is in experiential education, and outdoor education and study abroad in particular. I’m planning to move back to China after finishing the Pacific Crest Trail later this year, and I’m so excited to see what’s next for me full time in this field!
How did going to Nysmith impact your life?
I was recently showing a good friend the Nysmith Facebook page to show her more about where I grew up, and she said, “Wow, your school looks like so much fun!” And it was! I have never claimed to be very interested in math and science, but I nonetheless have amazing memories of pig dissections, a trip to the Walter Reed Medical Museum, coding Lego robots, making my own webpage, and so much more. We went on some amazing field trips like the Chesapeake Bay trip or the trip to Pennsylvania coal country that seamlessly merged science, history, and language arts. All of the hands-on, multi-disciplinary, immersive ways we learned at Nysmith taught me to approach my whole life as a learning experience, and it was because of that message that I was able to see that the hours I spent reading novels, hiking Hong Kong’s peaks, or talking to friends around the world were just as valuable, if not more so, than the hours I spent in class. I learned that it was rewarding and ‘cool’ to be smart and engaged, and although that message maybe faded a bit in middle school and early high school, it was always there, waiting to re-emerge when the time was right. Especially as a girl and young woman, I think learning to value my intelligence and being told that my dreams could be limitless has been an incredibly important asset.
Additionally, one thing that really stands out about my time at Nysmith is the very casual global diversity of the student body. Growing up, I had classmates whose parents and grandparents came from every corner of the world, and my friends went to weekend Chinese school, Farsi school, or Irish dancing lessons, and India/England/Jamaica/New Zealand/etc. over the holidays to visit family. At many institutions, diversity feels like something that has to be very intentional and constantly highlighted, but at Nysmith it was just a natural part of student life that I only became consciously aware of much later. I think this was a wonderful foundation that prepared me well for embracing a global kind of livelihood in the years since.
What advice (if any) would you give to a current Nysmith student and/or parent?
This is never the path I would have expected for myself when I graduated from Nysmith in 2008. I had no idea that some of the decisions I made while I was at Nysmith and in my early years of high school were going to change my life in such meaningful ways when I was making them. To current students, I would say be open to the unexpected. Do as many things as you can that scare you or make you uncomfortable. Never stop reading books and imagining different kinds of lives. Leave your smartphone at home pretty much always and look out at the world instead. Pursue every passion with as much dedication as you can muster. That way even if your plans change, which they will, you have the momentum to simply turn yourself in a different direction and keep blazing forward. Do things differently. Even if it doesn’t always feel like it in high school, suddenly when you’re twenty weirdness and passion become very, very cool. Spend high school building the groundwork for the kind of life that is most authentic to yourself, and embrace the bizarre!
To current parents, I would say trust your kids and say yes, even if they seem to be creating a path that is perhaps scary or unconventional. My parents had every reason to say no when I asked to go to boarding school at fourteen, when I asked to move to China at sixteen, when I decided to stay overseas from that point onward – but they didn’t. They trusted me that I knew what I needed to do to create the kind of life I wanted for myself, and I am so grateful that they allowed me the freedom to make those decisions. Tell your kids you’re proud of them for the things that make them different. Encourage them to work hard because learning itself is valuable and the world is exciting, not because of an imagined end point. Let them define success for themselves. If they want to travel on their own, spend time in ‘dangerous’ places, go skydiving – whatever – remember that getting into a car on any given day is probably statistically more dangerous than all of those things put together! Let them go.
FAVORITES
Field Trip: Walter Reed Medical Museum. What 5th graders get to hold a real human brain?? An amazing experience! I also really enjoyed the 7th grade trip to Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay.
School Play or Science Fair Project: I loved the 2nd grade play about the 50 states, and I remember how proud I was to perform after so much work went into that unit and all of our projects!
Place to Hang out at Nysmith: For some reason, the Silver Wing bathroom was the place to hang out in 8th grade!
Book that you had to read for one of your classes: The Giver by Lois Lowry or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Nysmith Memory: I was so into the pig dissection in 5th grade!
Do you still know all the words to the 50 states song? Yes! Not only do I remember it but I have been known to regularly sing it to friends overseas as indisputable evidence of my American childhood!
What state were you? Alaska
