Alumni Spotlight - Naperville Christian Academy

Sam Veague – Class of 2019

I graduated from NCA in May, 2019 and I am currently a senior at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas. I am studying Mechatronics Engineering as an Electrical and Computer Engineering Concentration.

My first year at LeTourneau I spent largely getting to know the culture of the university. Unfortunately, we were sent home during our second semester. My second year I worked in the University’s Writing Center thanks to the excellent work of Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Vahle, Mr. Bloom, and Mr. Hermann. I learned that NCA did an amazing job of making writers out of us compared to what a lot of students came to college with. Mr. Jacobs’ science classes made Lab reports an absolute breeze to do.

In my third year, I became an RA on the first floor of my Hall, and I am currently still working in that position. Being an RA has taught me quite a bit about people, specifically how communication can so easily go wrong and the difficulties of motivating unmotivated people. LeTourneau requires RAs to set up events for their living spaces and I began to learn how to do what Americans are excellent at – logistics!

Naperville Christian Academy is difficult, but that difficulty is so valuable. The classes taught us how to learn and how to teach others in return. The other excellent part of NCA’s education I found incredibly useful was the hours and hours we spent translating Latin and Koine Greek. The struggle with these languages and the way they taught us to interpret greatly strengthened our ability to comprehend the words of others and concepts they are attempting to convey.

NCA’s preparations have made a profound impact on my ability to speak with others and built up my ability to learn. Partially thanks to NCA, I was actually asked to help the LeTourneau media team film a video tour of our Robotics Lab, and I will be doing that next week. I am scheduled to graduate in May 2023, and am currently looking for a career opportunity.

Luke Jacobs – Class of 2019

I will be graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this spring with a major in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Computer Science. I am applying to R1 graduate schools across the country and have currently been accepted to UIUC and Virginia Tech. I hope to pursue a PhD in electrical engineering, specifically in the field of wireless sensing systems.

As I come to the end of undergrad, I can clearly see how my time at NCA has shaped my academic success at UIUC. NCA’s academic rigor gave me a work ethic that has carried me through extremely time-consuming STEM classes. NCA’s focus on grammar, logic, and rhetoric has served me well in conducting internship presentations and in arguing for the relevance of my research.

Most importantly, I have seen how NCA has prepared me to be an ambassador for Christ in the “real world.” I look back on NCA’s literature and history classes fondly, because they exposed me to secular philosophies that I see today on campus. NCA has showed me that not everything flashy and new is true, but there is wisdom to be found in the Word of God.

Photo: Luke at an observatory in LA on an intern trip.

Jonathan Bayert – Class of 2017

Congratulations Jonathan Bayert for being awarded the 2018 Howard Hughes prize for outstanding academic achievement in mathematics! This award is given in remembrance of Dr. Hughes who was committed to studying and teaching mathematics.[/one-half] Jonathan is a 2017 graduate of Naperville Christian Academy and is pursuing a Computer Engineering degree at Valparaiso University.

Click on this link to read more about the award: https://www.valpo.edu/mathematics-statistics/scholarships-and-awards/

Heather MacIntyre – Class of 2016

I am currently at Vanderbilt University studying elementary education, child studies, and special education. The further I get into my college education, the more I appreciate how well NCA prepared for me the rigor of a college such as Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt’s education program (both undergraduate and graduate) is consistently ranked in the top 3 or 5 programs in the country in that field. In my classes, I am studying under professors who are doing the ground-breaking research that is defining the field of education; the opportunities that Vanderbilt has provided in this area have been incredible! In all of my classes, I am continually struck by how similar what I am being taught is to how I was taught at NCA. I am learning the best practices in education that are supported by years of research and study, and those practices are the same ones used by NCA and encouraged by the classical model of education. On many occasions, I am able to tie concepts we are learning in class back to my own classical education, and my professors are amazed by the way I was educated!

I have only become more convinced of the value of classical Christian education since graduating from NCA. Not only are the methods of teaching consistent with the best practices in the field of education, but I have seen more and more examples of how well prepared I was for my college education, with all its academic rigor. I was prepared in writing, reading, thinking critically, logic, debate/speech, and more. I recently wrote a blog review* for a professor’s blog on children’s literature. The opportunities I have to collaborate with world-renowned professors are unbelievable, and I am excited to see what other opportunities arise as I finish my undergraduate years at Vanderbilt.

*Read Heather’s review of Old Hat, by Emily Gravett, here.

*See more about Heather as Clara in the Nutcracker Ballet here.

Julie Bonenberger – Class of 2015

I am pursuing higher education at Clemson University in the School of Architecture. After four years there I plan on receiving my Bachelor of Arts degree. Clemson’s architecture program positively challenges me, as it requires me to complete four years of studio work, a minor, foreign language, and study abroad. I currently have declared a minor in entrepreneurship and am studying Italian with hopes to study abroad in Genoa, Italy for a full semester during the Spring of 2018, my junior year. I look forward to this trip and plan on living with other students in my program at a villa in Genoa owned by the university while studying under local professors.

One of my favorite aspects of studying architecture is what is known as the “studio culture.” People say that the lights never turn off in studio; it is not uncommon for us architecture students to be finishing drawings or crafting models during the early hours of the morning. The studio environment provides a context for peers and professors to be constantly viewing and analyzing work in progress. Usually every two weeks or so, students showcase their work by pinning it on the wall and presenting it to a group of reviewers, usually our own professors as well as guest lecturers and graduate students in the School of Architecture. My time at NCA helped prepare me for these presentation sessions. My high school teachers certainly helped me to develop my ability to present ideas and defend them in a Q and A type interaction.

Finally, I am also involved with a student organization: the American Institute of Architecture Students, or AIAS. Last spring, I enjoyed the opportunity to travel with a group from Clemson to Savannah, Georgia, for AIAS’s South Quad conference. During the conference, we got to tour historic Savannah and the Savannah College of Art and Design as well as hear from keynote speakers on topics such as professional development in the practice of architecture, women leadership in architecture, and integration between architecture and different fields, such as the healthcare industry. This fall, as I begin my sophomore year, I will be filling the role of club secretary in the Clemson chapter of AIAS and would like to eventually pursue national involvement.

Alex Veague – Class of 2014

I graduated from NCA in May 2014. I am currently in my Junior year at Baylor University in Waco, TX. I am scheduled to graduate Baylor in May 2018 with a Bachelors of Science in Neuroscience.

I spent my first two years as part of the Leadership Living and Learning Center where I served as a mentor for incoming students in my sophomore year. Although I have since left the program to move off campus, I learned a lot about leadership. One of the things that we were required to do as part of the leadership classes that we took was to consider those who led us and how we had led before coming to Baylor. I was able to pinpoint how different teachers had been fantastic leaders in high school. In many schools, science teachers only teach science. At NCA, our science teacher also led the student worship team. My math teacher was over the student council. My Latin teacher also taught history, literature, culture, and Bible class over my years at NCA. All of these people taught me what leadership is. Because of the things that I learned interacting with these teachers, people who cared about more than their students learning subject material, I have been able to be a better mentor, a better leader. I have been able to care about more than the task at hand. I learned more about leadership through the people at NCA than many of the other students learned in large schools with hundreds of formal leadership opportunities.

Baylor has been a wonderful next step for me. However, NCA is the reason that I have done so well. College forces students to do more than repeat facts. It is about thinking through processes, answering why, understanding what happens if something changes. At NCA, I learned to critically think through things and understand them. I did not realize it at the time, but that was the best thing that I could have learned. Being able to think critically about subject matter has been invaluable. I have been able to continue to develop this is an organization that I am a part of called BUMEDS, which stands for Baylor University Medical Ethics Discussion Society. We have the opportunity to look at ethically compromising situations and critically think through the best course of action and all potential outcomes.

Summer of 2016 I had the opportunity to intern at Elkay Manufacturing in Oak Brook, IL in the Customer Care department. I had some great experiences getting to work with people across the country that all had different backgrounds. My supervisors often complemented my work and work ethic and all I could think was that at NCA, I had to do my best and it became so ingrained that I continue to have a drive to do better.

Sic ’em Bears!

Kaitlyn MacIntyre – Class of 2013

Since my time at NCA, I have been studying computer science and mathematics at Northwestern University. It has been great to continue to be in such an academically challenging environment. I am able to apply many things from my education at NCA in my course work and even use some things that I wasn’t sure I would going into the field and major that I chose. For example, I have taken logic classes at school as part of the theory of computer science, which covered the same material that we covered in middle school logic at NCA.

Just this summer, I was talking to a fellow intern at Argonne National Laboratory over lunch, and we got into a discussion about education as we were explaining the American educational system to our co-worker from Ireland. This other intern was expressing his regret that people have become more interested in getting into college and getting good test scores than actually learning, and how sad it is that critical thinking and the ability to reason well is no longer the focus of so many schools here – all that matters is learning facts you can regurgitate to be able to do well on standardized tests. It struck me that, even for someone who didn’t go to a classical Christian school like I had the opportunity to do, here was this smart mechanical engineer, from an Ivy League school, working at Argonne, who was backing up the same things that NCA stands for and continues to teach without knowing anything about NCA, or even classical education.

I am very grateful for the ways my education at NCA is continually showing up during my time at school and elsewhere. My public speaking ability, developed meticulously through presentations, debates, mock trials, and the constant participation requirement, is rarely matched in my classes, whether engineering design classes or School of Communication public speaking classes. My background in logic has helped me, not only in the logic classes I was required to take as part of the computer science curriculum, but in every class where I have to solve any problem or design any algorithm. While many engineers dread any class where they need to write, even 12-page final papers for a class on Mediterranean history continue to show the benefits of having spent my whole life at a school like NCA, where writing is such a focus. And beyond these skills, my time at NCA challenged me to think differently about learning and its place in my life – to look for a college, and for career options, where truth is pursued, where critical thinking is encouraged, and where learning is a process which never stops, no matter how old you are.