I met people this summer from places I’ve never even heard of before,” says Rhonda Allen, a vivacious senior from Jacksonville, AR. “My goal coming to Exeter was to expand my horizons and become more open-minded, and one thing I’ve definitely taken away from the experience is a new awareness and sensitivity toward other cultures. I’ve learned so much about people from all around the world.”

Stuart Arviso, a soft-spoken junior from Mexican Springs, NM, a community of just 200 located on the Navajo Nation reservation, says he too learned a lot about different cultures this past summer. But he also found a new appreciation for his own. “Back home, we’re all Native Americans, we’re all alike,” says Arviso. “But just like the people I’ve met from all over the world, I’ve realized that I have something very special too.”

Allen and Arviso are both part of the five-week multicultural immersion that is Exeter Summer School. If Exeter’s regular session has a diverse student population, with students from 46 states and 25 foreign countries, and 30 percent students of color, that’s even more the case during the summer session, which welcomed 583 students from 40 states and 30 countries, close to 50 percent of whom were students of color.

“Exeter has allowed me to break stereotypes I’ve had about other groups,” says David Dennis, a summer school student from Jackson, MS.

Such diversity is by design, says Hobart Hardej, dean of summer school admissions, and meant to compliment the academic enrichment and college preparatory components. “We are working within the mission of the Academy to educate youth from every quarter and fostering student-to-student learning,” says Hardej. “What defines our school in the summer is not Exeter’s fantastic facilities, but the students that we attract and their interaction with one another over the five weeks. Not only are they engaged when they get here and willing to take responsibility for their own learning, they’re also willing to share their religious and cultural diversity with each other.”

Adds Doug Rogers, director of the summer school, “In just five weeks, students from around the world make new friends, learn to tolerate, to appreciate and, perhaps, even to love the differences among them.”

To foster this student-to-student learning, the summer school pursues a number of programs to attract youth from every quarter, particularly students from geographic locations typically underrepresented at the Academy. From the Native American Program, started in 1985 by the late DeWitt Fischman ’35, to programs in Memphis, TN, Jackson, MS, Little Rock, AR, and several smaller ventures that draw students from Maine to Washington state, the summer school population is a “microcosm of international diversity,” says Rogers, where every interaction is a potential learning experience.