20 Alumni Stories - Katelin Sung
Transcript: (Auto-generated) Welcome to An Examined Education, a podcast from the Cambridge School. At Cambridge, we often say that education is never merely about what students know, but about who they are becoming. For 20 years, our community has been shaped by conversations that ask enduring questions about truth, goodness, and beauty, and by a shared commitment to forming students who think well, love rightly, and live wisely. Today, the Cambridge School is honored to be ranked the number one private K-12 school in San Diego, but rankings tell only part of the story. Our deeper aim, our telos, has always been the formation of a whole person, intellect, wisdom, virtue, and faith, integrated and ordered toward a life of purpose and service. In this series, we turn to our alumni. Through their stories, we explore how a Cambridge education continues to echo long after graduation in college classrooms, careers, relationships, and callings. These are reflections on learning, on becoming, and on the ways a formative education shapes how we experience and engage with the world around us. This is An Examined Education, stories shaped by the belief that a flourishing life begins with cultivating good habits alongside great people toward noble ends. Enjoy. My name is Katelin Sung. I just graduated from Cambridge in 2025, and I'm currently a first year at Berkeley majoring in rhetoric. I was at Cambridge for the long haul, K-4 through 12th grade. College is basically the first time in my memory that I've existed away from the Cambridge community, so I've had lots of prompting to reflect on my elementary through high school experience and the way it's shaped me up until this point. I've become appreciative of the both and aspect of Cambridge, specifically both humanities and STEM, after having been in college at UC Berkeley for a few months. Something about Berkeley that I've been learning isn't really true at some other colleges is that nearly every freshman comes to Berkeley knowing exactly what field they want to go into, and although there are many intellectually curious and open-minded students there, they pretty much just stay in their own lane in terms of the subjects they study. The engineers are there just for engineering, the biology majors are there just for biology, the English people are there just for English, and so on. And most people see what we call breadth classes or just just general education classes outside of their major as annoying requirements they just have to get out of the way because they don't have to do directly with their major. I think coming to Berkeley after having grown up in Cambridge, I came in with a pretty different perspective. I do have a career goal in the field of medicine, but I'm not approaching education and the college experience as mere means to get to that. Cambridge definitely instilled in me the idea that education is not just stuffing information into my brain to get a piece of paper that says I have a degree, but rather a joyful, or mostly an ideally joyful, privilege meant to enrich my life, not just monetarily in the long run, but intellectually and characteristically. Learning is about understanding the human experience, and I think when you look at learning like that, it's ridiculous to think that you could really learn without valuing both STEM and humanities. My choice to major in humanities, rhetoric to be specific, so the Cambridge influence is very very apparent, in addition to the pre-med courses is certainly a result of that idea of learning as understanding the entire human experience. The prospect that I had to choose only one subject to study for the next four years was quite saddening when my time at Cambridge had sparked my interest in both, and it wasn't just that Cambridge did a good job of teaching both sciences and humanities independently, but the subjects themselves were often intertwined and teachers themselves embodied an integrated approach to their subjects