“As a librarian, I meet high school and even university students every day who have no idea how to form hypotheses, conduct research, or write bibliographies. FLEX takes an entire year to guide students through this process, and when I arrived at university I was never overwhelmed by the academic expectations of my professors as some of my classmates were.”
– Megan Garza, Class of 2000
How to Participate in Discussions
“There are large parts of my life — personal and professional — that have been heavily influenced by my experiences in FLEX. In addition to a number of life-long friends, FLEX also provided a wide, humanistic, set of competencies that I utilize and inhabit every day. These include the ability to read closely, debate and discuss from evidence while being gracious in my listening, and to synthesize complicated and abstract ideas into coherent, nuanced, even troubled, wholes.”
– Carleton Gholz, Class of 1995
“Flex helped prepare me for college and strengthened my ability to critically examine social structures. I learned how to develop and support an argument, and, with my classmates, I learned how to communicate difficult ideas effectively.”
– Lauren (Drolet) Allswede, Class of 1999
“My critical thinking and problem solving skills have helped me excel in all of my undergraduate and graduate courses. Every professor of mine has said how impressed they were by my insightful questions, like questions I learned to ask in Flex.”
– Katherine Morykwas, Class of 2005
How to Read
“Though I was already a voracious reader, that first paper taught me how to analyze a book and find within the story larger themes about the world and the human condition. Flex exposed me to literature and film I’d never encountered before. While the regular English classes read Great Expectations, Moby Dick, and other standards in the canon, we read books like Midaq Alley, The Silent Language, Night, and The World’s Religions, along with essays and short stories by the likes of Horace Miner, Lewis Thomas, and Leo Tolstoy – and that was just the first year, and a small sampling at that. Above all, Flex taught me how to think.”
– Lindsey Block, Class of 2006
How to take Notes
“The way the information was taught in Flex helped me tremendously in college. The things I learned in Flex are the only subjects I even remember from High School. Flex taught me how to listen objectively and how to take notes on the things that are important. I became an active learner in Flex.”
– soozan Mazer Mendel, Class of 1984