Carter is good at finding adult leaders he can rely on. In addition to Coach Quilty, he has felt support from Band Director Ethan Updike, Upper School History Teacher Ron Heller, and his Latin teacher.
A committed member of Concert Band, Carter has played the trumpet since sixth grade and was inducted into Tri-M, the Music Honor Society, in ninth grade. He was particularly excited when Mr. Updike joined the faculty because he’s also a trumpet player. “The first time I heard him play it was like, Woah! He’s so much more powerful with his sound and his range.” Carter credits Mr. Updike with helping him improve his playing skills.
Mr. Heller, however, has been a travel companion through high school. “We really bonded when we travelled to England together right after my freshman year, we’ve done two service trips together, and most recently we went to Philadelphia together for Model U.N. He’s never actually been a teacher of mine, but he’s always been one of my most trusted mentors. I can talk to him in and out of school for any reason. ” Carter is also a member of Key Club, and Mr. Heller is the faculty sponsor of the club.
Carter’s Magna Cum Laude placement on the National Latin Exam came with a faculty mentor in tow as well. “I started Latin in Mr. Agier’s Middle School class where he led us through a textbook called “Ecce Romani.” It was a story of a family of a politician that got called to Rome, which was a 3-day journey, and their carriage got stuck in a ditch. The entire year of eighth grade was reading about them and their stupid trailer stuck in a ditch. It made eighth grade Latin hilarious. Then in ninth grade we had Mr. Wells and grammar lessons, conjugating verbs and getting into the nitty gritty of the theory of language.”
Latin at Shorecrest became an online class, and Brian Wells moved to Georgia, so Carter took Advanced Placement Latin in an online format with Mr. Wells as his instructor. Mr. Wells reported, “The class consisted of live chats beginning at 8:00pm each Sunday night. Carter committed himself to preparing and working diligently throughout the course.”
Some of that responsibility and maturity came from working alongside undergraduate and graduate students at a young age. In the summer of 2015, Carter was selected to spend four weeks at the
Rehabilitation Robotic Research and Design Laboratory, located at the new Pennsylvania Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Run by Dr. Michelle Johnson, the lab designs robots for rehabilitation, specifically using robotics to understand arm dysfunction and recovery after a brain injury or stroke. “I worked with 11 undergrad/graduate Penn engineering and medical students to design and assemble robots to assist stroke patients. The internship opened me up to neuroscience. Everything I was doing was very robotic and mechanical, but it also had a human side to it with understanding what stroke patients go through and how we can build these machines to help them.”
“Next year as a freshman, I want to be able to efficiently juggle my academics and extracurriculars. I have all these sort of hopes and dreams about what academics I want to do. I might want to do mixed martial arts classes or rugby or ultimate frisbee, but on the other hand I also want to be a psychology major with a neuroscience concentration and I want to take intensive language courses in French. I keep bouncing in my mind about how I’ll be able to do all these things I want to do. So that’s kind of my goal, to figure out what I want to do and do it without failing my classes or getting in trouble. Just do it.”