Theme: On Second Thought

One of the unique characteristics of the St. John’s College curriculum lies in its ability to transform the outlook of Johnnies. During the first mathematics tutorial, when we question what a point is, we challenge our preconceived notions about a point. With every text we translate, we find a new way of expressing our thoughts. With each experiment and symphony we study, we encounter an idea worth spreading.
Our goal as Johnnies isn’t to just witness the change of society as transcribed in the Great Books, but to change with every writer and story which with we engage. It’s these ideas and changes that are responsible for not only the students we become, but the people we leave the College as. We stand out in a crowd because of our ability to say “on second thought…”
Our alumni, tutor, and student speakers, through talks which follow the “On Second Thought” theme, will share with the audience second thoughts that have either impacted their life, or the world.

St. John's College
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St.Johns College
Annapolis, Maryland, 21401
United States

Anika Prather

Founder, The Living Water School

Dr. Anika Prather has earned her B.A. from Howard University in elementary education. She also has earned several graduate degrees in education from New York University and Howard University. She has a Masters in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College and has completed her PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has served as a teacher, director of education and the Head of School for public and Christian schools. The inspiration for starting this school comes from her three creative and curious kids. Anika’s blog www.letlearningflow.com is where she talks about her views on freedom in education and her research on literacy education for African American students.

Chris Liu

Liberal Arts Student

Chris Liu is a sophomore at St. John's College. She has ambitions to be a standup comedian if becoming a majestic philosopher proves impossible. She enjoys solving logic and math puzzles. She also likes to relate uncommon topics to philosophy. For example, she often wonders what contemporary fashion brands Friedrich Nietzsche would be fond of. She presents herself as classy and elegant but also secretly enjoys watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Hector Poveda Morales

Liberal Arts Student

Hector Poveda is a junior at St. John's College. He isn’t afraid to capture deeply painful emotions through his photographs, because he has lived through them. This SITE Scholar is a self-taught photographer. He began the trade with travel photography and has since transitioned to projects about mental illness, emotions, and states of mind. Originally from Colombia, this artist started photography when he was in high school at the Singapore United World College, which offered a culturally diverse community he was grateful to experience. The self-identified “travel junkie” says, “It all started as travel photography, taking pictures of places and people—that always caught my attention. I love traveling and eating weird food and getting on random bikes and trains. This mixes my two favorite passions—traveling and photography.”

Ian Hedley

Liberal Arts Student

Ian Hedley is a freshman at St. John’s College. He was born on a mountain in Colorado yet has spent most of his life enjoying the 110-degree weather and 360 days of sun in Florida. Ian became interested in St. John’s for it emphasizes reading, writing and speaking, the three skills that composite thought. Ian plans on attending grad school after St. John’s assuming he figures out what he wants to do with his life by then. In his free time, Ian enjoys reading, playing trombone and piano, and dancing in fields while listening to jazz.

Jakob Garvey

Liberal Arts Student

Jakob Garvey is a sophomore at St. John's College. Ridiculed by the works of Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle with a desire to find the simple nature of all things spanning from Human beings to the metaphysical doctrines of Alice C. Baileys, he explores the channels of thought regarding the “simple” to gain clarity and awareness regarding the most pressing questions such as: what is Virtue? what does the fall of man in Genesis 3 say about universal suffering and temptation for humans? These are some of the questions Jakob has struggled with.

Justin Horm

Data Archaeologist

Justin Horm is the Senior Network Manager at St. John's College (in his words, “essentially a digital plumber”). A gnome that inhabits a world where tinkering unseen keeps a community connected to the World it seeks to explore, he wanders along the meandering streams of data searching to simplify meaning to the elegance of binary. He is an avid reader of history, a writer of futures that should never be, and a scholar of Emily Dickinson.

Nancy Hilton

Liberal Arts Student

Nancy Hilton is a senior at St. John’s College. Originally from Connecticut and soon to graduate, she plans on attending a premedical post-baccalaureate program to prepare for medical school and a career as a physician. She loves to be outdoors, cook Italian food, read everything under the sun, and travel to new countries. In her spare time, she captains the women and non-binary intramural group Kunai. Being a kunai captain has made her grow in her leadership qualities, capacity for fun, and provides an important opportunity to think about the intersection between gender, sex, and athletics: the topic of her TEDx Talk!

Sylvie McKnight-Milles

Liberal Arts Student

Sylvie McKnight-Milles is a freshman at St. John’s College. Her interests span a wide variety of disciplines—she enjoys drawing, painting, writing, and playing sports in addition to her main hobbies, studying mathematics and thinking about physics. Instead of attending a technical university, Sylvie chose to attend St. John’s because of its emphasis on the interconnectedness between many fields of study. After graduation, she aspires to study theoretical physics in graduate school and pursue her passion for the sciences by founding a company dedicated to fostering creativity and innovation, both in the areas of the arts and the sciences.