Written By: Paulo Frank
As she walked from class to class on her first day at Gunn, sophomore Anna Lorenzon was bewildered by the school’s foreign layout. “Gunn is outdoors, which is really different,” Lorenzon said. “My other school was an H-shaped, three-story building.” Lorenzon will stay at Gunn for one year while her parents are on sabbatical at Stanford University, only to re- turn to her former high school to finish her last two years.
This stark change can be attributed to the climatic difference between Palo Alto and the location of Lorenzon’s old school—Ann Arbor, Michigan. “ e weather is really different,” Lorenzon said. “ The weather is always nice here, but it rains and snows a lot in Michigan.”
Gunn’s open format and warmer weather allow for brief respites from the cramped in- door classes. “It’s nice that you can walk in fresh air between classes,” Lorenzon said.
Luckily for Lorenzon, Gunn’s bell schedule has proven helpful in her acclimation to a horizontal school layout. “ The passing time is a lot longer,” she said. “I used to have only three minutes of passing time. If I pass my friends here, I have time to talk to them instead of just wave.”
Lorenzon has been happy to have had a generally warm welcome from the Gunn com- munity, as moving schools can be a difficult ordeal. “In the very beginning I didn’t have any friends because I didn’t know anyone here,” she said. “But some people were really nice and they let me eat with them during lunch and to hang out.”
Coming from a college town, Lorenzon is no stranger to an intense academic environ- ment. She has found, however, that some differences have emerged. “It’s kind of similar but there are a lot of driven people here,” Lorenzon said. “I think it’s a lot more serious here.”
The biggest difference Lorenzon has found has been the quality of teachers at Gunn. Ac- cording to Lorenzon, teachers here are much more invested in their students than she was used to. “Teachers at my other school were really bad,” she said. “I only had one teacher that cared about what they were teaching. Others would just give an assignment and not teach anything for the entire class.”
Yet another difference for Lorenzon is the fact that courses she is currently enrolled in have been shifted from what she would’ve been doing at her old school, due to different requirements for advanced placement classes. “You have to be a junior to take [most] AP’s here,” Lorenzon said. “I would’ve taken AP U.S. History at my old school but I couldn’t here because I’m a sophomore.”
Since Lorenzon will be moving back to Ann Arbor for the 2018-2019 school year, she realizes her time at Gunn is very limited. “I’ll miss the people I met here,” Lorenzon said.
