At a round table with people making eye contact and constantly addressing each other, if you’re not in the conversation, you can feel your own absence."
Ursula Wise
“Reach for the stars” isn’t just an idiom to Ursula Wise ’21. It’s her life plan. Since middle school, the Connecticut native has dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But it wasn’t until she got to Exeter that her passion truly skyrocketed.
“It means something to be 12 years old and have an interest or have a dream,” she says. “But to be 17 and have had the privilege of having the resources that allow you to really refine that [dream] and realize what it means to you, that’s a whole other thing.”
A middle child in a family of five, Wise first stepped into a working observatory during a trip to Exeter’s campus to visit her older sister, Isabelle ’19. “My whole life, I knew that there were other planets in the solar system, but there’s something different about putting your eye up to an eye piece,” she says of her experience peering through a telescope at the Grainger Observatory. “Looking at [a planet] and knowing that you’re receiving that light, it feels like a deeper connection. I would say that those kinds of feelings drove me to want to learn more.”
Over the last three years, Wise stacked her schedule with a full slate of astronomy and STEM classes. Now, as a senior, she is, “knee-deep in the details of advanced physics, the really gritty stuff, which is setting a great foundation for me in the future,” she says. “Being at Exeter and being able to take physics and astronomy courses has made me realize … that the idea of being an astronaut isn’t just something that I dream about. It’s something that I’m planning to do.”
With her mind entertaining the biggest questions in the universe, Wise finds Harkness helps her stay grounded. “In a traditional classroom, I can sit in the back with my chin in the palm of my hand and just think about whatever I’m thinking about,” she says. “But at a round table with people making eye contact and constantly addressing each other, if you’re not in the conversation, you can feel your own absence. You can see everybody else building off of each other’s ideas. There isn’t any other learning structure that would have benefited me more.”
That quality of conversation was one of the first things Wise recalls noticing during her prep year. “The conversations that I was having with other students had more substance than I had ever experienced before with people my age,” she says. “I didn’t even realize that there was something that I was missing out on until I was having those conversations and reflecting back on what it was like back at home.”
This fall, Wise was elected by her peers as president of the senior class, an honor for which she is deeply grateful. “I attribute who I am today and the things that I want to do with my life entirely to the people [who] have been with me throughout the whole journey, which is my class at Exeter,” she says. “We push each other to learn and to become better students and better people.”
Wise hopes to attend the U.S. Naval Academy upon graduation and serve her country as a member of the armed forces. After that, her sights are set on NASA. “Apply to NASA to become an astronaut over and over again until I get it, that’s literally the plan,” Wise says. “I don’t really care how long it takes. That’s what I really want to do with my life. And I wouldn’t be ashamed if it never worked out, because I think that there’s something admirable in just going for [a goal] and not being afraid of what you’re going to get out of it.”
Wise exhibited “Interstellar,” her painting inspired by women who have gone to space, in the Lamont Gallery’s “Rewriting the Narrative: Student Voices.”
— Jennifer Wagner