Ursula Wise
"There isn't any other learning structure that would have benefited me more.”
“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.”
