Senior Spotlight: Jacob Smollen (12-3)

Laura Shin (12-3)

Photo courtesy of Jacob Smollen (12-3)

You are going to Brown University. How do you feel about leaving home for college, and what are you looking forward to?

I am looking forward to increased independence, and getting to explore a new place. I think it’s kind of bittersweet. I don’t really want to leave my dog, and I like Philly a lot, obviously. A lot of my friends are going to school here, so it’s definitely kind of sad to be leaving. But also, I’m not super far away, so I’m excited to come back and have people visit me.


Favorite memory from senior year?

I really liked prom. Making the senior video has also been super fun. It’s been a ton of work, but getting to talk to the majority of the grade was nice, and being in charge of that is an honor.


If you could give one piece of advice to your freshman self, what would it be?

I wish that I could have told myself to be more confident in my passions and interests from an earlier age, like freshman year. Because I thought I had a lot of things that I was sort of interested in, but I didn’t really take the leap and go out and actually do them, like Voices or writing, or stuff like that. So I wish I had delved deeper earlier.

As a key member of Masterman’s basketball and golf teams, how would you describe your athletic experience at Masterman?

I’d say that basketball and golf were very, very different experiences for me, because golf for the most part was just a way to have fun. Not that I don’t have fun playing basketball, but I suck at golf, although I’ve gotten better. It was a place to kind of screw around and not have the pressure of needing to do well. For basketball, I think there was a lot more camaraderie, because it’s a team sport and you’re sweating together and you really have to work together to be a good team. I’d also say that it’s been a humbling experience, because as a 5’10ish scrawny kid, you get bounced around a lot during games.


You also create videos for Voices. What inspired you to start that kind of journalism?

If I’m being honest, it was NHD, because we had to make a video for that. NHD was also a way for me to get my friends involved since they like videos but they don’t like writing, and I like writing but I didn’t really have as much experience with making videos. Also, the future of journalism is going to be multimedia stuff, so I think it’s important to have video journalism in the school newspaper.


Biggest Masterman pet peeve?

How hot it was during the winter. The heaters would malfunction and it would be like 90 degrees in the classroom, and I would have to wear a short sleeve shirt under my sweatshirt everyday when it was twenty degrees outside.


Cats or dogs?

Dogs.


If you could be any fictional character for one day, who would you be and why?

I don’t even know how many fictional characters I can remember… let’s just say Harry Potter, because... he’s cool. He does cool spells. You can also put me as Aang, because he’s also super cool.


What would you like to see change at Masterman?

Getting kids from a wider range of schools across the city. On a sillier note, they need to put up the basket on the roof, the third one, because they have not put a basket there in two years and it really screws over everybody who wants to play ball on the roof.