Sarah Zdancewic Senior Spotlight

What is your favorite class you've taken or a favorite teacher of yours?

I’ve always really liked Ms. Rowley. Her classes have been great. I think she does a really good job of “de-Mastermaning” people—just learning to not take academics so seriously that you’re stressing out between a 95 and a 94. Especially her class in 9th and 10th grade; I had her for English and that was really fun. I could also give a shoutout to Mr. Tannen’s calculus class that I took last year, which was great. That class really made me love calculus.

Which Masterman tradition will you miss the most when you graduate?

My favorite Masterman tradition is definitely the musical. I’ve worked on stage crew and tech crew for the musical for four years now and it's such a magical thing to watch all the components come together at the end—actors, tech crew, stage crew, orchestra. I also think it’s kind of awesome that basically 1 in every 3 people is involved with the musical in some way or another.

What are you looking forward to in your senior year?

I’m looking forward to getting to spend a lot of time with people, especially after college applications are turned in. Just enjoying being social and all of the grade experiences, and doing all of our traditions again for the last time. It’s gonna be nice. 

Tell me about your favorite Mock Trial memory.

Right before we have a round, sometimes we’ll leave school early so we can prep… It's really fun when we have a few hours to just sit down in a room and we’re all practicing and working on the case together. It's just you and all of your teammates together in a room working on the same thing and bouncing ideas off each other and helping each other drill. It's fun to just sit there and work on the problem for an extended period of time uninterrupted, as a group.

You sell a lot of your handmade crafts at the Vibe Art Fair. What is a piece of art you’ve made that you are most proud of?

Most of the things I sell at the art fair are earrings, but I do a lot of art projects that I don’t sell. I think I’m proud of everything that I make, because it all shows a different part of me. I just love exploring a bunch of different mediums—I do crochet and collage, I write and draw, and I do digital art and video editing. I feel like you can get a lot out of making any kind of art and doing anything. 

What is your favorite part about living in and going to school in Philadelphia?

One thing that I love so much about Philly is the public transportation system. I love SEPTA and I will yell it from the rooftops until the day I die. It's so cool that everyone at Masterman comes from different parts of the city and most people get to school on SEPTA, or have SEPTA keycards. It's great having this one central connecting factor for people from all over the city, and I can meet up with my friends by taking the bus or the trolley or the Market-Frankford Line. I just love that we all have this shared transit system, and everyone on it is a part of my community. 

How has being in tech crew impacted your time at Masterman? 

Being involved with crew is such a great way to make all of the things that people work on at Masterman come to life. People don’t realize how many of our events really rely on light crew and sound crew and tech crew as a whole. We just had the Mock Election kickoff, and tech crew did a bunch of work to make that really special. Crew isn’t talked about much, but it really does a lot for the events that we have. It's really awesome.