MAY 29, 2026
VOLUME 9, ISSUE 6
Commuting in Crisis
Artist Spotlight
Departing Teachers
Senior Reflections
Matcha or Coffee?
As Caltrain and BART face funding restrictions, students and teachers discuss the impact of public transport on their daily lives.
Senior Audrey Z. ‘26 presents her debut art exhibition: "Soft Bodied."
We celebrate the legacy of the six teachers leaving the Nueva community this year.
A collection of lessons and meditations on the Nueva experience—brought to you by senior editors from The Nueva Current.
How do Nueva students stay caffeinated throughout the day?
Features // Page 8
Opinion // Pages 18-19
Culture // Page 7
Entertainment // Page 21
News // Page 3
Years after graduation, what kinds of lessons do Nueva alumni carry with them into the world?
DESIGN: Anwen C. / The Nueva Current
Since its founding in 2013, the Nueva Upper School has graduated nine classes of students. Most of them have gone on to four-year colleges, and today, many of them are navigating early careers, graduate programs, and the general business of finding their footing in the world beyond. Not everyone looks back on their high school experience as a defining period of their life. But some do, and for many Nueva alumni, the influence of those four years has proven surprisingly durable. Just ask Om Gokhale ’18. These days, Gokhale works as a graduate researcher and designer at the MIT Media Lab: a “direct offshoot,” he says, of the time he spent at Nueva. The Upper School had only been open for a year at that point, but as a freshman, Gokhale was immediately taken by the energy on campus. Here was an environment where he was encouraged to pursue multiple interests, take ownership of his learning, and be a bit spontaneous all the while. So maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that Gokhale was drawn to Nueva’s design thinking program. It was the “perfect”
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interdisciplinary environment, a space where he could blend his interests in visual design and systems thinking. Freshman year, Gokhale built a contact-sharing— Swap—alongside a few classmates in an entrepreneurship elective. They started with researching and need-finding, and later spent the next two years pitching, spreadsheeting, and raising capital. “If [I have] one takeaway from the Nueva experience, it was moments like that where what you think is just a task or an assignment can, with the right care and attention, become something much more meaningful and tangible,” he said. The project eventually fizzled out, but Gokhale still looks back on it fondly. He says that it introduced a mindset that has heralded the rest of his career. After high school, Gokhale studied his own major—”Humane Design”—at a liberal arts college, focused on ethical interactions between people and technology. He then took a job at IBM; left it for a machine learning startup; and eventually landed a graduate position at the MIT Media Lab— as it happens, through a tip given by a
close Nueva classmate. Whether in his career or simply the way he moves through the world, Gokhale still traces a “phenomenal” amount of his identity back to his time at Nueva. Oh, and this summer, he’ll be marrying fellow alumna Hannah Zucklie ’17. Now, Gokhale doesn’t speak for all alumni; not every Nueva student will feel the influence of their high school years so acutely after the fact. But his story goes to show that many Nueva alumni view their high school years as an inflection point of sorts. A period of exploration, where something—perhaps a particularly enjoyable class, extracurricular, or mentor—came along and unwittingly altered the trajectory of their life. Now a teacher at nearby Burlingame High School, Kayla Wagonfeld ’19 frequently finds herself reflecting on her time at Nueva. “I credit Nueva with so much of my decision to be an educator,” she says. “[At Nueva,] I’ll always remember the way that my teachers made me want to come to school every day, made me want to learn,
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and encouraged me to be curious about everything and anything.” That said, Wagonfeld left Nueva without a sure sense of what she wanted to do in college. Throughout high school, she’d wandered across different disciplines, from English to ecology to religious studies: “I was a very curious, happy learner,” Wagonfeld said. “I wanted to get to know everything and take advantage of all of Nueva’s opportunities.” The turning point, then, came during her first year in college. COVID-19 shutdowns were taking effect across the country, but Wagonfeld was determined to find a job she could do in person. She eventually found a summer teaching position at a startup charter school in St. Louis, Missouri. “I loved the energy of it all,” she said. “I felt like I was at Nueva again, where we were all invested and creating things together with our students. After that, I was like, this is awesome. And I never turned back.”
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