Where Are They Now: Arete Academy Graduate

By: Arthur Hill

I attended Arete Academy since its founding in 2016, though it was under a different name at the time, and graduated in 2019 at the age of 15. Before that, almost the entirety of my education was done at home through textbooks and websites such as Khan Academy. Math was the only subject that I was required to complete, and was placed before any other subject. Everything else that I learned at home and at Arete Academy was done so entirely on my own; I learned how to program in Java so I could make mods for Minecraft, I learned how to build a computer because my current one was too slow, and I also gained an understanding of how computers worked in the process. This eventually led to me getting a Arduino microcontroller to have more flexibility in my electronics projects and creating an account on a cybersecurity forum called hellboundhackers where I learned the basics of networking and how to host a server (I’m currently working on my own site at https://arthurjhill.dev 😉 ). Because of all of this, I knew exactly what I wanted to do once a graduated from Arete Academy. Had I studied under a more traditional education model, there’s just no way that I would be able to learn what I truly wanted to learn and do what I wanted to do. 

Immediately after graduating from Arete Academy, I enrolled as an electrical engineering and computer engineering double major student at Old Dominion University. Since enrolling at ODU, I have taken a summer internship position as an engineer as Newport News Shipbuilding and have been teaching microelectronics fabrication as a TA at ODU since January. This summer I will be interning with the Virginia Microelectronics Consortium at Virginia Tech working on microelectronics projects related to microfluidics. I am also one of the founding members of the IEEE student branch at ODU and have been serving on its executive board since the Spring of 2023. Even during my time at ODU I’m still finding time to pursue my own projects, and doing things that I only could have dreamed of when I was younger, though I can say with certainty that I would not be where I am now if it weren’t for Arete Academy.

I wouldn’t describe my time studying at Arete Academy as anything less than extremely beneficial and constructive. Not only was I given the opportunity to learn what I wanted to at my own pace, but I also made some really great friends who I still go hang out with at least once a week. My Arete Academy friend group actually formed when my brother and I were looking for a group of people to start a D&D campaign with. Not only did Arete Academy prepare me for adulthood, but it gave me the opportunity to excel in my future studies. Two years before graduating Arete Academy, I dual-enrolled at Tidewater Community College to take all of my calculus and physics classes so I could jump straight into the classes that I cared about most when I got to ODU. All of these things considered, I don’t believe there was a better way to prepare me for my future, both academically and socially.