Graduation

It is hard to believe that after an exciting and busy senior year, graduation is over. However, it is even harder to believe that after having been at CSG since form two, my time as a unicorn has officially come to an end. I still remember my first day of school at CSG in second grade. As a new student, I got lost on my way to music class; yet, in the weeks before graduation, I found myself giving tours to prospective families, and I have come to learn the building as though it is a second home. With the wonderful teachers and students that fill the classrooms, lunchroom, library, and theater, I will miss putting on my CSG uniform as I begin college in the fall.

The commencement ceremony is one of the most important traditions at CSG. Every year graduation is held on a Thursday at 2:00 in the afternoon. A large white tent is set up outside the mansion, red carpet lines the sidewalks, a professional lighting and sound system is installed, and hundreds of white folding chairs are delivered. After watching the ceremony the past four years, it was surreal to be walking down the red carpet in my long white dress. Every graduating senior wears a long white dress and carries a dozen red roses during the ceremony. My classmate, the student council president, delivered an articulate and heartwarming speech, and Dr.Scheckelhoff, the associate head of school, also offered her words of wisdom in her speech.

I will truly miss all of the CSG community, but I plan to come back to visit. I look forward to staying in touch with my classmates, and I can't wait to hear about all of the adventures that lie ahead for the class of 2012.

Go Unies!

Reading Day

Kalki - Class of 2013

On Monday 14, I had my second to last reading day ever! I have to say that is was probably my most productive reading day yet.

At the end of each semester, we have final exams.  On the Monday before the exams we have this day called “Reading Day.” It is an optional school day, so you can choose to stay home, but I have always found it helpful to come in to school. Basically, you come to school and go to the classes you need help with or just extra practice. Teachers are available to answer you questions and provide helpful tips, and it is a great way to have “group study.” I love reading day because it is a great time to tie up loose ends and, afterwards, I always feel much better. This time, I spent almost half the day in the math room doing practice problems for pre-calculus. My teacher, Mrs. Potts, was so helpful and I felt so much more prepared afterwards. Also, because it isn’t technically a school day, you can go out for lunch. So my friends and I went to Piada. The food was great and it was a really nice break from studying. Now that reading day is over, I am pumped to take my exams this week; math and history are tomorrow. Wish me good luck!

May Program: Interning at Cheryl's Cookies

Bridget - Class of 2012

This was the first week of Senior May program! For those of you who are not familiar with the program, it allows seniors to have an internship or design a project for the last three weeks of school. For my May Program, I am interning at the Cheryl’s Cookies headquarters in Westerville, Ohio. Students are responsible for arranging and planning their own program with help from one faculty advisor. I set up my May Program when Cheryl Krueger came to speak to our school’s Student Ambassadors’ Society in the fall.

Each student has an on-site sponsor who is their supervisor during the program. My on-site Sponsor is the director of merchandising at Cheryl’s, but she also happens to be a CSG alum who did her Senior May Program at Cheryl’s before she graduated from CSG. Every day I spend seven hours at the headquarters, and this first week, I spent most of my time in the merchandising department.

While in the merchandising department, I have attended meetings where I learned about planning email and store promotions. I also learned about how prices are set in order to ensure profitable margins. Another meeting I attended included both the merchandising and production departments. During this meeting I learned that 14 truckloads of butter will be delivered to the production kitchen this week. That’s a lot of butter! One day I helped set up a store display that was photographed and sent to each of the store managers so that the displays look similar at every store location. On Friday, I ventured out of the headquarters and spent time with the district general store manager. I was able to go to the McCorkle, Easton, and Worthington Mall stores. While I was at the stores I helped fill orders, greet customers, and bag purchases. At the Easton store, I even passed out free cookie samples! Easton is the company’s flag-ship store, and it sees a significant increase in sales during the holidays. The typical shelf-life of a cookie is between 3-5 days in stores, but many of the cookies are made up to 6 months ahead of time and frozen before they are delivered to stores.

This week I also got to sit in on a meeting with the company’s photographer. The merchandising department walked through their preliminary ideas for all of the photos in the 2012 holiday magazine. The merchandising department typically starts working on the design and marketing strategy for products one year ahead of time. Right now, the department is planning Valentine’s day for next year, and is already brainstorming for other spring holidays.

Tomorrow I will be helping out at a photo shoot for the Halloween and Thanksgiving magazine. I will be at the photo shoot for the next three  days, and at the end of the week, I will be going to the location where all of the cookies are sent to be packaged and shipped anywhere in the country. Stay posted to hear about the rest of my May Program!

College Decisions

Sarah (Class of 2012)


After submitting my first application on November 1st, I completed my college application process yesterday when I committed to Davidson College, a small, liberal arts college in North Carolina.  The time-consuming process started for me when I visited my first colleges the summer before my junior year.  Almost two years later, I could not be happier.  My classmates, whom at the beginning of this year could not predict where they would be in a year, have now all committed to colleges and universities around the world!  One of my best friends, Robin, is going to spend a gap year in Kazan, Russia, attending university there before returning to Ohio State's Honors Program to study international relations.


I will be entering college as the quintessential undecided student.  Right now my interests range from international relations to foreign languages to journalism to neuroscience.  My options are completely wide open.


I have gone to CSG for the past 10 years of my life and tomorrow is my last day.  Senior year, while jumbled up with college applications, play rehearsals, after-school runs, clubs meetings, papers, tests, projects, and the longest wait of my life (January to April can seem like a very long time), truly flew by.  I spent the last three weeks in five different states, visiting my top three college choices (Vermont, North Carolina, Pennsylvania), winning top honors in a choir competition with CSG's vocal ensemble, The Grace Notes (see picture below), and finishing my courses for the year.

The Grace Notes before performing in Chicago's Orchestra Hall

My favorite part of this time in the college process is the college map.  The college counselors Ms. Shipps and Ms. Schultz put up a map of all the college in the U.S. where each senior puts a small tack and connects her name to her college.  I just love looking at the board and seeing where all of my friends will be next year.  Our class is the closest it's been all year and I am sad to leave.  


At the same time, I cannot wait to begin my Senior May Program (a mandatory 3 1/2 week project) with Pistacia Vera, a local patisserie, on Monday!  My friends' May Programs are taking them all around Columbus and the world.  They are studying  ayurvedic medicine in India, shadowing local surgeons, interning with organizations such as the Columbus Foundation, Cheryl's (of Cheryl's Cookies), and Ballet Met, and studying architecture in Rome and Paris.  Once we all complete our projects, we come back to school the week before graduation and present them to the Upper School.  I cannot wait to try something completely new that I may never have the chance to do again in my life.  Just one more beginning in this, the season of endings and beginnings.

Big Sis / Little Sis

Ellie (Class of 2014)

Even though CSG has girls from preschool to high school, I still feel connected with all divisions of the school. I think the greatest way that the school encourages relationships between older and younger girls is through the “Big Sis/Little Sis” program. In seventh grade you are assigned a little sister in the first grade and usually keep that same little sister until you graduate and she is in sixth grade. We meet a few times a year to do activities together and catch up. It’s a lot of fun to hear what’s happening in the Lower School and in my little sister’s life!

This past Friday we had a Big Sis/ Little Sis event. These days are also called Red-Gold days. The even numbered classes (class of 2012, 2014, 2016, etc.) are the Red Team and the odd numbered classes are the Gold Team.  I’m on the Red Team, so I get to wear a red shirt and jeans and girls on the Gold Team get to wear a gold shirt and jeans. The most recent event was this past Friday, near Earth Day, so we wrote and colored messages about the Earth in sidewalk chalk in the courtyard. 

Our events also usually involve a service project, so this time we created flowers out of magazines and wrote messages. They will be sent to Nationwide Children’s Hospital and hung up as decorations.

Spring Break with Robotics

CSG's robotics team, Murphy's Outlaws, builds a robot every year to compete in a series of challenges.  This year the team traveled to a FIRST Robotics competition in Cleveland.  Below are posts from three of the robotics team members:

Madeleine

Whew.  It took months of preparation and six long weeks of build, but I am happy to tell you that FIRST Team 677 finally made it through our season!

At the end of March we were able to travel up to Cleveland to compete in the FIRST Buckeye Regional with 58 other teams from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and Canada. It was so cool to be able to see all of the designs and fabrications that teams had developed over the course of their season and compare their designs to the ones we had on our robot.

Our robot performed exceptionally well at competition. We were able to compete in all of our matches and score lots of points for our team. Not only were we able to shoot and score baskets with the basketballs but our driver, Tiffany, was also able to balance our robot on two of the balancing bridges in the center of the field. This task was really hard but it earned our team at least 10 points and helped us to win many of our matches! Because of our robot performance, we were picked to be part of an alliance team for the finals of the competition. Only 24 teams compete in the finals so it was an honor that we were chosen to compete. Unfortunately, we were eliminated in the last game of a best 2 out of 3 set in the first round of finals but our entire alliance put up a fantastic effort!

It was so exciting to be able to attend competition and have our robot perform so well. I am excited to see what lies in store for the team next year and in the years to come! 

Kalki

From March 23 – 25, the Upper School’s FIRST Robotics Team went to the Buckeye Regional in Cleveland, Ohio. This was my first year on Murphy’s Outlaws and therefore my first time going on the trip. I had so much fun. We competed against other teams from Canada, New York, Pennsylvania, and of course Ohio. The robots’ main functions were picking up balls, shooting them in baskets, and balancing on bridges and our robot did amazingly! This year was the first time we made an alliance in a while (which means we made it to the quarterfinals) and we were also the best at balancing our robot on a bridge.  In addition to watching our robot play basketball, I got to meet so many other students on FIRST Robotics and watch the amazing robots everyone else built. After working for six weeks on the robot, it was so exciting watching it compete. Unfortunately, we lost in the quarterfinals, but it was a fantastic season and I cannot wait until next year! 

                Last week was our first week back from spring break. Everyone was so excited to see each other after a relaxing two weeks and for me I was ready to get back in the swing of things. Early Monday morning I turned in my tentative thesis statement for my British Literature Class. We are currently writing our last research paper about well-known British authors. I have Katherine Mansfield, the famous short story writer. The next class, my teacher Dr. Leahy decided to read all of our thesis statements aloud so the class could provide us with feedback. At first, I was nervous because I did not want everyone to hear my thesis, but it turned out to be helpful! My classmates gave me good advice and the experience was not awkward at all. We actually had loads of fun going over things to fix. By fixing our theses, we all improved our research papers. 

Jessie

From Relaxing to Robotics, i.e. What I Did Over Spring Break

 “Where did you go for spring break?” “Oh, nowhere, I just stayed here in Columbus.” The two weeks I spent doing nothing but relaxing in the comfort of my own home were the best two weeks of the year. In summary, I spent the first week catching up on sleep, reading books, and enjoying the sunny weather. I think my biggest achievement for the first week was re-reading The Hunger Games in four hours (that was a very productive morning if I do say so myself).

 The second week was a little more productive. I spent the first half of the week preparing for the FIRST Robotics competition that weekend. Everything had to be sorted, packed, and double checked so as to ensure that we didn’t leave anything of importance behind. I think that final packing list ended up being about five pages long. Thursday of that week was an early morning, as that was when FIRST Robotics Team 677 left for our competitions in Cleveland. This was an exciting year for us, as our robot had a lot of potential and we were excited to see it become competitive this year. After over two days of practice and competition, we ended up in the quarter finals alongside Team 4269, from St. Charles Preparatory School (this was their rookie year, and we mentored them through their first season) and Team 379 from Girard, OH. This was a big deal because our team has not made it to the quarterfinals in at least 7 years, if not longer. Needless to say, the team was ecstatic. It was a great weekend, and I am so proud of our performance. Congrats Team 677!

Overall, I had a wonderful spring break relaxing and participating in my favorite activity, FIRST Robotics.

Public Speaking Class

by Ellie (Class of 2013)

One of my favorite classes at the moment, which happens to be a semester class, is public speaking. So far we have written and delivered a few different speeches – an introduction speech for another girl in our class, a speech to demonstrate a task (for example, my friend Audrey demonstrated how to tack up a horse), and a speech that covered a current event in only 45 seconds. Not only do we write and deliver speeches, but we also cultivate skills such as connecting with an audience and delivering eloquent speeches. This week we worked on reading poetry. First we chose any poem from a book in the library and studied its punctuation and meaning before reading it aloud to the class. After that, we all opened a different poetry book and read whatever poem was on the page we opened to without studying it beforehand. It was a good way to use our newly acquired oration skills and try some improv! We even snapped instead of clapping after each girl read. I think it’s fantastic that public speaking is a required course because, as my teacher Mrs. Davis said on the first day of class, everyone will have to stand up and speak in front of a group people some time in life!