The Fenn School · Class of 2030
王实 · Shi Wang
Curious scientist. Steady pianist. Bold new American.
My Story01 — About Me
Home
Beijing → Boston
I moved from Beijing to Boston in November 2025 and started fifth grade at The Fenn School just two weeks later.
It was a big jump. I left Beijing World Youth Academy, my friends, and my grandparents behind. My dad is still back in China — he is a business lawyer there — and my mom came with me to Concord. I miss home sometimes, but I am the kind of kid who warms up fast, and Fenn has already started to feel like my place.
What I care about is building things that are real. Rockets. Piano pieces. Animations. Stories. I want to understand how the world works, from gravity to friendships to the color of sunlight, and I want to be the kind of person who is still learning decades from now.
02 — Academics
Fifth grade, Semester 2 — Ms. Writer, Advisor
In lit circles we read The War That Saved My Life; my group built a board game for the final project. I am writing an ongoing serial for the class newsletter with my friend Carson — we add a new installment every cycle.
Spring goal: grow my vocabulary and tighten my grammar before sixth grade.
This quarter we worked through order of operations, statistics (mean, median, mode), geometry with right isosceles triangles, and the connections between fractions, decimals, and percents.
Spring goal: make enrichment problems a weekly habit, and prep for AMC 8.
We studied the solar system — gravity, the light spectrum, Earth's seasons, the phases of the moon. For the final project I designed an alien creature whose body was shaped by the physical conditions of a planet I chose.
Spring goal: settle in faster at the start of class and stay focused during labs.
I wrote an opinion paragraph comparing Athens and Sparta and connected my reasons directly to my main argument. We moved into Rome with an independent Choice Board that includes an engineering component in the iLab — my favorite kind of work.
Spring goal: sharpen my punctuation and use stronger transition words in my writing.
What's Next
My teachers set strong goals for me this spring: grow my vocabulary, tighten my writing, stay focused at the start of every class, and make enrichment work a weekly habit. I'm tracking each of them.
03 — Piano
Piano is the quiet part of my day. I've been playing for more than six years — it started in Beijing and it moved with me to Boston. It's the one room in my life where the rules are clear and the reward is immediate: you practice, you hear yourself get better.
My plan for the next two years is to enter regional competitions and to use piano as one of my core talents when I apply to secondary schools. I love that piano rewards the same kind of patience my dad showed when he built his way from a small village to Beijing — one honest day at a time.
On stage at the WIRC · Steinway & Sons
04 — Soccer
When I started at Fenn I didn't know many kids yet. Soccer was how I learned the hallway. On the field, language matters less — you read each other through runs, passes, and the small moment before the ball comes.
I played during Fenn's winter athletics term and I am looking forward to the spring season. A teacher once told me I should let more of my potential show — soccer is one of the places I can do that, because it is a game of small decisions made at full speed.
With the team · Beijing, summer 2025
05 — Science & Building
Outside of Fenn, this is where my curiosity actually lives.
My science teacher Mr. Byrd said I have a "genuinely strong mind" for labs. I spend hours replicating experiments I see online — spectroscopes, moon phases, simple chemistry. Pipettes and lab coats are my favorite uniform.
A long-form skill I like: you show up, you put in the laps, and eventually you are faster than the boy you were last month. Same lesson as piano — just wetter.
Summer 2025 I caught my first real waves. Surfing teaches you patience in a completely different way — you wait, then you commit, then you fall, then you paddle back out and try again.
Back home in Beijing I have a dog named Snowy and two cats, Meowth and Migoa. They're the reason I know how to be patient with someone who doesn't speak the same language as me.
I watch every SpaceX and NASA launch I can find — Starship especially. My dream is to work on a rocket team one day, the kind of team that lets the whole world watch the countdown.
Give me a pile of LEGO and a weekend and I'll give you back a machine with moving parts. Gears, cams, differentials — I like figuring out how the real world works by rebuilding small pieces of it.
I cut paper figures and photograph them frame by frame — fights, chases, quiet moments. It's patient work, same feel as practicing piano: one still image at a time until there's motion.
06 — Reading
Fifth grade · 2025–2026 · in order of discovery.
My favorite series so far. I have read every book and reread a few.
Finished the trilogy. Long books do not scare me.
A comfort read. I come back to it between harder books.
I liked Mockingjay best — the hardest ending of the three.
Read for fun this term. It made me think differently about groups.
Finished both back-to-back. Dystopia is my current favorite genre.
Our Fenn lit-circle book. My group built a board game for the final project.
Animal Farm · Coral Island · one or two more every week.
07 — What I'm Building Toward
I want to go to MIT or Harvard to study science, and I want to work on something that launches.
My dad grew up in a small Chinese village and built his way to Beijing. Every time the work feels too heavy, I think about him. He is the reason I know hard things are just long things.
Between now and college there are a lot of doors, and I am trying to walk through them carefully. The next one is a top secondary school — somewhere that will push me and also let me be the kid who builds rockets on weekends.