Bogdan

What I like about being a Resident Leader is feeling that younger students look up to me, and I'm setting a right example for them to follow. We’re making all of us stronger by helping each other.

Bogdan

Imagine coming from 4,666 miles away to start school at the beginning of a pandemic. Bogdan, who hails from Nizhny Novgorod, a city of 1.2 million residents some 250 miles east of Moscow, faced just that.

“It was pretty tough, very weird,” he said. Just getting here represented a challenge, what with the visa process complicated because of U.S. and international sanctions. The visa issues meant that Bogdan didn’t enter the country until the fall, and he had to quarantine upon arrival. Four years later, though, he’s emerged none the worse, indeed stronger.

He was attracted to the opportunities offered by going to school in the United States and didn’t really experience much culture shock, thanks to YouTube. Still, he noted some nuances that gave him pause, such as the casual manner students have with teachers and the American propensity for small talk.

“Everyone’s greeting each other like, ‘Hey, how are you doing,’” he said. “People are more friendly but maybe less honest. In Russia, we don't really do that. We only ask things that we actually want to know.”

During his time at NMH, Bogdan pursued numerous extracurricular activities. There were his three years on the rowing team, and three years singing in Hogapella. Volleyball, too.

But it was the wrestling team and his role as a Resident Leader that impacted him the most on his path to self-improvement, Bogdan said.

“I've always been attracted to things like the martial arts,” he said. “I’d watch UFC, Bellator MMA, boxing, and so on. I just love the sport [of wrestling] because of how I can put my strength into it.”

As a Resident Leader in the 9th-grade dorm Chan Cottage, he did things like help students with their homework and navigate their academic lives as well as dealing with the dynamics of dorm life. This involved issues ranging from small interpersonal conflicts to weighty personal problems that a student might not feel comfortable approaching an adult with directly.

One of the greatest challenges, and one of the most educational, was maintaining the balance between being a rule-enforcing mentor and being like an older brother, for fun times and camaraderie.

“One of the aspects of leadership is to be embedded in the community,” he said. “Fourteen-year-olds can cross the line pretty frequently.”

Teamwork is a key factor in peacekeeping, he said. Bogdan sees the RL role as an embodiment of the values he learned at NMH.

“What I like about being an RL is feeling that [younger students] look up to me, and I'm setting a right example for them to follow,” he said. “We’re making all of us stronger by helping each other.”

Balancing the time between being an RL and classes (he gives shout-outs to Advanced Calculus AB and teachers Carl Sangree and Steven Campos) came easily to him. It’s possible that having wrestling practice almost every day kept him disciplined, he said.

Bogdan looks forward to studying finance and possibly computer science in college, although he’s not ready to pin down where he wants to go in his post-NMH life.

”I don’t want to predict,” he said. “I like trying new stuff. So the first year, I’ll study, I’ll get an internship, and we’ll just see how all that goes.

— By Bill Sweet