Nathaniel Tong was one of NuVu’s first ever graduates in 2015, and looking back on his time at the project based high school, he says it was this experience that not only guided what he’d pursue in college at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), but prepared him for his current role as Senior Industrial Designer at Eberlestock USA.

The industrial design major shares that when his family moved to Boston from California, the city’s public school system placed him several grades behind where he had left on the west coast. “That wasn’t an option for me at all, so when a friend in my fencing class told me about his school, and how they were making music, working with cool tools and software, and being taught by these folks from MIT, I went home and said I wanted to check it out.”

What Nathaniel recalls the most about his first year was the vast amount of projects he was able to tackle through NuVu’s design studios. “The first thing I remember was the amount of equipment we had access to,” he says. “3D printers and laser cutters and all kinds of woodworking equipment that we could use. One of the first projects was something in robotics—I want to say it was making some kind of weird spider thing move around. The kinds of projects that we were doing were super fascinating to me.”

When asked what his biggest takeaway was after graduating, he immediately answers. “Problem solving, for sure. I don’t think that I used that side of my brain in a legitimate way before NuVu, and so it was really awesome just understanding how to solve a problem—or if I didn't know how to do something, it was fun to learn because I was doing something real as opposed to working on a worksheet.”

At his current position with Eberlestock, working with many rigid military clients, Nathaniel says he is grateful for one piece of NuVu learning in particular, and that is to remove the ego from his projects. “Besides having the CAD skills or experience working with Adobe that I could bring to my job,” he says, “it was how I learned to separate the feedback and comments on my projects from myself. That it isn’t personal. I learned to let the ego go.”

One thing this inaugural NuVuer hopes to impart to anyone considering attending this one-of-a-kind high school, it’s that the experience here is simply unlike any other. “It's such a fun process and you get to use the skills you're learning right in the moment,” he says. “And if you’re someone who doesn't really know what they're doing—like me when I was first in high school—it's a really good opportunity to experiment and figure it out by trying a whole bunch of different things.”