Patrick Noel

Patrick

Seeing the other side.

When I came to Kent, I felt a little intimidated by the precedent my brother had set. He'd done really well, been a dorm prefect, all that kind of stuff. I wasn't sure I could live up to that, either in my parents' eyes, or, I suppose, in my own eyes.

But the longer I was at Kent, the more I began to see me—for me. And the exciting thing was it wasn't always the same old me. Sometimes it was surprising, like when I started playing football, or went from never having swum competitively to being the go-to guy on butterfly, one of the hardest strokes.

And then I was tapped for the Senior Council, just like my brother, and became senior prefect. The main job for senior prefect is to be an advocate for students on the disciplinary committee. For me, this was interesting, because I've always been the kind of person who never really got into trouble. And yet here I was, defending kids who, in some cases, had broken major rules. That meant I had to relate to them. I had to understand why they did what they did and explain it to the teachers. You could almost say I had to explore new parts of my own character.

This happened in my AP psych class too. We had this assignment to alter our behavior in little ways. You did it for the whole day and observed how people reacted to you. I really enjoyed this. It felt like delving into your own personality, or at least possibilities for your personality. It was like asking what's on the other side of where you normally live. It sounds hard but, well, for me, it was easy. Again, maybe that's Kent, always pushing you to look from different angles, to see what else is out in the world, and even see what else is inside you.