How one family found, carried, and returned to EXPLO’s culture of curiosity across three generations
“When else do 13-year-old boys do their own laundry?”
When Jen Light’s son Felix came home from EXPLO, he was doing more than talking about the courses he had taken and the friends he had made.
“He said he came back and he was like, ‘Mom, I feel different,’” Jen remembers. “More grown up.”
He was different in the way young people can be after they’ve experienced a little more autonomy, a little more responsibility, and a little more room to explore.
For the Light family, that feeling has traveled across decades. Jen and her younger sister Sarah Light first came to EXPLO as students in the 1980s. Jen later returned as a staff member in the early 1990s. Years later, her children Anja and Felix attended EXPLO, too. And this summer, Anja will return once again, this time as a staff member.
Their story is an example of what happens when you give kids the freedom to try something new, the respect to tackle complex subjects, and the inspiration to be curious, collaborative, and joyous.
For the Lights, EXPLO became that place again and again.
When Jen thinks about EXPLO now, one of the first things she remembers is juggling. Not a formal class. Not a scheduled activity. Just an informal moment in the off hours, when another student, Amanda Stern, taught her how to juggle in the dorm.
“I spend a lot of time with circus people now,” says Jen, whose work at MIT focuses on integrating movement and learning, closing the gap between research on movement and pedagogy. “And when I think of EXPLO, I think about how it’s the place where I learned how to juggle.”
That memory captures something she loved about EXPLO from the beginning: the conversations in the hallway, the time with kids from different parts of the country and the world, and the feeling that everyone had something to share.
“I just loved those informal moments,” she says. “Kids from all over the country and all over the world sharing what they knew, what they were thinking about. And it has served me well.”
Jen attended EXPLO in the early 1980s, after hearing about it through a childhood friend who had gone the year before and told her it was “awesome.” At the time, she had never been to sleepaway camp before. Wellesley felt close enough to home to be less intimidating. And because her friend was going, she knew she would not be stepping into the experience completely alone.
Still, what she found there was unlike anything else she’d experienced.
“You compare it particularly at that time,” she says. “What would you do as a kid 12 or 13 going to camp? You’d be assigned to a group of 20 girls. You’d all go to the same activities together.”
EXPLO felt different. Students chose courses. They had structured time and free time. They moved across a college campus. They met people they never would have met at home.
“I just thought it was so amazing about EXPLO then, and even more so looking back,” Jen says. “It was just completely different in what it gave kids the possibility of doing.”
There were dances at Alumnae Hall, a beautiful building on the Wellesley campus, where the experience felt far more grown up than a school gym dance. There were afternoons walking to the beach on Lake Waban with friends after class, “like we had taken a little day trip,” even though they had only walked 10 minutes from the dorm. There was the thrill of meeting roommates and friends whose lives were nothing like her own. One summer, Jen roomed with a girl from Kuwait. Decades later, her daughter would have a roommate from Brazil.
“What is it like to be an emerging teenager in a completely different part of the world?” Jen says. “Hearing about that was super cool.”
And then there were the courses.
One of Jen’s favorites was a filmmaking course where students made a goofy horror movie called Excitable Boy, named after the Warren Zevon song. She still remembers the layers of the project: writing the story, scouting the location, creating costumes, planning special effects, editing the final piece.
“Even in a well-resourced public or private school, you are not going to get to make a movie,” she says. “And not only that, it was like a goofy horror movie with all these special effects. I did learn something, but there was so much laughing.”
Another favorite explored American history and culture through the music of the Beatles. Students listened to songs, talked about rumors of hidden messages, and used music as a portal into the 1960s, youth culture, and the experience of being a teenager across generations.
“I still remember the name of the counselor, Anne Irwin, who taught that class,” Jen says, “because she was so good that I signed up for another class that she taught.”
For Jen’s sister, Sarah Light, EXPLO was also a chance to step outside the patterns that had defined her daily life.
Sarah, who went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and is now a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, spent three summers at EXPLO after sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Like Jen, she remembers the Wellesley campus, the friends, and the “sense of vibrancy” that came with being part of the program.
She went to the same school for her entire K-12 experience, but EXPLO gave her a chance to try exploring different sides of herself.
Her first summer, she took photography, using a Pentax camera and developing film. She also performed in the musical Grease. She played the school principal, with talcum powder in her hair to make it look gray. During one performance, she had to discipline some students and quickly turn to leave.
“My hair just did this cloud of talcum powder in the air,” she remembers. “It looked kind of silly, but also very funny.”
These experiences gave her permission to expand her sense of self.
“It was a chance to explore different sides of my personality,” she says.
One EXPLO course has stayed with her in a deeper way. It was about the history of the civil rights movement, and students were discussing legal cases and complex social questions. Sarah remembers one debate in particular about whether a fetus is a person in the context of injury and criminal prosecution.
It was a serious topic. A difficult one. And decades later, she still remembers being invited into that kind of conversation as a young teenager.
“It was a very sophisticated set of conversations that we got to have, even at a young age,” Sarah says. “The sparks were there, and the conversations and the topics were real.”
That mattered to her.
“It wasn’t, you know, like, is this lollipop the wrong color?” she says. “This was real stuff. And I think it was cool that the counselors and the instructors treated us with respect and gave us the opportunity to have real conversations.”
Today, Sarah teaches undergraduates and MBA students about environmental law and business responsibility to the environment. Her work asks students to think through complex, timely questions at the intersection of business, law, and society: deceptive advertising, electric vehicles, lithium mining, environmental responsibility, and the role of institutions in shaping the future.
Many of these questions do not have one simple answer. They require debate, evidence, judgment, and the ability to value different kinds of trade-offs.
That kind of classroom, Sarah says, is not unrelated to what she experienced at EXPLO.
“I think of EXPLO not as school,” she says, “but as a summer program for people who are intellectually curious.”
For Dick Light, Jen and Sarah’s father, that combination of intellectual seriousness and low-stakes experimentation is exactly what made EXPLO so valuable.
Dick is a longtime Harvard professor whose career has focused on improving education and understanding what students are really learning. He first met EXPLO founder Arnie Singal through Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, where both were on the board of trustees. As they got to know each other, Dick asked Arnie about his work at MIT. Arnie told him about what he was seeing among incoming MIT students: extraordinarily talented young people who were, in his view, too risk-averse.
“He said, they’re all smarter than I am,” Dick remembers. “They’re incredibly talented. They’re great, especially in technology and math, as you’d expect. But he said they are hopelessly risk-averse.”
Arnie’s concern helped shape what became EXPLO: a place where young people could be pushed outside their comfort zones in ways that felt exciting rather than punitive.
“They may succeed. They may fail,” Dick says. “But they’re not being graded.”
For Dick, that was the point. EXPLO gave students a place to try things without the usual penalty for being imperfect.
He remembers Sarah doing improvisation, where students might be handed a city, a color, and a day of the week, then asked to create a story on the spot. It was fun, but it was also a risk. There was always the possibility of making a fool of yourself. And that was part of the value.
“Get them at age 11, 12, 13, whatever they are,” Dick says. “Get them to try new things. That’s the big point, to take a risk. And the penalty for being no good at something is basically zero.”
As a parent, and now as a grandparent, Dick also values the breadth of ideas EXPLO places in front of young people. He describes his “secret wish” for his daughters as wanting them to become “Renaissance women”: not simply good at math, or history, or science, but eager to know something about many different things.
EXPLO, he says, creates that kind of exposure.
He saw it again years later with his grandson Felix. Dick would drive Felix to EXPLO and pick him up in the afternoon. On the ride home, he would ask what Felix had learned. One day, Felix asked him whether he knew how African countries set the price when they sell oil to the rest of the world.
Dick did not. Felix did.
“That’s what we discussed in our globalization class today,” Felix told him. “I was Nigeria.”
For Dick, that says a lot. A 10- or 11-year-old had not just heard about global economics. He had stepped into a role, taken on a perspective, and tried to understand a real-world challenge from the inside.
“It’s the variety of different ideas that come up at the different workshops and classes at EXPLO that expose kids to ideas that never cross their mind,” Dick says. “These things don’t come up in school.”
Jen eventually returned to EXPLO in the early 1990s as a staff member. That experience, she says, was just as formative as being a student—maybe even more so.
As an RA instructor, she designed and taught her own classes. Each class met for three weeks, 15 sessions in total. EXPLO gave her autonomy, resources, training, and trust.
“You have an idea, we’re going to trust you to execute it, we’re going to give you a certain dollar amount of resources, go!” she says.
The training was extraordinary. Staff practiced how to respond when a student was homesick, disruptive, struggling with a roommate, or acting out in class. Jen remembers watching other staff members model different ways of relating to young people and realizing she was learning something that would stay with her far beyond the summer.
“It was some of the best teacher training in my whole career,” she says.
It helped her feel ready when she went on to graduate school and began teaching. It shaped her work with students. It even shaped her parenting.
One message from that time still stands out: Be yourself.
Jen remembers EXPLO leaders emphasizing that if staff members showed up as themselves, students would see many different models of who they might become and naturally gravitate toward the adults who resonated with them.
“We hear so much now about being your authentic self,” she says. “That was so forward-thinking and very liberating.”
That idea has carried into Jen’s current work as an educator. After decades of teaching undergraduates and graduate students, she has increasingly focused her research and teaching around making academic subjects accessible through movement: how and why students need to be out of their seats, physically engaged, and active in the learning process.
She describes this phase of her career as channeling her “inner camp counselor.”
In one class, students choreograph lesson plans to teach topics in science. The ideal gas equation can become a dance. DNA replication can be explored through movement. Students who do not think of themselves as dancers can still use movement to learn tough subjects, increasing accessibility, fun, motivation, and early wins.
Those questions—how to make something accessible to a beginner, how to make it engaging, how to help students feel willing to try—are questions she first learned to ask at EXPLO.
“After a long career of doing more conventional stuff, I decided I wanted to return to the kind of fun-loving, more hands-on, active, joyful learning,” Jen says, “and make that kind of the final chapter of my career.”
When Jen’s daughter Anja attended EXPLO, Jen saw the program’s impact from yet another angle.
Anja had attended a strong school, but it was not always the way she learned best. She had worked hard and “muscled through,” Jen says, but the experience could leave her questioning herself. Then she went to EXPLO.
“EXPLO just exploded open all kinds of possibilities for her,” Jen says. “Understanding, oh my god, this is how I learn.”
That realization became part of Anja’s college search. She looked for places with a more hands-on, intellectually open feeling and ultimately found a strong fit at Macalester College.
Now a college student, Anja is returning to EXPLO as a staff member.
Dick saw her excitement firsthand when she visited him and his wife, Pat.
“Grandpa, Grandpa, I’m going to be on the staff,” he remembers her saying. “I’m going to teach this, I’m going to work on that.”
She was excited because she remembered what it felt like to be the new kid at EXPLO when she was 10. She remembered what the experience had given her. And now she would have the chance to help create that experience for someone else.
For Jen, that return is especially meaningful.
“She’s very excited to return with this idea that she can give back to kids who were maybe in her shoes,” she says.
That is the Light family’s EXPLO story in miniature: A student tries something new, grows more confident, carries the experience forward, and eventually helps make it possible for others.
Across the Light family’s memories, certain themes keep returning: autonomy, curiosity, low-stakes risk, respect, friendship, joy.
At 50 years, EXPLO’s impact can be seen not only in what students do during a summer but in what they carry away from it: the confidence to try, the ability to connect, the willingness to think across disciplines, and the memory of being treated as capable of more than they may have imagined.
Sarah sees that across the generations of her own family.
“I think it’s pretty cool that after Jen and I went, my sister’s kids have now both gone to EXPLO,” she says. “I think it’s a really special place.”
For Dick, EXPLO also points toward something education needs more broadly: stronger relationships, more real-world questions, and more chances for students to stretch in environments where the stakes are experience based instead of grade based.
His hope for education at all levels is simple: “much more personal relationships.”
EXPLO, he believes, has long understood that.
And as Anja prepares to return as a staff member, the story continues—not as nostalgia but as renewal. The same spark that once helped Jen and Sarah try on new versions of themselves is now moving through another generation.
A student becomes a staff member. A student becomes a teacher. A parent watches a child discover confidence. A grandfather hears a 10-year-old say, with complete conviction, “I was Nigeria.”
That is what 50 years can look like: not one story but a family of stories—a spark passed forward.