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Gulliver Prep senior Ian Gill is Gulliver’s Silver Knight nominee in the Drama category. He worked with an organization called Students for Environmental Education and Discovery (SEED), which seeks to educate students about climate change for his Silver Knight project.
He and a friend developed curriculum that gives kids a broad overview of climate change.
“There were nine units,” he says. “I worked on three of them. With all of the nine units, they would be able to engage in activism in their communities as they grow up into a world that’s going to be increasing affected by climate change.”
He designed the curriculum, worked on the SEED website and did presentations.
“Early our freshman year, Maya Gowda and I wanted to expand the Environmental Club at Gulliver,” he says. “We started the project with two other students. Maya led the project.”
When not working on environmental issues, Gill is immersed in drama. He’s been in drama since middle school. He’s been in more than 12 productions in high school alone.
“I’ve spent a lot of time doing drama,” he says.
He says his drama skills have helped him in a variety of ways, including public speaking.
He has done well at the Thespian competitions. Gulliver’s One Act play entry in this year’s competition – Into the Woods – was only one of two from Miami-Dade to go to the state competition.
Gill has won Top Honors for playwriting in both his junior and senior year. This year the ensemble one act play also won Top Honors.
At school Gill is a peer counselor for the Health Information Project, teaching health to freshmen at school.
“We teach it during directed studies or study hall,” he says. “When you get into the module, they get engaged. At first, they are reticent, then they become receptive for sure.”
Some of the modules can be difficult to talk about, such as the modules on mental health.
“Also, the module on relationships,” he says. “Abuse is hard to talk about. The kids recognize the importance.”
Gill works with the Environmental Club to do beach clean-ups. He’s done around eight or nine. Most of the time they pick up regular trash, but one time at a location near Marine Stadium, there were more plastic cups and bottles than he’d ever seen before.
“It was a shocking moment in all the beach clean-ups I’ve done,” he says. “There were trash cans, but they were so full, there was no room. It was incredible.”
He says it was a moment he felt climate education was necessary.
While Gill excels in drama, he also excels in math. He’s taking a graduate level course at the University of Miami in Abstract Algebra II.
He’s a member of several clubs, including Mu Alpha Theta, where he’s president. He’s also president of the Model United Nations club.
He’s earned the Best Delegate Award at four different conferences out of the six or seven he has attended.
“My favorite thing is the chance it gives me to connect to people from across the country and all over the world,” he says.
Gill plans to major in physics in college. He has not yet committed to a university. His goal is to get a PhD in physics and study either particle physics or nuclear physics and become a researcher.
He did research on geo-magnetic storms from July to January.
“The first six weeks were through a research program and the rest were online,” he says.
“The paper is still pending publication in Space Weather Journal.”
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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