Creative Santa Barbara siblings Ryan and Sidney Suh have established the online Humanities Plus journal.
Ryan is a senior at Cate School, and Sidney is a junior at the school.
“My sister and I co-founded Humanities Plus last year to address an issue that teenage writers often face: a lack of readily available platforms to publish our work,” Ryan Suh told Noozhawk. “We wanted writers of any age, especially high school students like ourselves, to have a place where they could readily share their thoughts and opinions on topics that bridge the humanities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields.”
The siblings are already accomplished. Ryan Suh has been elected for six consecutive terms as a class senator at Cate. He was also the junior year editor and will be the senior columnist for the school newspaper, El Batidor, and competes on Cate’s boys varsity squash and varsity volleyball teams.
Sidney Suh’s scholastic career closely mirrors her brother’s, with the addition of being principal trombone in Cate’s orchestra and the founder of the first brass chamber group in the school’s history. She also participates in the Santa Barbara Youth Symphony and was selected to perform as part of the National Honors Band at Carnegie Hall earlier this year.
The siblings have been in Santa Barbara for 11 years since moving from Boston in 2009. Besides Cate, they have attended Montecito Union School, Marymount of Santa Barbara and La Colina Junior High School.
Since its inception in 2019, Humanities Plus has grown to include 11 writers and artists from countries such as New Zealand, China and Peru. The journal gains most of its contributors by reaching out to schools and scholastic organizations, both domestically and internationally. Additionally, its audience has expanded to countries such as Germany, Ireland and China.
“The humanities classes at Cate served as an inspiration for the creation of Humanities Plus,” Sidney Suh said. “The intersections between English, history, art and music addressed in our classes made us wonder what other fields the humanities overlapped with. That’s when we shifted our focus to the connections between the humanities and STEM fields.”
In terms of the journal’s content, Ryan Suh said, “Our issues consist of articles that align with our four interdisciplinary categories: History Plus, Literature Plus, Philosophy Plus and Art Plus. These categories each cover a specific range of interdisciplinary topics that fall under the Humanities Plus mission of our journal.”
He said he plans to continue the journal as he branches out to the college platform, adding, “It will give us a chance to expand.”
June Issue
» Akhilesh Balasingam is a 16-year-old high school student from San Jose. He is passionate about increasing public awareness of environmental issues through his writing and photography. In addition to conducting research in electrical engineering, in his spare time he also enjoys hiking, painting and playing squash.
» Annika Bajaj is 16 years old and lives in Lexington, Mass. She attends Lexington High School and enjoys playing violin, writing poetry, and baking.
» Edward Zhang is a junior at Palo Alto High School in California. He has won two Scholastic Art Awards and earned a certificate of special recognition in his district’s Congressional Art Competition. He enjoys using acrylics to depict portraits and human figures. Additionally, he writes articles about foreign policy for his school’s Agora magazine. In his free time, he walks his dog, Snowy.
» Ying Hu is a sophomore at Rutgers Preparatory School in New Jersey. She has a passion for psychology and neuroscience. She likes painting, playing the piano and practicing Chinese calligraphy.
Click here for more information about the journal, or email hplusjournal@gmail.com.
Founded in 1910, Cate is a four-year, coeducational college preparatory school with boarding and day students totaling about 300. The student-teacher ratio is 5-to-1 with an average class size of 10 to 12 students. Click here for more information.
— Noozhawk contributing writer Rochelle Rose can be reached at rrose@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkSociety, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.