Community Life
Alumni Success & Staying Connected
Summerfield Waldorf alumni are part of our community for life. See where our graduates go after Summerfield, and update your contact information to stay connected with classmates, faculty, and campus news.
Waldorf education provides a well-rounded foundation. Our graduates attend diverse colleges and universities and succeed in many different professions, from STEM fields to Business to the Arts and beyond.
Stay connected
You’ll always be part of the Summerfield community. Whether you graduated last spring or decades ago, we’d love to stay in touch — with news from campus, invitations to alumni gatherings, and the chance to reconnect with the teachers and classmates who shaped your Summerfield years.
The best way to stay connected is to reach out directly to our Development Office with your current name, address, and email. Let us know what you’ve been up to since graduation — we love hearing where Summerfield alumni end up.
Give back
Many alumni choose to support the next generation of Summerfield students through giving. Every gift, of any size, helps sustain the programs, farm, and faculty that made your own Summerfield years possible.
Characteristics of Waldorf graduates
The Survey of North American Waldorf Graduates (2008) indicates that Waldorf Education is achieving the following in its graduates:
- Multiple intelligences and cross-disciplinary learners
- Global consciousness and sustainability
- Basis for moral navigation
- Creative problem solving
- High levels of social intelligence
- Environmental stewardship
- High levels of emotional intelligence
- Thinkers who think outside the box
By the numbers
| Survey of North American Waldorf Graduates | |
|---|---|
| 97% | attended college or university |
| 92% | placed a high value on critical thinking |
| 91% | are active in life-long education |
| 90% | highly value tolerance of viewpoints |
| 90% | highly satisfied with their occupation |
| 42% | chose sciences or math as a major |
2015 Success Survey
What are the paths our students take after studying at Summerfield? — by Beth Weisburn, High School Coordinator.
A Summerfield education prepares student for life, to be healthy and fully engaged in meaningful activity at age 35, 50 and beyond. This looks different for each individual student and the paths they take are diverse. Most students engage in some type of advanced training or education. Many take a gap year for travel and volunteer work right after graduating. Some enter college or university immediately, with a career goal in mind.
What do SWSF graduates do in the years just after high school? To get a sense of this, I took a “snapshot” of the 2015 class. I sent out an email to the addresses used for senior project work, heard from some parents, and researched via social media and the internet. In a very short time, using these methods I was able to find some information for 22 of the 25 students.
A significant percentage enter professions in science, technology and social services. Most (22) attended training programs, college or university, including:
- Sciences: Masters in Chemistry, Biology, minor in Math, Communication Sciences and Disorders (Audiology), Integrative Psychology, Kinesiology (Physical Therapy), Molecular Environmental Biology, Nursing (2 students), and Physics and Math
- Humanities or Social Sciences: Economics and Philosophy, History, Political Science, Pre-law, law internships in the criminal justice system, Public relations/Advertising: Strategic Communications, Sociology with Legal Studies, Spanish minor
- Interdisciplinary: Science, Tech and Society, and German Studies
- Art/Performance: Game Art, Theatre
Four students immediately applied to graduate school—one to Law School, one for Physical Therapy, one for Audiology, and one for Chemistry. In addition, two are working in research labs—one in Physics designing a perovskite-based thermochromic solar window, and a second in Biology working in a non-profit medical scientific research center. One student attended a circus training, and is one of three students now working in Sonoma County. Another student presently manages a creative team for video productions for an online tutoring company. (Two students did not respond, and I could find no information about their work or schooling after Summerfield.)
Notice that 9 students majored in the sciences, representing half of the total number of majors reported!
SWSF students are creative in the paths they take, in this time of rising college tuition costs. In recent years, several have attended the Santa Rosa Junior College for two years, and then transferred to universities such as UC Berkeley and UCLA to complete their four-year degrees. In some instances, these students have graduated debt free!
Other students go directly to liberal arts colleges across the country where they receive substantial scholarship support or financial aid. Most students are accepted to one of their top choices of college or university. More importantly, four or five years later, many are still attending school or have graduated.
Alumni profiles
Lisé Whitfield
As a teenager at Summerfield Waldorf High School, Lisé found a place where her passion for science, art, and the humanities could intertwine. Today, she runs a company she created called WorldWise Learning Adventures — a traveling school that offers immersive, place-based learning programs for children and teens around the globe.
Dawn Barlow — Marine Science Research Associate
Her research on how blue whale vocalizations change with environmental conditions was featured in National Geographic on July 29, 2025. Read the National Geographic article.
Jonathan Beard — The Music Man
The Santa Rosa native orchestrates and composes music for TV, movies and video games, from Handmaid’s Tale to Deadpool to the video game Star Wars: Battlefront. Read the article by Dan Taylor of The Press Democrat.
