It was the end of sophomore year, and senior Jenna Brewer knew she had to get out.

“I didn’t like being at high school,” she said. “I was in this place at the end of sophomore year where I just needed to do something else.”

So she went to her parents, who found the Oxbow School, a semester school in Napa, CA with a visual arts emphasis.

“I would be so miserable if I hadn’t done that,” Brewer said. “I would be so lost. I would be so upset. And so, so frustrated with everything. Because there were missing pieces that I couldn’t figure out and wasn’t going to get the answers to here.”

Brewer spent the first semester of her junior year at Oxbow, where she cycled through classes in painting, sculpture and new media, as well as traditional academics.

Fridays were reserved for field trips to galleries, private collections and artists’ studios, according to Oxbow’s website.

According to the website, the Oxbow school day balances studio time with extended class sessions: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

In these discussion-based, writing-heavy classes, Brewer learned about political identity and ethics, about natural dyes and the food industry.

And in every class, she learned about herself.

“All of the work I did required me to reflect on myself and who I was as a person,” she said.

She came out as gay. She discovered her academic strengths and weaknesses. She realized that she could write well, given the chance to explore a passion, and that she liked contributing in class, when provided time to gather her thoughts.

“It was the big missing piece that I was talking about earlier. This idea that I’m not stupid. I’m a smart person, and I just need extra time,” she said.

Brewer said that semester school showed her that academically, she would be alright. After years of feeling like a bad student, she had found a place she could thrive.

“I was so doubtful of myself [before],” she said. “It’s such a shitty feeling when you feel like you can’t do well at things, and you don’t know why, and not only can you not understand what’s going on in school, but you can’t understand why you can’t understand it.”

“The person I was there, I wish I could go back as the person I am now, because I feel like I could take advantage of it so much more,” she said.

Coming back from Oxbow, Brewer said that she was able to better emphasize her strengths.

“I’m good at writing,” she said. “It’s showing a lot more now in my classes, and that is great.”

She joined School Within a School as a senior, where she said the small, tight-knit community enables her to play to her strengths much as she did at Oxbow.

Next year, she will attend Bennington College, a school with less than 900 students, which she said takes two or three Oxbow alumni almost every year, and which she chose with Oxbow in mind.

According to SWS Curriculum Coordinator Dan Bresman, semester schools give students new perspectives on the different ways school can be.

Brewer said that her mainstream dean and guidance counselor had never helped a student through the semester school process. But Bresman said that SWS sends at least one student per year, thanks to visits from alumni and existing relationships with program representatives.

Senior Sam Martel, who spent last semester at CITYterm in New York City, said that he had never thought about semester school until a representative from CITYterm visited SWS his junior year.

The program interested him, he said, in part because it sounded like an extension of SWS.

“I feel like in SWS, I’m a lot more comfortable being open and sharing my ideas, and that was sort of what the whole program was about,” Martel said.

“The whole point of it was to bring yourself into what you were learning and to have this space, be a part of it and base everything that you learn on that,” he said. “And our space was New York City and the boroughs.”

Martel said that the program taught him to be more independent and get along with people from all over the world.

He also said that it pushed him into new learning experiences, like talking to homeless people for over an hour at the homelessness relief effort Midnight Run.

“We just learned things that you never would have known if a teacher told you,” he said. “We got it firsthand.”

Junior Tanisha Martins, also in SWS, said she decided to spend last semester at High Mountain Institute in Leadville, CO, a semester school that combines academics with wilderness expeditions, after seeing a presentation by SWS alumni Emy Takinami ‘12 and Eli Davis ‘13.

Before HMI, Martins said she had never backpacked and had little wilderness experience.

“I just wanted to get out of Brookline and see how everything else was in the world,” she said.

Martins, like Brewer, said that her semester school experience taught her how to be herself.

“We had days where we would spend three or four hours in silence, hiking,” she said. “I had a lot of time just to think and be in my own mind. That really helped me.”

Brewer said that semester schools enable students to realize their capabilities by removing them from familiar environments.

“People who have lived in Brookline their entire lives, you don’t really know anything different. And it’s impossible to see yourself in another setting,” she said. “I think that that’s definitely one of the best ways to learn about yourself: putting yourself in another situation.”

Emma Nash can be contacted at bhs.sagamore@gmail.com.