Hannah Jo Flynn, class of 2019, model
Hannah Jo Flynn is currently working as a model. Flynn began filming TikToks with their brother during the pandemic and amassed over eight million likes on TikTok, giving them a gist of the world of modeling. They ended up signing with a mother agent and later expanded their career to include work in New York, Spain, Italy and London. While modeling, Flynn also majored in film and media at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“My philosophy with the [modeling] industry is to go in and be yourself,” Flynn said. “Because in reality, [you] don’t want to change yourself for a job. And people tend to like you for being yourself.”
At Aragon, Flynn was a student-athlete who played water polo, soccer and lacrosse.
“[Water polo] just felt like a second home to me being in the pool, my teammates, my coaches,” Flynn said. “I had just started the sport in high school, so I didn’t know much about it, [but] I ended up being on varsity a couple years later and being one of the captains of the team. It was my favorite thing to do.”
This athletic background carried over to their profession and landed them one of their first shoots, which was for a spring-summer collection for a French fashion house called Chloé.
“The shoot itself was right up my alley,” Flynn said. “During my self-tape … I talked about [water polo and swimming], and that’s what stuck out to the photographer and the casting director. The shoot was in a pool and it was this beautiful dress. It was so elegant [in] the movement of it, and the water was equally stunning.”
Flynn truly enjoys working with a diverse range of people from their agency.
“[It’s] really cool to be able to bring someone’s creative vision and direction to life in front of the camera,” Flynn said. “And I think that so many photographers have so many different styles and ideas that it’s like something new every time.”
Flynn is currently learning Italian in preparation for an upcoming business trip to Milan, Italy in February.
Sabrina Imbler, class of 2012, author and science journalist
Sabrina Imbler was the editor-in-chief of The Aragon Outlook in 2012.
“The Aragon Outlook and [Scott] Silton obviously were wonderful influences in teaching me how to write and report, which is what I do full time now as my job,” Imbler said.
In their senior year, they were accepted and committed to Brown University in Rhode Island.
“I wanted to leave California,” Imbler said. “I had spent my whole life in California, and I think I had a very romantic idea of what it would be like to go to school on the East Coast and go to classes in a beautiful brick building that has been around for hundreds of years.”
After graduating from Brown, Imbler worked as a journalist at The New York Times. Later, they joined Defector, a worker-owned media company which is a subscription-based sports and culture blog. Their writing career focuses on science, aquatic creatures and technology inspired by childhood visits to Half Moon Bay and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
“It felt like a natural way to combine my two interests to pursue a career in science journalism,” Imbler said. “I talked to scientists all the time, and I interviewed them about their work.”
Imbler is also a successful author of two books: “Dyke (geology),” “How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.”
“I was learning about … [dendritic cell] biology,” Imbler said. “I knew that I wanted to continue writing about these topics, and with a more personal lens.”
“Dyke (geology)” was selected for the National Book Foundation’s Science and Literature program, and “How Far the Light Reaches” won a 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The book weaves stories of Imbler’s own family and coming of age with marine biology.
Victoria Villacorta, class of 2015, learning & development specialist
Victoria Villacorta, pursued her passion for life science and studied neurobiology, physiology and behavior and minored in Chicana Studies at the University of California, Davis.
“[At] Davis, I loved the science classes, but I really liked balancing it with the humanities classes, and my studies at Aragon really helped prepare me to do well in college,” Villacorta said. “While I was at Davis, I had the opportunity to also study abroad … in Oaxaca, Mexico. I was there for about three months, and I did a clinical healthcare internship while I was there.”
In Villacorta’s sophomore year at UC Davis, she was a resident adviser for the freshmen and worked at a nonprofit clinic called Clínica Tepati.
“[We] served the underserved and underrepresented folks in Sacramento,” Villacorta said. “They were mainly Latinx folks who didn’t have health care insurance … I was a co-head for health education.”
After college, Villacorta was originally going to pursue medical studies but changed her mind.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to be a doctor,’” Villacorta said. “Then I graduated, and … [I wanted to] try something different. I decided to make the pivot into the business world and consulting, and I really enjoyed it.”
Villacorta started working at Slalom, a global business and technology consulting company, and became one of HabLab’s project managers — an extension of Slalom. The laboratory collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania to study the effects of virtual back-to-back meetings.
“[This] was one of the first studies that we were doing with [electroencephalography] headsets,” Villacorta said. “I created the training on it [and] helped them record the data.”
Villacorta was one of the co-authors on the research article titled “What Our Brain Activity Reveals About Improving Workplace Culture,” which has recently been published in the University of Pennsylvania’s business journal Knowledge at Wharton.
Helen Lu, class of 2019, software engineer
Helen Lu was once the president of Aragon’s Math Club. She followed her passion for Science Technology Engineering Mathematics and studied math and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a journey that began with the seeds of curiosity planted in her early years.
“I just started doing math in middle school as part of the Math Club,” Lu said. “It just seemed interesting to me, so I just kept doing it.”
Lu’s achievements are a testament to the foundation she built during her high school years. She has many memories and experiences from her time at Aragon.
Through lots of effort, Lu has reached where she is today. She graduated from MIT this summer and is now a software engineer. While Lu prioritizes academics heavily, she also believes in having a good work-life balance to help one pursue their dreams in a more engaging way.
“For me, it’s work hard, play harder,” Lu said. “Life is so short. I think it’s good to have fun while you work towards your dreams.”
Lu followed this life philosophy by trying out skydiving in her senior year at MIT.
“I’m the person in the friend group who holds everyone’s bags while they go on roller coasters,” Lu said. “I can’t even ride roller coasters, so skydiving for me seemed … incredibly terrifying. [But] I would actually never know if I liked it or not unless I tried it, and it turned out to be fun [and] unforgettable.”
Working as a software engineer, Lu continues her endeavors in mathematics and computer science.
