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# At 16, She Left High School to Find Her Voice — and a Cause
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/at-16-she-left-high-school-to-find-her-voice-and-a-cause/
- Published: 2026-09-18T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T16:00:02.000Z
- Author: Maaz Alin
- Tags: Community, Santa Monica

At 16, when most of her classmates were finishing their junior year, Isabella Guglielmetti walked away from the traditional high school classroom altogether.

She took the HiSET, a high school equivalency exam for students under 18, and enrolled at Santa Monica College. She describes the decision without hesitation.

"I'm someone who genuinely loves to learn, but I remember in high school just feeling so agentless due to the lack of control you have over your courses and time, and I felt so disillusioned with learning," Guglielmetti said. When she discovered the HiSET was an option at the end of her sophomore year and her parents backed the idea, she said, "it felt like a complete no brainer."

What the college offered a teenager, she said, was freedom and a student body unlike any high school could provide. Choosing her own classes — among her favorites were psychology of environment, culture of food and creative writing — changed her relationship to school.

"Having agency over my course selection made me 100x more excited to go to class," she said, adding that "a sense of autonomy and freedom are some of the most important indicators for personal happiness."

The people surprised her, too. [SMC](https://www.smdp.com/moviemaker-magazine-names-santa-monica-college-among-30-best-film-schools/) classrooms mixed recent high school graduates with retirees, mid-career professionals and international students. "This makes every class at SMC so entirely distinct and the conversations you have, so vibrant," she said.

That freedom soon turned into action. Last semester, Guglielmetti enrolled in SMC's inaugural Social Action sustainability class, which challenged students to "practice hands-on democracy" by developing and leading a social-impact campaign on campus. She proposed tackling light pollution, an issue she had researched for a high school project.

"The topic seemed specific, actionable and exciting," she said.

Five students, including Guglielmetti, formed a group called Students for Stars and issued three demands: removing unnecessary campus lighting, directing remaining lighting downward and using warm-tinted lighting where possible. They launched at Sustainability Week in October 2025 and tabled at the campus planetarium opening the following month.

The work drew resistance, particularly over safety.

"Campus safety is a top priority, especially as a group of five women," Guglielmetti said. But the group's research, she said, showed "that reducing light pollution actually helps, not hurts, safety," because "reducing light pollution means smarter lighting, not no lighting."

A tabling event connected the students with astronomy professor Simon Balm, who helped them narrow their focus to glare from the Corsair Stadium lights that was obscuring images from SMC's new observatory. Over three months, the group gathered more than 100 petition signatures, spoke in classes, met with campus police and measured the stadium's light pollution. Administrators pledged to raise the issue with the campus safety committee and to test new lighting during a stadium remodel over winter break, though Guglielmetti said their "actual follow-through on this was unclear."

The campaign sharpened an instinct she has long held — that she is drawn more to the human side of environmental problems than the science.

"I've always been fascinated by why people do the things they do," she said. Recycling, she said, is a case in point: "The issue isn't really with the science of recycling; it's with us."

That framing, she said, is oddly hopeful. "We have solutions; we just need to figure out how to make it cool enough, easy enough, intuitive enough, or even sexy enough for people to follow through on." Approached that way, she said, sustainability "just turns into a fun puzzle."

This fall, Guglielmetti continues that pursuit at Amsterdam University College in the Netherlands, drawn by its interdisciplinary social sciences program and the chance to graduate without debt. A European Union passport, gained through her father's Italian ancestry, eased the move.

Along the way she also earned a noncredit Sustainability Assistant Certificate and one of three [Global Citizenship Symposium](https://www.smc.edu/community/global-citizenship/events/symposium.php?ref=smdp.com) scholarships SMC awards each year.

For Guglielmetti, the leap she took at 16 set the terms for everything that followed — a search less for a destination than for the freedom to keep exploring.