One of the VERY best pieces of advice I got here on CC was to record a conversation on my phone’s voice memo in the car immediately after visiting while we were driving to our next destination.
DD and I just chatted about the school for a half hour or so, and then to keep things easy to compare later on, she gave each school an overall score from 1-10. This made it SO much easier for us later to keep straight which schools she had the overall highest impression of, and it became easier to decide which schools to apply to, and which to drop from the list.
We had no idea at the time how useful it would be for us to go back to those recordings in the absence of revisits and listen to our own voices talking about the schools right after leaving campus!
So, we just listened to the schools and thought I would share what we felt about HK.
Note – these are merely our impressions after touring and interviewing, so just our opinions.
We were surprised by how forward-thinking it was. We both had expected something more preppy and maybe even a bit stuffy, but it was not at all. It felt fresh and modern, compared to what we had imagined. The students were incredibly friendly and open, and it felt like the most truly international school we visited with a rich variety of countries that we hadn’t heard mentioned at other schools. (again, just an impression – not basing this on stats).
The campus was unbelievably gorgeous.
We liked the seated meals, but wished they more than just occasional.
We noticed that our tour guide was able to do sports and theatre in the same season because theatre met during study hours. My DD wouldn’t do that (not a performer), but we thought it was interesting that our tour guide was able to manage the workload while losing her study hours. That said that the workload was somewhat reasonable. Also, IF someone wanted to do theatre and a sport at the same time, it seems that they could. (Again, didn’t affect us, so we didn’t explore that thread.)
The thing that we loved the most about HK was the truly special integrated humanities program, which is (I think) fairly well-discussed in the BS-discussion world. What I had forgotten until I heard our conversation was how this humanities program is grounded in some key philosophical questions that (if I recall correctly) were painted on the wall in the main academic building. Questions like “what makes a life well-lived?” and “what makes a society good?” These deeper questions driving one’s education made us feel like “this is something that we could NEVER get from home.” It felt like a true shift in focus. We loved how our tour guide explained that she studied merchant of venice in english and in theatre, and how the classes are integrated based on time, so you aren’t learning “english facts” and “history facts” and “philosophy facts” in a silo.
One downside – we couldn’t find any reasonably-priced hotels nearby at all, and ended up staying in a very overpriced awful small inn that was easily the yuckiest place we stayed, and we had a very hard time finding a bite to eat since it was after 8 pm. I’m sure that we just didn’t know where to go, but it did give us some pause regarding how rural the location is, and the difficulty we would have in transport, visits, etc… Not a dealbreaker, but boy, that night was pretty stressful and yucky. We tried to leave the hotel and just lose our money, but no other hotel was available below several hundred a night. Again, we probably would learn the ins-and-outs, but it was a negative for us.