Hello,
I’m a current junior at Concord Academy. CC helped me when I was applying to prep school so I thought I’d share some tips and experiences. Feel free to ask any questions about the application process, boarding life, or CA specifically and I will try to answer them as best as I can.
Essays- brainstorm ideas with parents or others who know you well. Be genuine in the essay and touch upon aspects of yourself that aren’t your grades and activities list. The admissions officers will already see your impressive stats and are not looking for you to repeat it to them in the essay. Many schools will ask for three adj describe you best. The most common answers are “determined, confident, artist/violinist/musician/etc., passionate, hard-working, ambitious, etc.” Really show in your essay how you being “hard-working” is unique from all the hundreds of other “hard-working” applicants (by using specific experiences, etc). Take advantage of the different questions to touch upon various facades of your character and experiences. (Although it’s good to have a common theme so the admissions officers can get a more concrete idea of who you are.) Don’t let feedback from others (parents especially) change the voice of your essay. If there are some sections you want to keep, don’t let others sway you. If you are sassy, be sassy in your essay! If you’re not, don’t try to be! Finish the essays a week before the deadline. Procrastinating will make you too mentally exhausted to care how good the essays are.
Interviews:
Google the questions and have parents or friends ask them to you as if it were the real interview. It helps to ask someone who is not a relative and hear the impression they got of you from your answers. Interviews are another reason to think about your essays early because the essays and interview questions often overlap. However, there is such a thing as over practicing; toward my last interview, my answers were very formulaic and unnatural even to me, which is a huge turn off to interviewers who don’t want to hear fake and robotic answers.
Tours: do your research about the school beforehand! This not only helps you ask good questions to the tour guide but also you can remember the tour better after it’s over. There was a rumor when I was applying that tour guides write down their impression of you after the tour to submit as a part of the application. Now that I’m a tour guide, I can confidently tell you that, at least for CA, this rumor is false (and based on what my friends at other private schools say, it’s most likely false for most other schools).
Choosing schools to apply to:
It’s easy to apply only to the most competitive schools. However, many of these schools have acceptance rates lower than some ivies and depending on what the previous admitted class and graduating class were like, a student that may have been accepted last year may not be accepted this year. It’s always good to apply to 3 types of schools: reach, possible, and safety. In addition, many schools have higher acceptance rates for day than boarding. The acceptance rate for boarders at CA is close to 20% whereas its around 40% for day. However, you can ask any boarder at any school and most will tell you that the boarding experience is definitely worth it. As a boarder, I’ve learned to be independent, formed strong family-like bonds with teachers and friends, and really learned who I am and who I want to be. It helps in the college process because you know what it means for a school to truly be your home and will be looking for specific deal-breakers/deal-makers whereas preferences pertaining to college life can feel abstract to day students. However, in the case of CA, if you are concerned about getting in, you can apply as a day student and switch soph year (it’s easy to switch to boarding once you’re in.) But it’s better to get into boarding freshman year because you’ll make many memorable friendships in your freshman house.
Things to expect at private school:
Social life- friend groups change a ton from freshman to sophomore year. Everyone’s new to the school and it takes time for people to really get to know each other. Most lasting friend groups only begin to form around the end of freshman year.
College matriculation:
Many schools will make their last 5 years of college matriculation available to the public. Just google " college matriculation." When looking at these records, take into account how many students in total the school has (to see % of kids at a specific college), if the high school recruits athletes (some schools will send athletes to top colleges, boosting their matriculation, but have trouble sending non-athletic students), how many college counselors per student, etc. You may also find a “class profile” which tells you stuff like the avg GPA/AP/SAT scores, etc. Also note the avg SSAT score vs. the average SAT score. CA takes pride in the fact that despite an avg SSAT score in the 84th%, (lower than other peers like Exeter or St.Paul’s,) our avg SAT score is in the 2050s which reflects how much the school has helped students improve academically (though test scores aren’t everything.)
Size:
The smaller the school the more suffocating it will feel by junior/senior year. But there’s a trade off; when you’re stuck with the same small group of people for so long, you’re forced to get to know them better and you will befriend people from different backgrounds and world views that you may have not thought you’d get along with before. Compared to larger schools, you can get a more personalized education and the teachers can dedicate more individual time with you. Don’t forget the size of the boarding community if you’ll be a boarder.
Culture:
One generalization which has some truth is that athletic schools have a preppy jock culture while artistic schools have wannabe hipster kids. Most private school kids are in the upper or upper middle class. From my personal experience, nobody really talks about how much money they have and most people don’t care if you’re poor/rich.
On the other hand, I know that money is a more obvious presence at many (though definitely not all) private schools; I’ve heard stories about parents hiring a helicopter for prom and kids being pressured to buy the latest expensive watch, etc. Depends on the school and I won’t name any here but feel free to PM me if you’re extra curious/concerned. Generally, in larger schools, kids tend to self-segregate themselves by race and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Academics:
Classes are hard, but also very engaging and exciting. The biggest difference between public and private school academics lies in the English and History classes. Public schools tend to teach more facts and formulaic essay formats, whereas many prep school teachers encourage students to think for themselves and find their own “essay format”/voice. For example, in one of my first history classes, my teacher shouted out a bunch of random letters and numbers which he told us to write down. He made each sequence of letters longer and said them faster, making them harder to remember and write, until for the final sequence, only one of us was able to write down. He then asked the class, “what was the final sequence?” And the kid who got it said “it’s my name spelled out.” Then he looked at the class and said, “if you look at history as a random series of events and people, it will make no sense. In this class you must truly see how these events influence, trigger, and repel each other.” This was when I really realized what kind of education I was receiving.
This is really helpful!