ANDOVER images and video gallery!

Prep School Admissions
1

<p>Hey all,</p>

<p>TomTheCat here! I'm a current SENIOR at Phillips Academy. Congratulations to everyone who got an acceptance. Andover is a really incredible place, and you'd be hard-pressed to find better. I've posted this link in the past, but I think it would benefit the newly-accepted to post it again. I maintain an Apple MobileMe gallery of images and videos that I have taken over the course of my two years at Andover. The gallery includes campus shots as well as videos from pep rallies, dances, and other campus events - even video from an impromptu Yorkies performance on the terrace of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library. Additionally, I update it pretty frequently, so my hope is that it gives you a really good feeling for what it's like to go to Andover. Enjoy!</p>

<p>MobileMe</a> Gallery</p>

<p>Also, as always, I'd love to aid DieterSama and any other Andover students who are already on this board in answering any questions you may have about the school or Phillips Academy life in general. I came as a new Upper (11th grader) so I feel as if I can offer a fresh perspective as Andover is not the only high school I've ever attended.</p>

<p>Enjoy the gallery and post questions!</p>

<p>Love,</p>

<p>TomTheCat, PA '11</p>

2

<p>This is so great! Thanks so much. It’s nice to see what Andover’s like behind all of the brochures.</p>

<p>I especially liked the Head of School Day video!</p>

3

<p>Hi Tom, What college are you going to?</p>

4

<p>Thanks! Yeah, the Head of School Day announcement was (and always is) incredible. You wouldn’t believe the hype and speculation about Head of School Day. Kids go crazy trying to figure out when it’s going to be. It’s common for kids to call Admissions to try to schedule tours on random days of the week - and if there are no tours available, the first thing everyone thinks is that that’ll be Head of School Day! It’s a lot of fun.</p>

5

<p>Oh! Hey, Pulsar. I’m going to the University of Edinburgh, a school in Scotland. It’s pretty uncommon for kids here to go out of the country, but my family lives in the UK, so it works out well for me. It’s a great school, too - ranked 22 in the world. Can’t believe my luck! I’ll miss PA though. A LOT.</p>

6

<p>Wow, isn’t it the school that Prince William went to? What will you study at Edinburgh? Do US kids from PA go to Oxford or Cambridge for college?</p>

7

<p>That was St. Andrews, I think - I applied there as well and have yet to hear back. I’m really only waiting out of curiosity, though - the degree program I got into at Edinburgh is quite something. It’s an accelerated four-year Masters program in French and Politics with an acceptance rate of just 8.3%. So I’ll come out in four years with a Masters degree while the rest of my American buds have just attained their Bachelors :)</p>

<p>PA kids do go to both Oxford and Cambridge. There are three seniors going to Oxford this year, and I know of one girl who is headed to Cambridge. They’re all absolutely exceptional students and, moreover, fun people to live and go to school with, and they absolutely deserve what they’ve earned.</p>

8

<p>8.3%… holy smokes! congrats, tom!</p>

9

<p>How would you sell Andover to someone who thinks Deerfield and Hotchkiss offer better experience due to Andover’s size and not wanting to feel like a number on a long roster?</p>

10

<p>I guess I’d respond that one thing that makes Andover feel like a much smaller school is the cluster system. Basically, the school is split into five residential clusters - day students are also assigned to clusters. I belong to West Quad North (WQN). The other four clusters are West Quad South (WQS), Flagstaff (FLG), Pine Knoll (PKN), and Abbot (ABB). For boarders, the clusters work geographically. For instance, the dorms closest to mine all belong to WQN.</p>

<p>Each cluster has its own separate events, such as cluster munches. Cluster munches happen every week on Wednesday night - WQN’s is in the common room of Bancroft Hall at 9:00. Delicious food is served (not just commons food - it gets ordered from off campus!) and we all sit, play games, watch TV, and forget about studying for an hour or so. There are also cluster-specific trips, though these are not exclusive. For instance, this fall Abbot cluster rented out a screen in a movie theater in Methuen, MA. Most of Abbot, but also people from outside the cluster (me included) went. The movie shown was Harry Potter and it was 100% free to attend.</p>

<p>Clusters also deal with discipline separately. It is distributed consistently, of course, but it means that each DC (Disciplinary Committee) meeting is composed of faculty from the same cluster that the student involved belongs to. This means that the faculty are a lot more likely to know the student - this makes the system a whole lot less faceless.</p>

<p>Kids absolutely make friends outside of their clusters, but clusters are often really tight-knit. PKN, for example, is renowned as the tightest cluster - they have SO much spirit. They all wear their cluster apparel all the time, and they really exude a sense of solidarity.</p>

11

<p>Do you know how the Sternberg program works to weed out not so “nice”/psycho kids from their essays?</p>

12

<p>I don’t know what the Sternberg program is…</p>

13

<p>How is the early college admit season this year? I heard it was rough last year?</p>

14

<p>I mean, I guess it’s all relative, but early admissions is always relatively stellar here. I know it was certainly stellar this year - THIRTEEN kids got into Stanford early. Five got into Yale. Something like seven into Columbia. I’d quote other numbers, but we seniors had our access to Naviance downgraded as we’ve all applied at this point.</p>

<p>It’s not early admission-specific, but if you want overall numbers, you can access Andover’s college matriculations. [Phillips</a> Academy - College Matriculations & School Profile](<a href=“http://www.andover.edu/Academics/CollegeCounseling/Pages/SchoolProfileCollegeMatriculations.aspx]Phillips”>http://www.andover.edu/Academics/CollegeCounseling/Pages/SchoolProfileCollegeMatriculations.aspx)</p>

<p>I’d just like to remind readers, however, that Andover is about a whole lot more than just getting into an incredible college.</p>

15

<p>Does Andover recruit kids who have already shown promise to succeed and provide them with just a high school experience or do they recruit average kids and turn them into whiz kids? What I mean is if you recruit top kids, they will be successful at any school not just at Andover. Do they recruit diamonds or do they recruit charcoal and turn them into diamonds?</p>

16

<p>Well, like all of the boarding schools I know of, Andover selects the most qualified, but also those who stand to gain the most from the Andover experience. PA’s median SSAT for accepted applicants is 94th percentile - that’s huge. So yes - the kids are already smart - but you have to understand the intensity of the Andover experience. I’ve never worked harder in my life. Never. And, by Andover’s standards, I’m pretty average.</p>

<p>Yes, kids who are talented enough to be accepted here will, most likely, be successful at any high school, private or public. However, I would not posit that their college matriculations would be the same. I do not think I would have been accepted at Edinburgh if I hadn’t come to PA. This is, in large part, because of the extracurriculars and the sheer resources that PA offers. I wouldn’t have been able to win a $20,000 grant to bring Ray Suarez to campus at my old school because my old school does not have an equivalent of Andover’s Abbot Academy Association. I wouldn’t have been able to be president of the International Club, and bring its membership up to 360, the largest membership of any club on campus, at my old school because my old school does not have an International Club. I wouldn’t have been able to be a Head Tour Guide, because my old school does not use student tour guides.</p>

<p>I also probably wouldn’t have scored above 2300 on the SAT at my old school, because I simply didn’t have to work as hard there. You see where I’m going with this.</p>

<p>For many students, Andover functions as an extension to their education - many students who enter after 9th grade do so because they have exhausted the offerings at their old schools. Andover takes brilliant students and forces them to continue working, and to work harder than they had ever imagined - to achieve more than they had ever imagined.</p>

<p>Make sense?</p>

17

<p>What made you choose Andover? Would you change anything about it?</p>

18

<p>The Deans Blog says that the admit rate for this year is 14% the lowest in academy history. Last year they posted that the admit rate was 14%. The math I know is 14 is not greater than 14. Is there a lot of pressure at the Academy to brag about progress year over year?</p>

19

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<p>Is it busy work? I always thought working smarter is better than working harder. My classmate finishes the math homework in 30 mins and for the same homework I take at least an hour.</p>

20

<p>Well, to be honest, it wasn’t much of a choice - I was rejected at Exeter and waitlisted at Deerfield. Lucky for me, then, that Andover had been my first choice the whole time. Maybe that showed through to my other schools…</p>

<p>But if I had gotten into the other places, Andover would have been my choice for a whole array of reasons. First and foremost, I guess, it was just so… Different. In profound ways. What immediately struck me was how much freedom is given to PA students. We don’t have a dress code, our internet doesn’t get shut off at night, the whole town counts as campus so we need no special permissions to leave the campus walls… The list goes on. With that freedom comes responsibility, and that responsibility is emphasized constantly. I guess it’s that Andover’s philosophy is to learn by doing and by making mistakes. For example, freshmen might occasionally stay up all night on the internet, but they sure are going to suffer in the morning. How else are they going to learn to manage their time properly? By being told how? Unlikely.</p>

<p>Andover knows that kids are kids. Expectations for our achievement and behavior are, of course, extremely high, but we’re not necessarily treated as if we’re supposed to be miniature adults. That, for me, is great. I might occasionally show up to calculus first period in my pyjamas, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean I’m not going to work my behind off in that class. Furthermore, neither my teacher nor my peers judge me for it.</p>

<p>That’s another thing. It’s an incredibly tolerant place. I arrived on campus for my tour to a student with a big shaggy beard walking away from admissions. That would NEVER have passed at my old school, but you know what? Does it mean he can’t achieve in class? Absolutely not - and it’s the achievement that really counts here. You’re totally free to be who you are, and there’s no baggage attached to that. Any type of intolerance, like homophobia, gets absolutely BEATEN out of kids here within their first year. Two weeks ago I was standing in line in the Den (the student center) about to pay for some Gatorade and I heard a freshman behind me use the word “■■■.” Well, being completely unaccustomed to hearing such a derogatory term used on campus, I absolutely flipped out at him and made a huge scene. I guess the only type of intolerance here is intolerance of intolerance, if that makes sense. Andover’s just a great place to be who you are.</p>

<p>As for change, well, sometimes I feel like the physical and emotional health of students isn’t always taken into account in an effective way by some teachers and the administration. Often major assignments such as tests and large papers are clustered around the same days in the week which makes for a concentrated period of sleepless nights and general stress - no matter how good your time management is. However, the rule is that if you have more than two major assignments on/due on one day you may ask one of your teachers to reschedule that assignment for you, personally. If you’re good at looking at syllabi and noting where there are large concentrations of assignments, that’s always a good option.</p>