About 9 months ago, at the end of my seventh grade year, my mom said she had something to discuss with me, and that she wanted me to keep an open mind. She asked me if I wanted to look at boarding schools for high school, and almost immediately, I said no. I had my friends, my sports, and a local high school that my parents and grandparents had attended and at which I had been picturing myself for some time. Additionally, we live in a small town in the South. Boarding school isn’t a norm here at ALL, I knew no one else my age considering it and only knew one adult who had attended. Looking back at the moment, I have no idea what exactly made me change my mind about two minutes later-“Actually, yeah. Let’s check it out.”
Right from the start, it was all led by me and based on my decisions. That night, I sat down with my mom and my dad. We read through some list of “The top 50 boarding schools in America.” My mom would read out the basic facts of each school on the list, and if it I liked the sound of it we wrote it down, researched it more, and discussed as a family whether or not I thought it might be a good fit for me. The school that is now possibly my top choice I almost didn’t even consider, and certainly wouldn’t have applied to if we hadn’t had those family discussions. By the end of that week, just like that, we had requested information from Exeter, St. Paul’s, Hotchkiss, Taft, Lawrenceville, and Episcopal. I thought six schools was plenty, more than enough-only after browsing this forum did I learn that many people recommend looking at 10+ schools, but I am satisfied with the number and don’t think we could’ve been as thorough had I looked at more.
Every packet we received in the mail was exciting. I looked over all of them with my parents, and ultimately decided that I almost without a doubt wanted to apply to all of them. So, about a month or two after the initial question, we had scheduled 6 interviews over the course of a week. In the month leading up to them, I sat down with my parents every Sunday night, and worked on interview prep. If I learned anything from that, it’s that being prepared is essential. I think my interviews would have been fine if I hadn’t done any preparation, but going in with anecdotes at the ready and complex, personalized questions to ask the admissions officers certainly made me more confident and hopefully made me a better interviewee.
Living in the south, the visiting process was quite a venture for us. The trip was something I will never forget-my entire family, including my two little brothers aged 9 and 11, loaded up in our mini van with a cooler of snacks in the back and a weeks worth of luggage strapped to the roof. We left on a Saturday, drove up to Philadelphia, stayed the night there, and then drove all the way up to Exeter, where I had an interview on Monday. From there, we worked our way down, seeing a different school each day. Keep an open mind at your tours; try to leave previous assumptions about the school behind, and focus on trying to get a feel for the atmosphere there. We ended our tours with Episcopal and returned home the following Saturday. Touring so many schools in such a short period of time, I realized right away that I would have to take notes at each one to prevent them from getting jumbled in my head. At every school, while sitting in the admissions lobby waiting for my interview, I made a pro-con list with basic, random things I liked or didn’t like that were very personal to what I want in a school. I also wrote about a paragraph of notes, trying to capture the “vibe” a school gave off. I HIGHLY recommend putting that nervous admissions office energy towards this kind of note taking. They were incredibly helpful in the rest of the process.
After six visits, I learned the important lesson that everyone’s interview process is different. Some will sit down in casual, cushy chairs with you and have what truly feels like a relaxed conversation, and some will sit across a desk from you and go formulaically from one question to the next. Some interviewers will have a lot to say on something you’re interested in, and some will not. Some may gush to your parents afterwards-or they won’t. Honestly, I don’t think any of these things reflect too strongly how the interview went, so don’t read so far into it if interviewer Y wanted to talk for 10 minutes about an interest that interviewer X briefly acknowledged. It’s more of a personality thing, in my experience.
After my interviews, I wrote all of my interviewers brief thank you cards and also followed up with emails, per advice my mom gleaned from reading this site. We then scheduled an SSAT date, and I began studying a few weeks later. If I could go back and do it over again, I would have started studying sooner, particularly the math. As an eighth grader in a public school I knew there would simply be things on there that I had never been taught. I did study efficiently, though, and earned an 800 in verbal, 746 in reading and 725 in quantitative, putting me in the 97th percentile. The verbal score was something I certainly wouldn’t have received had I not studied-on a practice test taken barely two weeks before the real deal, I answered 17/30 analogies incorrectly. I missed none on the test.
Then came the essay writing; again, I wish I had started these earlier (don’t procrastinate like me!!!). I began writing them them with a little less than three weeks until the due date, but I worked very hard on them and feel that I put forth the very best writing I possibly could have. My advice is that, if you are not happy with something you have written, do it over. Seriously. I scrapped more than one essay along the way, and I am 100% glad that I did. Though it took more time and more effort, I feel that every single thing that I wrote was well thought out, fully proofread, and showcased my abilities. If you don’t feel like you’re a strong writer, use the essays to show the schools how unique you are. Answer the prompts in a way you feel no other applicant could.
For me, the final step of the process was video making. I made a one minute “get to know me” video that I sent to all of the schools. The goal of this was to make me stand out from other applicants as much as possible, and to briefly give the schools some information about me as a person they might not otherwise know. I also sent in a video of me singing, emailed all of the volleyball coaches a skills highlights video, and emailed the track coaches with some of my times. I advise contacting the coaches pretty early on in the process, as it certainly can’t hurt to establish a relationship with them if you’re serious about playing their sport.
After months of effort, I learned SO much from this process. Even if I am rejected by every single school, I will never be sorry that I went on this journey. Going into this process, I think you need to be really certain that a boarding school is the right choice for you. Applying is, quite simply, a LOT of work, but it can be so worth it. I hope this account helps someone to better understand what the process is like-though I know that everyone’s experience is very different, I would have loved to have read something like this when I decided to apply. Best of luck!