<p>I agree more specific questions would be more helpful. Look thoroughly at the web sites of each school. I will, however, try to answer a couple of your questions here as far as Deerfield is concerned:
Swimming: Deerfield swimming and diving has always been strong. I know they won the New England championships for something like 17 years in a row. They’ve at least medaled there for the last 7years (3 championships, including last year, 2 team silvers and 2 bronzes). The facilities (8 lane pool, separate diving pool) are beautiful.
Music: excellent music, putting a lot of focus on the program. New arts building opening this summer includes new music class rooms, practice room, a big auditorium, and a separate chamber music hall which is supposed to have great acoustics. This will be performance space for students as well as outside guests. There is lots of music, including orchestra, a daily chamber music class (for credit), several choral groups, band, and music classes (music theory, composition). My son is a serious musician and has been very happy with the level of music there.
Math:serious advanced math will be found at all these schools. By reputation, Exeter is in a league of it’s own, but all the other top schools will have a serious program with serious math students. It sounds like at Deerfield you’d probably be placed in Honors Precalc in 9th, which includes a bit under 2 trimesters of precalc and then you start AP calc BC by spring trimester. Over 60 DA students participated this year in the AIME , with 8 students now qualifying for the next round this week. I’m sure this is true for many of these schools-- I’m just saying…
Dorms: there are 2 kinds of dorms: freshmen/ sophomores and upperclass dorms. Most people have single rooms.
Work load: you will work your butt off at any of these 9 schools, if you want to do well. </p>
<p>You need to look at the websites for all these schools and use the “search” function to look at threads for the specific schools on these boards. That will help you have more specific questions. As others have said, the schools you list are QUITE different from one another, except maybe in terms of rankings. One other bit of advice, which we learned when looking at music programs specifically: if you can, try to see at least one music class ( or a performance, if you can), and meet with the music director, orchestra or chamber director, or someone who does your kind of music. Do NOT just listen to people (or web sites) that say, " oh yes, we have great music here." Look at their offerings on line or in their catalog, of course, but then really go and listen-- the quality of the different programs varied by a pretty large margin, and that seems to be at least somewhat dependent on the directors of the different musical groups. It’s also a little bit a function of size: really small schools sometimes have a harder time having enough good musicians to have an orchestra or chamber music class doing challenging pieces (but go see for yourself).</p>