Upper Spring!

Hello Lovely Blog Readers!

It’s been a while. A long while. And for that, I apologize. Spring term is well underway and I’ve been so busy doing Andover-y things that I haven’t had much time to write. It’s time for an update, yes?

Finish Strong

Congratulations to the 236th entering class! You are officially Andover Students and we are excited to have you in September. At this moment, you all are probably inching to get out of middle school and into high school…I know I was. To me high school seemed bigger, better, and full of cuter boys. Don’t get me wrong,  I loved my middle school. The people were great and so were the teachers. However, after being there for nine years, I was ready to move on. I wanted a challenge and Andover promised to give me one.

In those last few months before graduation and summer, it would have been easy to sit back and unravel. I was going to Andover. I was already in.  Who needed to study? Who needed to do homework.? This wasn’t the case for me.

The Marathon

This was a tough week. We all have them, they come once in a while to disturb the flow of events, to disrupt our daily regimen, to shake our skulls  and encompass our perspectives in bigger contexts. But this. This was a tough week.  Many of you reading this blog have now said yes to our admissions department, received course selection material, a housing questionnaire, perhaps you are now anticipating  the graduation of middle school, or the exodus from home. I was struck this week – this week of all weeks – this week filled with the ineffable horrors of terror, with the sudden boundlessness of Andover.

Our Head of School last week wrote in an email, “At Andover, I am reminded each day, we are not alone.” I’ll let that quotation stand alone.

Before I came here, I had never been to Boston. In truth, I’ve only been twice since having arrived at Andover two years ago. But I am no stranger to weeks like these. Watching the reels on WBX and photos online, for the first time in a long time I began to remember with clearest vision 9/11. I was five, so not a baby, but old enough so that the artistic blueness of the sky so well discussed. Old enough to remember the dust that hung overhead and old enough to remember the television. The blaring and colors of the television, as names strolled across the ticker once reserved for stock quotes or local weather or school closings. So as the first reports on Patriot’s Day turned into full fledged investigations and those turned into manhunts and manhunts into victory celebrations, I thought back to when I was five. But at Andover, we are not alone. Every teacher asked how we were, we turned to each other even the ones we didn’t know and asked how they were, we posted messages of sympathy, we glued our eyes to the news, we wrote in the Phillipian, and we stood quietly listening to how close, how so ever close we were to Boylston street. Patriot’s Day means a lot to Boston. This is not a profound scientific discovery, but being a New Yorker meant I had no concept of Patriot’s Day until last Monday. I had no idea of the tradition and the parties and the marathon until Monday. Yet at dinner last night, in Upper Right of Commons, as we watched the police surround the boat in that backyard in that town outside of Boston, my friend turned to me and said, “That’s where I live.” At Andover, we are lucky to have a breadth of students and faculty from across the globe, but at other times this means we are more vulnerable to the far-flung atrocities of the world than say a day school nestled in the New Hampshire hills. She turned to me and said, “That’s where I live. I live in Watertown. I live two minutes from where those cameras and those policemen are. That’s where I live.” She experienced that surreal experience of seeing something you know so well on television, beneath the coloration and electrical cords she saw her home. At Andover, we are not alone. Even though she was here and her family was under police lockdown, she was with a group of faculty and friends who sought her out. And checked in on her. This was one week. For everyone here, we left our last commitments on Friday and sighed a little bit. A little relief. It is uncanny now to see on news sites titles like, “Earthquake tops off week from hell.” Uncanny not because these things don’t happen all the time all over the globe, but uncanny because at Andover inside the safety and comfort of those who know and care for us, this week in which we all needed a friend and a guardian angel found one. We all turned to someone for help, and we all gave the help someone else was looking for.

Revisits!!

For all of you who will be joining us tomorrow and throughout the next two weeks, welcome! I hope that your revisit experience is enjoyable. In the spirit of the coming revisits, a have a few quick words of advice.

1) Visit the departments that mean the most to you-As I mentioned in my last post, Andover has things to offer in a variety of extracurricular and academic programs. If there is anything that interests you in the slightest, ask! Faculty members are always happy to talk to students interested in their programs.

2) If you would be a boarder, ask your revisit  about the living situation for members of your class- Boarding is at the center of life at Andover (for boarders, that is). Ask about the housing process, how roommates are selected, the house counselors, etc. This goes for day students as well, in a roundabout sort of way. For day students, I would suggest asking your revisit host about what it is like to be a day student, GW (our day student lounge), etc

3) Ask about things that impact daily life (e.g. The food, the campus, the workload) The smallest things have the biggest impact on your experience at any school. Make sure to ask your host and their friends about how much work they complete a night, the food at Paresky Commons, etc. Also, try to observe these details so you can compare them to those details of other schools you may be revisiting at.

4) Enjoy the day! I know Andover can be scary at first, but it’s not quite as scary as it looks. On my revisit days, I was inexplicably nervous and it affected my ability to enjoy what each school had to offer.

Anyways, on a somewhat lighter note, I hope you all have a great time at revisit days this spring and I hope that my advice sort of helped you.

Questions For Your Revisit Host!

Next week Andover will welcome admitted students for their spring visits! This really is such an exciting time. These spring visits will give you all a feel for life at PA. You will have a chance to walk the campus, go to academic classes, athletic practices, talent shows, performances, and informational meetings. Your revisit day will help you decide if Andover is the right school for you.  I wish you all the best of luck and I look forward to seeing you soon!

Top 11 Questions to ask your revisit host!

1.  How does the cluster system work?

You want… me? … to write a textbook?

Hey readers!

Let me tell you about a final project I just handed in…

Well, every lower (10th grader) here at PA takes English for all three of the academic terms. English class in the winter term focuses specifically and only on poetry. A lot of people dread this term because it takes a class that is already so subjectively based and graded, and moves the focus to the most subjective of writing styles. Nonetheless, I feel that most of the English teachers do a great job of making the term enjoyable. My own teacher, Dr. Cynn, assigned a… peculiar final project for the class: write a poetry textbook.

What the heck?

To the Class of 2017

Andover is the biggest challenge I have ever accepted. Yet lying within the challenge is the lionhearted verve that compels PA students  to strive and dig deep. Great friends, great trials: this is why I chose Andover. The letter you have just received contains more than you can imagine. Here’s to a great journey. 

Today is March 10th.

Today is March 10th. March 10th–a day of acceptance letters, and a day that you will never forget! Congratulations to all admitted students! You probably have a big decision to make and family to tell and teachers to thank. But you can get to all that later. For now, relish in your victory.

You did it!

Congratulations to all newly admitted students in 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014!

Wanting to go to Andover since Kindergarten, getting my acceptance letter was one of the best moments of my life. I cried, laughed, smiled, jumped up and down. I think I honestly carried my letter around for the rest of the day. I kept reading it and reading it just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.  I remember asking my parents that night at dinner, “what if they made a mistake? What if they meant to send this letter to another Victoria?”….

When I came to visiting day in April, one of the first things Jane Fried, previous Dean of Admission, said was, ” I know what you all are thinking….Let me assure you, you didn’t get an acceptance letter by mistake… the letter you got was truly meant for you.”

An Unforgettable Envelope

The seal which I had waited so long to see printed on a letter.

I have a few memories that I will never forget, one of them is the day I received my acceptance letter to Andover.

Two months of anticipation. Two months of thinking, Maybe I should have changed this on my essay. Two months of certainty that I wasn’t going to get in. Two months of desperation. If I didn’t get in, I told myself, it was the absolute end of the world.

Then, on the day that had been the object of my worries for what seemed like ages, I received a normal, business-sized envelope with the return label: