How boarding school expanded my values system
Why the conversations in the common room were just as valuable as the discussions around the Harkness table
This past admissions season, I worked at Shang Learning (now Shang NancyFriends) as part of my gap year. As an educational consulting intern, I helped prepare middle school students for the boarding school application process, and one of my main responsibilities was mock interviewing students. During these mock interviews, the question that my students struggled with most was “Why Boarding School.” Some students focused exclusively on the skills they hoped to acquire at boarding school through coursework or extracurriculars, while others gave vague responses about community life.
Actually, I saw my younger self in them, because five years ago, I, too, was a nervous eighth-grader who felt lost about these questions. Because I did not know anyone who had gone to boarding school, I could not contextualize the residential experience, and I picked boarding schools to apply to primarily based on name brand and rankings. In my interviews, I, too, focused mostly on the academic offerings; I remember scouring the course catalogs of the schools that I had applied to and being fascinated by the electives on Shakespeare, ethics, and Latin poetry.
In the United States, there are two common, albeit extreme stereotypes of boarding school. One, bastions of privilege where the rich go to connect, and two, “feeder schools” for prestigious institutions like the Ivy Leagues. Real boarding school is somewhere in between. Those stereotypes have some element of truth to them, because socialization and academics are inseparable and emphasized at boarding school. Despite the constant sense of community and immersive environment, a sense of loneliness and familial nostalgia is unavoidable. Students become independent at the cost of condensing relationships with parents and siblings to school breaks and hurried phone calls. Many boarding schools, including Blair, are physically isolated; sometimes, they can be ivory towers that provide safety and community at the cost of creating a “bubble” that distances students from the surrounding towns and, sometimes, their own families.
I applied to boarding school with two major misconceptions. At the time, I believed the most compelling reasons for choosing boarding school are, one, to become a stronger student, and two, to get into a good college. I don’t think these were wrong goals. We would be lying if we said that prestige doesn’t matter: our desire for selection and exclusivity will never change. Ultimately, going to boarding school for four years at Blair did help me become a stronger student and get into a good college, but I don’t think they were my biggest takeaways.
Perhaps as a result of attending some of the most academically rigorous schools in China and America, I had always equated education with the accumulation of knowledge, which might be why I felt like a fish out of water during my first two years at boarding school. Before Blair, I attended Tsinghua International School, a top day school in Beijing, and the Brearley School, a New York City day school ranked by Forbes Magazine as the #4 prep school in America. Brearley was a notorious “pressure cooker”: every year, more than a third of the seniors matriculated to Ivy Leagues, and students competed for admission to these top schools. Although I was unaware of these stats, when I applied to Brearley, I came to see Brearley as a stepstone in my upward mobility. As a seventh-grader, I was unprepared for the nearly one hundred pages of nightly reading. I felt more intellectually stimulated at Brearley than I had at any other school, but I was not always happy there.
Blair, however, did not have a competitive, “sink or swim” atmosphere, especially regarding academics. I was never in a class where students tried to hamper the success of their fellow classmates. At Blair, teachers discouraged students from being competitive about grades. When my teachers saw me finishing the reading or a math problem set after study hall, they often encouraged me to leave my room to socialize.
Soon I learned that I did not need to be driven by a cut-throat environment. As an inherently motivated student, I performed much better when I could push myself. I set high expectations, and Blair gave me all the resources I needed to meet them. At boarding school, academic life was inherently social. I soon realized that what I learned at 10 PM in the common room was just as valuable as what I learned at 8:30 AM in the classroom. My peers and I knew that academics were important, but far from the only thing we could learn.
Blair was the first time I felt fully integrated into a community. At Brearley and my previous day schools, I often felt sharper divisions between students based on race, ethnicity, or social-economic status. It was hard to become friends with classmates who did not live in the same neighborhood. As a result, I socialized with a much narrower set of friends who were very academically-focused and shared a similar cultural background. Although most boarding schools do enjoy considerable cultural diversity, the majority of students, domestic or international, are still very privileged. There is a huge financial cost to building a resumé that elite schools want, and wealthy families game the system with tutors, essay advisors, and donations. The Chinese and Korean students bonded well with each other in part due to their shared experiences at junior boarding and international school. In part to mitigate this scenario, Blair randomized seating for weekly formal dinners. I was forced to talk to students I would have been too intimidated to approach otherwise. I befriended varsity athletes like Onome, a 6’3 girl from Nigeria and now a starter for the women’s basketball team at Duke University. I still talk weekly to my roommate, a self-proclaimed “American Born Confused Desi,” with whom I bonded with over our numerous unstructured late-night conversations freshman year.
As Asians, we are often taught to be demure, to not talk about our accomplishments, but within Western culture, socializing can be a means of advancing. Boarding school helped me socialize in a safe environment, gaining tact, and presenting myself in a responsible, appealing way. Because teachers are also dorm parents, coaches, advisors, relationships with faculty are ingrained into the social fabric of boarding school. Teachers opened their homes to us; I learned to bake bread and make pad thai with my dorm master, discussed human rights over dinner with my headmaster, and continued conversations about systemic inequality with my American history teacher over s’mores when he was on weekend duty. I learned at Blair to proactively seek mentorship and to speak to adults as equals. When I applied to colleges senior year, I received strong recommendations because my teachers saw my growth inside and outside the classroom.
The support I received from the community helped me become less afraid of failure. A day school might be a better environment for developing interests into “hooks” for college admissions. Say I knew early on that I wanted to play varsity golf in college as a recruited athlete, I would have benefitted from more specialized resources and master coaching. In contrast, at boarding school, there was a lower barrier to entry for most activities. Many of my classmates were beginners in rowing, theater, or robotics when they first came to Blair, but they continued to pursue these interests through college. My best friend from Blair picked up set design her freshman fall, when an ankle injury prevented her from joining the JV tennis team. She fell in love with theater tech and is now a freshman at UCLA’s Theater, Film and Television School. I had always been relatively shy, but I found my passion for public speaking at Blair. With encouragement from my friends and teachers, I gave a TEDx talk my junior year, a school-wide chapel speech my senior year, and the class speech at graduation, all of which I had never envisioned doing when I first came here.
So, to the question of “why boarding school,” there are many correct answers, because the value that each student derives from boarding school will be different. A reason this question remains difficult for so many Chinese students is perhaps that they have no prior exposure to the experiential core of boarding school life. They are unaware of the hidden, non-academic curriculum of acquiring social skills. As Chinese students, we often operate by the same formula - perfect test scores, as many AP tests as possible, strategic extracurriculars - with the hope of getting into our dream college. But because boarding school is a focused and immersive experience academically and socially, we cannot neglect personal growth as well.
Now seeing things from the other side, I believe interviewers look for a lot of things: students who are open-minded, curious, and eager to contribute to a greater community. At the beginning of ninth grade, I was afraid that boarding school would not be academically rigorous enough, and that this, in turn, would affect my college placement. If I had to do it again, I would still choose Blair. The key reason is that I felt happy and supported there, both of which are crucial for academic and personal growth. Rather than exclusively focusing on my studies and golf, I found myself transformed into a whole person.