Stuyvesant

A great, somewhat well-endowed high school in New York City; generally considered to be the best public education one can receive in the city. Students are required to score above a certain cutoff on a multiple-choice entrance exam to get in. Contents of the exam are fairly similar to those of an IQ test, if you look at it cynically. Because of its location in NYC, the student population is very diverse, but students do tend to clump together in cliques, though not very heavily. The success of the school is primarily driven by the bright, over-achieving (to the point of masochism) students. The teachers varied, but many, if not most, are mediocre to average. The school is well funded for an urban New York school ($12 million a year at this time), but that amount is meager compared to other schools of its class, like Thomas Jefferson. Common myths/misconceptions: 1. They're all super genius nerds. Around 600 to 1000 students are admitted each year. These are going to be pretty bright kids, and it does include the very top slice of the students in NYC... but do you really think all 800 kids born in the same year, living in NYC, are all Einsteins? 2. Everyone does drugs there. There are a lot of people who do drugs at Stuy, but not disproportionally more than at any other high school. 3. Everyone's stuck-up. And there aren't any of those people in your school? Obviously, there are some arrogant people, but most of the population is accepting and intelligent. 4. No one has a social life. You don't go to the school. Stuy kids party HAHD. 5. You get like six hours of homework every day. You do get a crapload of homework, and some juniors do have six hours of it, but most are simply overachievers. They find their own stuff to do. If you come home at 9PM after building robots and then write a school newspaper article (and LIKED IT), you wouldn't sleep a lot either. 6. Everyone's Asian. There are a lot of Asians, but they are neither the majority, nor are they unfriendly. 7. Everyone is ultra-competitive. There are definitely college jerks: self-serving delusional beings who are not averse to back-stabbing friends and sucking up on artificial and insignificant hierarchies. There are definitely brown-nosers, and people who will use friendships to leverage themselves into "leadership" positions or to copy homeworks. However, most of the kids are nice people whose parents forced them into Stuy. 8. Everyone is a rich snob. People scored well on a math and reading exam to get in. Having buttloads of money doesn't help anyone at Stuy. Regardless of race or financial status, Stuy students have a sense of "we're all in this together"-ness. Getting an education at Stuy is a lot like getting hazed for four years: everyone has to do it to graduate, and it feels like you're part of some special group when it's over. Ripped a lot of this off from Thomas Jefferson's page. TJ is like Stuy's rival school in Math and CS, but both on both sides of that will tell you that one's so much better than the other that there is no rivalry.