School life, between the linesBy Admissions Diary
School stories, admissions adventures, and the things parents talk about on the way home.
Parent life · Hotchkiss, Connecticut
In a 2025 essay for The Hotchkiss Record, a student explained how she dodged her parents' calls with invented tests, and what happened when she got sick that winter.
Parent life · Toronto
An Upper Canada College student told his story in the student paper in 2015: one expensive sweater, two weeks of silence, one email to his mother. Schools have since put lost-and-found online.
School portraits · Seattle
In fall 2025, the Bush School's girls' basketball program in Seattle was nearly out of players. Two seniors and their coach wrote a case for changing a rule. On the first day of the season, 21 showed up.
School portraits · San Francisco
In a Lick-Wilmerding class called Rethinking Furniture, a sophomore designed a lounge chair based on a geodesic dome. Then his computer crashed.
School portraits · New York City
A Nightingale assembly asked students to name their feelings by chip. Three years later, a senior told the whole school about the morning she cried in homeroom over a Latin test.
Parent life · North Carolina & California
Head of School for a Day is a staple of the school auction. The platforms of the winners are remarkably consistent, and remarkably sound.
Parent life · New York & elsewhere
At one Manhattan public school's auction, a class shower curtain went for $400 and six crayon drawings beat a backstage pass to the Temptations.
Parent life · New York
Schools tell families plainly that their wait lists have no order. In our kitchen, over one pot of coffee, my wife and I assigned ourselves a place.
School portraits · Chicago
Sophomores at a Chicago school run a fair for the whole school every year. In 2022, after a COVID delay, a student food critic set out to eat everything.
School portraits · New York City
A Manhattan Quaker school has a light installation by one of the world's most famous artists on its sixth floor. Third graders took sketchbooks and found lunch.
School portraits · Dallas–Fort Worth
At a Dallas-area Catholic boys' school, one teacher stays with a class from fifth grade to graduation. In 2013 that teacher was a young monk with a reputation to fix.
Rivalries & rituals · Boston area
On Switch Day in 2022, three Winsor newspaper editors shadowed students at the boys' school down the road and wrote it up. Lunch was at 1:40.
