ith the awkward first weeks behind them, Andover’s new upperclassmen are already beginning to feel like a part of the Phillips Academy community. Both Uppers and Post-Graduates are now adjusted to their new boarding school life. Meagan Winn ’05 What are the best and worst parts of living in a dorm? I think it’s really good that I’m in a big dorm. It makes it much easier to meet people. You already know so many people from within the dorm that you are able to branch out and make new friends fairly easily. The down side is that having so many people around makes it hard to concentrate and focus on school work, even when I know that I need to. Stephen DeSimone ’04 Are you glad that you came as a PG? How do you think it is different to come as a PG than it would have been to come earlier in high school? I’m glad I came for PG year. I guess it’d probably have been easier to come as a Junior, a Lower, or an Upper, though. There are some on campus that just don’t give PGs as much respect as they do people that entered earlier. They don’t see us as students. There seems to be this myth on campus that all PGs are idiots who just came for sports, or for music, or to repeat a year of high school. People tend to think that we don’t care as much about the school, so they look at us differently. Vaishali Grover ’05 Coming as an upper, you step right into what many consider the most academically challenging year of high school. How was this adjustment? Before coming here, I went to a desperately under-funded public school. Andover has been much harder. You have smaller classes, though, so the teachers are able to spend more time teaching. Andover is academically very difficult because you are held to very high standards. People say that we have so little class time, but in terms of what we get done, the class time is very efficient. We are able to get so much done in just the 45 minutes of class. The teachers were also very helpful in the adjustment. At the beginning of the year, many of my teachers would give me advice, and when they saw me, they’d check and see how I was doing. My teachers have been very willing to set up conferences after class to help. For example, at the beginning of the year, I was having problems in math, so my teacher would go over the homework with me everyday after class.
