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St. Paul's School

School rating 4 / 5 by

325 Pleasant Street Concord NH 03301 United States
Boarding
9th to 12th
Gender
Coed

Academic

St. Paul's School review by .

The academics at St. Paul's were amazing. They prepared me well for college and the course offerings are amazing for a high school. My favorite was astronomy; St. Paul's has three really great observatories (and 1 more that has been recently added) and the instruction I received was second to none. My classes were demanding but at the same time, the teacher to student ratio is so small that kids never really fall too far behind without the teacher noticing. I also never had any bad teachers during my four years at St. Paul's; I had some who were challenging, some who were funny and some who just knew a lot about their subject. But I never had a teacher who didn't care about their subject and their students, which is rare to find even at top level colleges. The distinguished visitors that they brought in to talk to the whole school were great. I saw John Kerry (SPS grad) during his campaign for the president, the director of the FBI, a member of the Leakey family (famous anthropologists) and numerous others who weren't as famous but just as engaging.

College Counseling

The one lesson I learned from going through the college process, and also by watching....

Sample insights on college counseling

  • They have contacts at most of the major universities and feel perfectly comfortable picking up the phone and advocating for a student to get accepted somewhere they feel is a good fit for that student. However, these counselors are certainly not magic bullets. They cannot guarantee that a student will get into an Ivy League university...
  • For those wishing to move on to Oxford or Cambridge, the provision is second-to-none. In the months running up to application and interview, every subject faculty offers classes (often run by former Oxbridge tutors) exploring further areas of their subject as well as offering advice on personal statements, interview technique and more...

Admissions - Getting Accepted

The admissions process when I went through it for St. Paul's was very selective and....

Sample insights on admissions

  • For the interview, dress conservatively. Try to be very clean and put together. Also, I was a tour guide for two years and at the end of every tour, we were asked to evaluate the candidate so if you think the tour is not apart of the process, you are very wrong. Ask questions and be interested. Also, tip for the parents: the kids speak on the tour. Do not ask their questions for them...
  • Most younger siblings have an easy time in the admissions process. I can only think of one case of a younger sibling not being admitted. About half of the students who entered with me had come from public schools. The remainder came from private K-6 schools, or had transferred from other New York private schools The Elizabeth Morrow School and St. Bernard were two of the larger feeder schools...

School Life

The quality of life was probably the one thing that I had some reservations about at St. Paul's. Obviously the students have access to state of the art facilities for pretty much everything they could possibly want and the houses are great, but with so much pressure from teachers to do well and from outside sources (mostly parents) to get into a top college, there wasn't a whole lot of time to relax and enjoy your time. The campus is absolutely beautiful and I would highly recommend spending a lot of time exploring all the little paths and rivers that....

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