News

Ready for College

One of the things that is especially fun about the first weeks back from winter break is that our college-aged alums come back to visit, since their semesters have often yet to start. They pop in on their teachers and friends – catching up on their college fall semesters and on what’s been happening at BUA.

We hosted a lunch for that cohort last week, which several dozen BUA graduates attended. I had a chance to ask them about how things are going. What I heard was heartening. We know from recent survey results of young alums that they feel ready for college. 95% of recent graduates agreed that having attended BUA, they were better prepared for college than they would have otherwise been. 100% reported that BUA prepared them well as writers. 91% agreed that their experience at BUA helped them navigate college life with confidence and independence. The stories I heard added some helpful context. Certainly, they told me about their confidence in navigating their courses. But I also heard about advanced classes students were able to take because of their BU coursework and how that opened the door to a second major. Alums told me how they took advantage of office hours to build relationships with professors and how some of those conversations turned into research assistant positions. Others told me about how they have started new clubs, noting a need in the community and having the confidence to navigate the college bureaucracy. The picture that emerged was a group of students with the confidence and savvy to not only succeed in college but to get more out of experience. I’m really proud of them, and it makes me happy that they are thriving.

View more from our Young Alumni Lunch with the classes of 2021-2025 from Thursday, January 8th, 2026 here.

Knowing Every Student

As we do every year, the faculty started the semester a day before the students. All teachers and advisors sit together for a full day. The topic? Our students. Over the course of the day, we talk through each student – reviewing academic performance, engagement outside the classroom, and social connections. It’s a chance to share observations, talk about support students might need in the coming semester, and celebrate growth and successes. I’m consistently impressed by how well these teachers know the kids and by the number of voices speaking up about each student. Certainly we hear stories and reflections from each student’s advisor and classroom teachers. We also, though, hear from adults in the community with less direct daily contact but who have managed to form a connection.

Too often in schools, it is only the students who are struggling in some way who get attention from the adults. I’m proud to be part of a place where we take the time to talk about every kid. Every young person deserves to be known and loved – the one central promise we make to our families when they join BUA. We work hard to live up to that each day.

Exams in Several Flavors

Today is the last day of BUA classes. It has been a very good semester, and students’ attention has understandably turned to preparation for next week’s exams. We believe that exams play an important role. They provide students the chance to practice synthesizing months of material and to demonstrate long-term retention of key ideas. Exams are also helpful data points for teachers on how students are learning and how teachers might adjust for the coming semester and future years.

Exams may conjure a singular image of students in long rows for multi-hour, high-stakes tests. The reality is more diverse. Our teachers have created a number of different ways for students to show what they know. There is certainly a place for sit-down, written exams; classics and most of our math classes will offer those. English and history teachers have adopted in-person, one-on-one interviews to supplement the periodic essays and other assessments. Students in chemistry and geometry will have individual oral exams with their teachers as well, while those in biology will give a poster presentation on organelles they have designed. I’m grateful for our faculty’s thoughtfulness and creativity, and wish all of our students good luck next week!

Student Voice

In place of our usual all-school meeting this week, leaders from our Student Council organized community-wide town hall meetings. StuCo representatives led sessions of about 25 students each to hear about their experiences and solicit ideas for how we can further strengthen the BUA community; we’ll review those ideas together later this winter and report back at a school meeting. Another round of town halls is in the works for the spring, and I hope this becomes a new school tradition.

This year, we are also running several small ad hoc working groups, where teachers, staff, and students collaborate on important school policy questions – one focused on our daily schedule and another on our learning-management system. Those groups make recommendations to the full faculty and staff and have a real impact on the life of the school.

Schools are better when students – the experts in what the school experience is really like – have channels to speak up and feel empowered to play a role in shaping the community. That’s particularly true here, where we have an exceptionally thoughtful, dedicated, creative, and talented cadre of young people. I’m proud to work with them side by side.

What I’m Grateful For

With Thanksgiving days away, we turn our attention to gratitude. Brimming donation boxes from the 9th-grade food drive adorn the lobby. Tuesday’s all-school meeting will feature short talks by a handful of juniors and seniors who will tell the community about something they are grateful for. It is good for the soul to pause, reflect, and share the blessings we enjoy.

I’d like to take a moment here to express my personal gratitude to this community. I often share (brag, really) with colleagues at other schools that our parent community is like no other. Like their children, our parents value learning, challenge, and growth for their own sake, even in a society that tends to focus too narrowly on college lists and grade outcomes. They trust the school and our extraordinary teachers in a way that has become all too rare. Our students, too, are one of a kind. I have yet to visit another school where curiosity and kindness are the expectation and weaved into the cultural fabric like they are here. I have been meeting groups of seniors for lunch recently. They often ask how we select for those traits in admissions, how we perpetuate that culture day to day, and how they, as leaders in the community, can help. They recognize how rare this student culture is, and I love their desire to preserve it for another generation.

Finally, a thank you to my colleagues on the faculty and staff – the heart of this great school. Our teachers bring an unusually deep well of knowledge, fitting guides for a school filled with kids thirsty to know more. The teachers and staff – including those who will sacrifice sleep and time with their families to chaperone Lock-In tonight! – lean into and model the work ethic, high standards, creativity, and kindness we expect from our students. Most of all, they love these young people. That love opens the door to learning and growth – and to lifelong mentoring relationships. I feel so lucky to work with these remarkable colleagues. I hope that you will join me by taking some time during this holiday season to thank a teacher, advisor, coach, or mentor who has made a difference in your life or in your family’s life.

I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Being of Service

We paused as a community on Tuesday to mark Veterans Day. There are a number of alumni of this school who have devoted their careers to serving our country in branches across the military. Several have returned to BUA over the years to speak to our students and share their journeys. We are grateful for their service and the example they set.

Service takes many forms, but all forms center around a fundamental truth: service to others – our families, friends, community, a stranger, a cause – is where we find purpose in our lives. Decades of psychological research confirms a central thesis of Viktor Frankl’s seminal work, Man’s Search for Meaning, based on his experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during WWII: humans yearn for and are motivated by the feeling of contributing to something bigger than ourselves and being of service to others. That sense of purpose can be psychologically sustaining, not only in the horrific setting of Frankl’s work, but in more ordinary times as well.

As a school, we have a duty to give students the chance to experience the feeling of motivation and contentment that comes from being of use to others – that something they do matters and perhaps makes somebody else’s life better. Our mission promises that these young people will be challenged to “engage meaningfully in our community and beyond.” There are longstanding traditions of students volunteering in the school and around the Boston area. In the past two years, we have initiated a service-learning pilot where groups of BUA students travel to local middle and elementary schools to volunteer in their afterschool academic and enrichment programs. The interest among BUA students has exceeded our expectations, and we hope to expand the initiative in the coming years. We expect that it will create lifelong habits.