News
Lobstah Bots Robotics Team Nets Honors at New England District Championships
BUA's robotics team, the Lobstah Bots, participated in the FIRST Robotics New England District Championships in Springfield, MA in early April 2024. Although the team fell short of qualifying for the world championships, it performed at a high level on the field: on the final day of competition, the Lobstah Bots won the FIRST Innovation in Control Award, which is given to a robot with an “innovative and unique” control scheme that is “integrated with the machine, human players, and strategy” in both concept and execution. Its practical and sleek mechanical design, paired with impressive auto-align and LED signaling in software, made the team's robot -- dubbed "The Woodpecker" -- stand out from the crowd. This has been one of the team's most competitive and successful seasons in its history. In February, the Lobstah Bots were invited to present their work and robot at the International Society for Laboratory and Automation... More
An Admissions Thank You
We are wrapping our admissions season – and what a season it was. We received more applications than ever in the school’s history. We were more selective than we’ve ever been. We are fully enrolled for the fall. We extended financial aid funding to every student we felt should be here, again maintaining no financial aid waitlist – a testament to our values and a product of the philanthropic generosity of our community. Most importantly, in the fall we will welcome an extraordinarily talented, kind, curious, diverse group of new students. I can’t wait for you to meet them! I’m writing to thank all of you who played a role in this year’s admission season. It is the work of many hands. Thank you to the dozens of BUA alumni who conducted admissions interviews and participated in panels. Thank you to our parents who shared their experiences at events, reached out... More
Getting Down to Work
Last Sunday, many of our families celebrated Easter, with others set to celebrate in early May according to the Orthodox calendar. I wish you all a happy and blessed Paschal season. I also extend warm wishes to our Muslim families who mark Ramadan this month and Eid next week. Eid Mubarak. With their teacher away from school attending a national art educator conference, I had the pleasure of covering a first-period painting class this morning. Before class, I sat at the teacher’s desk clicking away at my keyboard, focused too much on clearing my inbox and looking up every few moments to greet students as they settled in. At 8:55, the bell rang to mark the start of class. I closed my laptop screen, stood up, and found ten students seated around the room. They had brushes in hand, paint palettes on trays in front of them, and heads down engrossed... More
Purpose through Research and Action that Matter
This week, we heard from two BUA alumni at all-school meetings. Dheekshita Kumar ‘16 spoke about her career as an entrepreneur and the ways her BUA experience set her down that path. She told us about the time when she and her friends published a book of poetry as high schoolers with the support and guidance of their English teacher, who demystified self-publishing. She described the process of envisioning and launching BUA’s middle school model UN tournament (BUAMUN), which has now become an institution. The confidence she gained from her experiences bringing an idea to life at BUA gave her a lifelong I-can-do-that attitude, which has translated into entrepreneurial success at an early age during and after college doing socially meaningful work. We also heard from Jon Freeman ’04, the recipient of this year’s Distinguished Alumni Award. Jon is a professor and researcher at Columbia University studying social psychology, combining that... More
Global Trips and the Wall-Less Classroom
In just a few hours, 50 BUA students, guided by trip leaders from the faculty and staff, will be heading off on three place-based intellectual adventures. One group is off to Istanbul, where they will build on their BUA study of classical history, modern politics and culture, and geometry through Ottoman architecture and ornamentation. Another is off to Paris for a hands-on literary experience, visiting the places that so many of the expat writers from their American Literature course frequented and engaging in daily writing assignments while there. The third group heads to New York City for an art-focused whirlwind – jazz clubs, museums, operas, plays, and more – supplementing the work they do every day in the BUA studio, theater, and music room. These are not sightseeing trips. They are a wall-less version of the BUA classroom. I am grateful to all the faculty and staff members who have... More
Asking Good Questions
Yesterday, our 10th graders took part in a lunch talk with Dr. Ingrid Anderson, the Associate Director of BU’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. Dr. Anderson, who received her doctorate at BU, took many classes with Elie Wiesel when he was a professor here, worked closely with him, and has done a great deal of research and writing focused on Wiesel and his work. The students are in the midst of a unit in their history course exploring the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. They recently read Elie Wiesel’s Night, the famous memoir of Wiesel’s experience at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Holocaust, and will be reading Wiesel’s Dawn shortly, a fictional work set in the immediate postwar period. Dr. Anderson shared personal stories about what Wiesel was like as a teacher and mentor, explored his views on morality and politics, described the hundreds of... More
The Beauty of Many Hats
What an exciting week here at BUA! Last Friday, the Jazz Band and Swamp Cats entertained students, faculty, staff, parents, and even grandparents for our Valentine’s Cabaret. The dance floor was quite a scene. Yesterday, both the boys and girls varsity basketball teams won their league championships in close games in front of a lively home crowd. In the girls game, senior Anais Kim reached a rare milestone – scoring 1,000 points – which is even more impressive given that she did so in just three years (COVID canceled her 9th-grade season). Tonight, we will celebrate the Lunar New Year in that same gym. Students from the East Asian Students Association, along with dozens of parents, have organized food, music, and games to share this important cultural moment with the whole BUA family. All are welcome, and we hope to see many of you there. I’m struck by how many of... More
Leadership is Learned
On Tuesday, Boston University’s interim President, Ken Freeman, spoke at our all-school meeting. President Freeman has a distinguished history of service to BU, including eight years as the Dean of BU’s Questrom School of Business. That service followed a nearly forty-year career in industry, including senior executive positions at Corning, Quest Diagnostics, and private-equity firm KKR. In 2013, Harvard Business Review named him one of the 100 best performing CEOs in the world. He knows some things about leadership – his topic that morning. He offered a lively overview of what we know about successful leadership, peppering his talk with anecdotes and grounding it in decades of scholarship about what works and what doesn’t. He invited students to think about their own preferred leadership styles and challenged them to begin developing their own leadership philosophies. He touted the centrality of EQ. Most notably, he assured our students that leadership is... More
Our Diversity is Our Strength
Students from the Geography Club and from Student Council’s PR Committee posted a world map at the foot of the staircase by the main entrance earlier this week. Attached to the map is a basket of pushpins and a request for students to add a pin to any locations connected to their heritage. Just a few days later, the map has now come alive with hundreds of multicolored pins. Yesterday afternoon, I joined some students gathered around the map analyzing the data – noticing the significant coverage of Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and parts of North America; tight clusters in East Africa, Central America, and the Middle East; and scattered points throughout the map. The story it tells is a beautiful one of a local school composed of and enriched by cultures from around the world. We are proud that BUA is a place where families and students across cultures... More
Research Highlight: Finn McMillan ’24
For his senior thesis, BUA senior Finn McMillan ‘24 is working in partnership with Boston University’s Daniel Segrè Lab to investigate the optimization of plant growth for the sustainable and affordable production of consumer biofuels. Finn was first introduced to the Segrè lab when he toured it as part of the STEM Seminar in his junior year. Intrigued by the team’s work, which focuses on bioinformatics and metabolic networks in living systems, Finn reached out to Professor Ilija Dukovski, a researcher in the Segrè lab, and arranged to spend his summer conducting research in the lab. Finn’s – and the Segrè Lab’s – work focuses on a small piece of a much larger, multi-institutional project called the Microbial Community Analysis & Functional Evaluation in Soils project, or m-CAFEs, “a collaborative, coordinated and integrated mission-driven proposal that interrogates the function of the soil and rhizosphere microbiome, which has immense implications for carbon... More