A Passion for Learning

For the students, teachers, administrators and support staff there is a sense of belonging, a sense of family, a spirit, all essential ingredients for this milieu … our school …our gem.                                              

Maddie Dressner, senior
Great Neck South High School, Great Neck, N.Y.
Great Neck South is more than just the impressive AP assessments and Regents scores. South is knowing that your principal truly cares by asking how you are when he sees you in the library, and showing his appreciation with a personal note on your report card. It's having a staff that stays past the last bell to help. It consists of teachers who love what they do and have the ability to inspire others. South is an experience that leaves a lasting impression. It's every club and activity you could ever want. It's wearing orange and blue while you watch the Rebels play a rival team. It's going to Rebel Olympics and trying to beat out the other grades--even though the seniors always win. It's waiting for the track team to run down the halls, faces painted and chanting, during Spirit week. It's the newspaper spoof that comes out on April Fool's Day. South is the assembly about Martin Luther King Jr., celebrating diversity. It's the operas and plays. It's the charity auction where you buy time with your teachers. South is a sense of community. It's loving to get up and come to school. It's about being yourself, but knowing you're part of something greater.

Jonathan Chong-Yen Yeh, senior
Troy High School, Fullerton, Calif.
A great high school is one that brings out the best in its students. It is a place where passion and character are cultivated in addition to mathematics and science, and where peers and teachers care more about you than about your class rank.

When I arrive at Troy High School every morning, I find myself in that sort of place: each of our faculty members has an unparalleled dedication to us and our futures, and the programs they've created here attract equally dedicated scholars, athletes and artists from throughout Southern California. For a student here, each day is intense but fulfilling, each classmate is competitive but supportive and each faculty member is devoted to our education and excited to be a part of it.

Troy's students are vibrant and diverse, and the broad range of cultures, interests and goals we bring to the school makes the entire experience incredible. Though Troy's courses are extremely rigorous, its community is supportive, such as with our Peer Tutoring Club, through which hundreds of students offer academic help to their peers in every class.

Through all of our differences and difficulties, every member of the Troy community shares a passion--to give our best in all we do, for ourselves and for everyone around us. It is this passion that is passed down to us by our celebrated teachers. It is this passion that propels students of the Troy Tech Program toward success in every field of professional work as part of their crowning, senior-year internship. It is this passion that drives our renowned Science Olympiad Team, which has built nothing less than a national dynasty, and our other extracurricular teams, which are well on their way to accomplishing similar feats.