PJF - very thruthful, personal view. Thank you for your honesty.
Do you mind if I ask why you stayed at Andover, since it looks like you did not fit in/did not enjoy it to the fullest?
Do you think spending two years at Andover has shaped you in a way that your local HS would not be able to?
I was at Andover because I was from a family of expats, and there was not an international high school in the country we were living in. I'd done one year of correspondence school, but wasn't really happy with that. So boarding school was what we tried next, and there wasn't really an alternative to fall back on. I don't ever remember wishing I could drop out--I wasn't actively unhappy while there, just not happy. The upside, of course, is that it was more academically challenging than any thing my parents or I could think of. Not academically nurturing like what delbows describes (no one-on-one faculty contact), but it gave me headroom that I wouldn't have had elsewhere.
