Boarding School Life

Boarding School

Going to a boarding school has been one of the best experiences of my life. Boarding school gave me the opportunity to mature and grow up with kids my age, while learning to make life decisions and having more freedoms than the average teenager. I have been attending boarding school for the past 3 years, and now I am going on my 4th year.

Dorm Life

This is probably the biggest difference between living at home, and going to a boarding school, the dorm life. The most important thing to remember is that the entire dorm is your home, not just your room, so be respectful to everything and your neighbors. The dorm life at a boarding school is very similar to the dorm life at collage, the main difference being that we have more supervision since we are younger. Things such as check in on week days at 7:30 for study hall, and on weekends at 11 pm for the night, and having your teachers live next door to you are some of the differences between boarding school, and living at home. Having teachers live next to you can be good, and bad. If you need help with homework, you just go ask the teacher, and they will help you. A bad thing is, if you were not working in study hall, and you do not have your homework for the next day, then your teacher is not going to believe any excuses that you come up with.

The dorm is the place where you learn a lot about different cultures and ways of life. Each person is placed in a room where none of their roommates are from the same country, this is done to help all of the students learn about different cultures. For example my roommates were from Turkey, and Russia. One of the big parts of being roommates is communication, you need to communicate to each other when the room is not clean, what times your getting up in the morning, if you need to stay up late that night to finish homework, and just things about everyday life such that there are no clashes between roommates. Being roommates at this age can be very hard, some times we are irresponsible and don't clean the room, or someone forgets to shut the window and it rains, but over time you learn to live with each other and adapt and make sacrifices.

Social Life

The social life when going to boarding school is just like any other teenager social life, just with more freedoms to do what you want, and become who you want to be. When you want to go somewhere with friends its not like living at home where you have to go and ask your parents if you can go out. If you feel like going out, then you go out, if you just feel like doing nothing all day and just sleep in, and play some games on your computer, then that is what you do. This can be good and bad, while some kids might choose to go to the movies, and play sports and just hang out at cafes, other kids choose to go to pub's and bars, and go smoking , cigarettes and drugs. This is part of becoming who you are, and learning to make the right decisions. For example, on the weekend i will wake up around 10 and go down to brunch (breakfast/lunch) then i will go and hand out with friends at a cafe or something. then we will go and do some of or shopping or get things that we will need for the week. Then we will go out to dinner, and later on catch a movie. Depending on how late at night it is at this point we might go out to the pub and get a drink or two. (My boarding school is in Europe, so beer and wine is legal at 16).

School Life

School life is just like going to normal school, you still have a full schedule, and classes that you need to attend. The teachers still give you homework, and you can still get in trouble for falling asleep in class. The only difference being that the teachers know you better than if it was a day school. They know if your a hard working student in the dorm, or if your more of a party person. They know where your from, and some things about your family. They also tend to know who your friends are, who you are dating (which sometimes can be kind of annoying), and who you are outside of class.There are also after school activities, and team sports. Just like any other school, we have teams that compete in tournaments and train just as hard as other teams.

Friendship

There are no words that can describe the people that you meet at boarding school. The people you live with, eat with, and see everyday of your life, become a huge part of your life. Everybody becomes close, even if you do not like a person, you will still get to know them very well. The friends that you make, are closer than friends that you will ever make in a normal day school. They say that one year of friendship at a boarding school is equal to seven years of being friends with someone at a normal school. At a boarding school your friends become your family, we help each other, support each other, and push each other to be greater. Friends are probably 3/4 of the reason I go back each year, because they mean so much to me, and its hard to leave them behind. Even on vacations I'm always emailing them and staying in contact.

This is just a brief overview of what boarding school is like from my experience, and I have been going to boarding school for the past 3 years, and I am going on my 4th year there. Each boarding school is different, and have different rules, but overall I must say I love boarding school, and never regret going to one.