On Thursday, May 17th the entire junior class arrived to school an hour early to head out on a day long trip. Three buses departed Baskerville at 7:00 on its way to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. From the buses we split into groups to
Today, students in Baskerville, the schools primary building, were evacuated five minutes early due to a security threat on the college campus. HS MSE students were evacuated through the northern door which leads off campus and told not to return to the campus.
Later, I found that a man carrying suicide notes took a hostage with a pellet gun designed to look like a 44 caliber pistol. Police who arrived convinced the man to release the hostage and to drop the gun. From the description on the news, it seemed as though the event was not near Baskerville.
The whole incident served as a wake up call for myself and hopefully other students. It is important to recognize that we are on a college campus and keep in mind events that have occurred throughout the country on college campus'.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling held the 2008 Spring National College Fair today. There were over two hundred colleges represented at the Jacob Javits Center where the event was held. HS MSE had a large turn out, I saw 10 students myself. We would all like to send thanks to Mr. Klein who provided us information about the college fair and gave us strategies of how to handle the overwhelming amount of colleges.
Today I had my first of many meetings with Mr. Klein, my guidance consoler and college advisor. I realized that my failure to adjust to such a competitive school in freshman year, when I averaged an 82 and an 83 would hurt me tremendously when applying to colleges. It took me a whole year in MSE to realize that I would have to motivate myself to learn and if I was struggling I would have to put in the extra hours to get to where I wanted to be in terms of understanding the material. I consider myself an A- student and it was difficult for me to look at an 86 average on my transcript. However I hope that this wake up call will serve as even more motivation for the rest of my time at MSE.
While it was difficult for me to move on from an 86 staring at me on my transcript, my parents and Mr. Klein pushed on with the meeting. My dad told Mr. Klein that he wanted me to stay in a 5 hour drive radius from the city. I was disappointed because even with my poor grades in freshman year, there was nothing i could have done to limit my choices as drawing a circle around New York City and saying that I could only go to somewhere inside the circle. However, as I sat back in my chair in thought for the second time, the meeting continued. Mr. Klein went over SUNYs and CUNYs and private schools.
The meeting was very helpful as a whole and I really recommend that for anyone reading this, you get your parents to make an appointment with Mr. Klein because until you meet with him, you really don't have any idea of where you are on the road to getting to colleges.
Today the Junior Class went on a trip to Philadelphia's National Constitution Center. HS MSE covered the cost of the trip providing three coach buses, lunches and admission tickets for about 115 Junior students. The bus ride was about two hours each way. After arriving at the museum, we were brought into a planetarium where students looking forward to a skit with people dressed in 1700's attire were disappointed with a monologue from a man dressed for the 21st century. Following the overview of our countries trip through the centuries, we were released into the outer part of the museum, a large circular exhibit that surrounded the planetarium. We were given work to do based off of certain interactive exhibits for about two hours.
The work given to us was too specific to the interactive exhibits at the museum, most people spent the majority of the time waiting in line at various activities. There was a law activity where a ridiculous turkey tried to become the state bird, a taxes exercise where a duck smoking a cigar continuously popped up in front of the information about variations in the governments spending of taxes throughout the countries history, and a voting booth to vote for presidents from different time periods in U.S. history, a poll in which no matter whom you voted for the machine told the voter that they had made a good choice. Additionally, we were in the buses for about double the time we were in the exhibit.
However, even with many criticisms made about the trip being a waste of money (even though the school covered the cost of the trip) and a waste of the students time, the trip, was a success. HS MSE as a school does not sign off on many trips and because everyone got to Philadelphia, did their work and came back without any trouble, the Junior class made an example of how other trips could work in the future. The trip serves a point to move forward from.
Welcome to the High School for Math, Science and Engineering student weblog! My name is Amos Goldstein and I am a Junior at HS MSE. Our school is such a vibrant community that it is necessary to have an ongoing blog about life at school. This blog will feature postings about school events, updates on the school sport teams, what is going in school and much more. I will be writing most of the posts however there will be guest postings from students, faculty and maybe even some parents.
-Amos Goldstein
