About Our Students

They tend to be smart, independent-minded, self-directed, creative, and passionate about learning. Some of them are academic stars (in high school they might have been in the National Honor Society, or they might have joined Odyssey of the Mind or the National Science Olympiad or Academic Decathlon), but in general they’re not motivated by grades; they’re motivated by ideas, by the prospect of knowing more, making connections, surprising themselves, applying their brains to thorny problems and complicated issues. They might be deeply involved in civic action or community service (they might have been—and might still be—involved in Amnesty International or Habitat for Humanity or Model United Nations), but not because it’ll look good on their resume; they’re involved because the world matters, and they matter in the world.

Maybe the most important thing about them is that they’re all here, and nowhere else.

The Community

Our students come from Fairbanks and Brooklyn and Burma; from El Paso and Ecuador and Washington, D.C.; from Jackson, Mississippi and Honesdale, Pennsylvania. They speak Hindi and Swedish, Hebrew and Japanese; they play the sitar and the mellophone and the Irish flute; they publish novels and build Web sites and compete in trick yo-yo events; they represent an astonishingly diverse range of histories and beliefs, opinions and experiences. That diversity is one of the defining features of the human condition—and one of the hallmarks of a Simon’s Rock education.