The Middle School Experience
—An interview with alumna Alexandra Kelsey ’20
See an excerpt in the 2024-2025 issue of ViewPoints.
Pine Point’s Middle School intentionally builds on many core experiences of our Lower School and creates a powerful cornerstone for students’ success in high school and beyond. As we often hear from young alumni, the achievements they attain in some of the most competitive high school and college programs in the country can be traced to some of their foundational Middle School experiences.
We reached out to a group of young alumni to delve deeper into their Middle School experiences. The following response came to us from Alex Kelsey, who is currently a sophomore at Cornell University majoring in Economics with minors in Arabic and Business. Alex, along with her sister Amanda ’24, began her Pine Point journey in pre-kindergarten. As her mother reports, Alex “…loved Pine Point from her first day as a 3-year-old!” Alex grew into a leader in our Middle School, and then went on to much success at Deerfield Academy, class of 2023, before attending Cornell University. She is planning on a summer internship at Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Alex’s responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Q: In your academic career, which Pine Point class, project, or teacher inspired you?
A: In eighth grade, our anatomy class fascinated me – I loved understanding the human body and the exciting labs we conducted in class. The course inspired me to pursue my Emergency Medical Technician certification, and at sixteen, I became state and nationally certified and enjoyed the fast-paced emergency medicine environment. In college, I decided to combine my love for history, economics, and math with my desire to work in a similar dynamic environment as emergency medicine, and decided to recruit for finance, ultimately receiving an offer from
Goldman Sachs.
Q: Excellence is one of Pine Point’s core values. What does that mean to you in terms of your experience?
A: Pine Point taught me that excellence should be measured beyond just academics. Excellence can take shape through lifelong friendships, pursuit of hobbies, care for the community, I could go on. For example, classrooms emphasize collaboration and discussion; there is more to excellence beyond a test score: there is question formulating, problem-solving, and teamwork. Pine Point also offered several extracurricular activities, from theater, chorus, sports, and community service—enriching and helping students explore interests, leadership, and areas that provided satisfaction beyond academics. These are all elements that lead to personal excellence. Pine Point also celebrated engaging with the community, whether it was ninth-grade buddies with Lower School students, taking the boat into the Long Island Sound to learn about the coastal community, or gathering for an all-school meeting. All provided a sense of community and helped me excel socially and academically as I built a strong support system, and continue to build similar networks in each new environment I enter today.
Q: In what ways did Pine Point help prepare you for high school?
A: Pine Point’s creative teaching and educational experiences greatly prepared me for boarding school and beyond. From frequent outdoor learning opportunities to innovative lab activities, I learned how to be curious about the world beyond a worksheet or a test. When I arrived at Deerfield Academy, I found the same methods of thinking outside the box and the same emphasis on curiosity I was used to at Pine Point were utilized in my new classrooms. In a traditional learning sense, Pine Point’s discussion-based learning in humanities classes gave me the confidence to participate in Harkness tables, a popular discussion learning method at boarding schools, with intellectual curiosity and care for others. Similarly, the smaller classes at Pine Point prepared me to engage with my high school teachers on a greater level than some of my peers, allowing me to deepen my understanding of materials and forge strong relationships with teachers in academic fields of interest.
Q: In what ways did Pine Point help prepare you for your college experience?
A: Pine Point gave me a strong foundation of friendship and empathy. I find making academic, social, and professional connections easy, as I draw on my years of Pine Point experiences, emphasizing care for others and maintaining connections. Pine Point was an incredible social experience for me, and I learned that creating caring communities, similar to the one I experienced for so long at Pine Point, is the key to success. In college, developing relationships with professors, friends, and alumni has led to my academic and professional success, and I am forever grateful for Pine Point’s emphasis on connections.
Q: What are some highlights from your Middle School years?
- Writing my first big essay in sixth grade for our bird project; I was very proud of my bibliography skills and piping plover research.
- Traveling to Pine Cobble to play in a tournament with my varsity lacrosse team, and of
course, begging Ms. Raf [Raftery] to stop for McDonald’s to and from the tournament! - Creating the World War II wax museum in Ms. Fed’s [Federici] eighth-grade history class.
- Volunteering at Academy Point, a memory care center in Mystic, CT, for my eighth-grade Independent Service Learning project. My classmates and I always got excited to help plan, conduct activities, and create crafts for residents.
- Traveling to StoneRidge, a senior living community in Mystic, CT, in seventh grade to hear my partner, Gloria Bradley, tell stories about her life to create a biography about her for our English class, and drawing a picture of her in art class as the cover of her biography!
- Naming my chick in sixth grade Cucumber and measuring Cucumber’s growth, and then visiting the grown chickens on Mr. Brown’s property.
- I still have my ski chateau draft from our architecture drafting competition in seventh grade!
- I vividly remember my friend falling into the pond near campus during one of our sixth-grade field labs! I always had a blast putting my boots on for a day of exploration and learning about local flora and fauna.
- I still remember all the lyrics to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” from a Spring Arts performance circa seventh grade.
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