Home Contact Us

From Game Golf In Its Lifetime Only Wisdom Words

Info Menu

From Game Golf In Its Lifetime Only Wisdom Words

Choate Rosemary Hall

"Fidelitas et Integritas"

Archbold (dorm) detail 2 - Choate Rosemary Hall.jpg

Choate Rosemary Hall (also known as Choate ) is a private, college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school located in Wallingford, Connecticut. It took its present name and coeducational form with the merger in 1971 of two eminent single-sex establishments, The Choate School (founded in 1896 in Wallingford) and Rosemary Hall (founded in 1890 in Wallingford, but resident from 1900 to 1971 in Greenwich, Connecticut). At the merger, the Wallingford campus was enlarged with a complex of modernist buildings on its eastern edge to accommodate the women from Greenwich.

Choate is a member of the Eight Schools Association, begun informally in 1973-74 and formalized at a 2006 meeting at Lawrenceville School, when Choate headmaster Edward Shanahan was appointed its first president. He was succeeded in 2009 by Elizabeth Duffy, head of Lawrenceville. The member schools are Choate, Phillips Academy (known as Andover), Phillips Exeter Academy (known as Exeter), Deerfield Academy, St. Paul's School, Hotchkiss School, Lawrenceville School, and Northfield Mount Hermon.

Choate is also a member of the Ten Schools Admissions Organization, established in 1966 and comprising Choate, Andover, Exeter, Deerfield, St. Paul's, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville, Taft School, Loomis Chaffee, and The Hill School.

Among Choate's alumni are President John F. Kennedy, two-time Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, playwright Edward Albee, novelist John Dos Passos, philanthropist Paul Mellon, actors Glenn Close, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti, and Jamie Lee Curtis, translator of Homer and poet Robert Fitzgerald, cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and educator Avery Dulles, and My Fair Lady librettist Alan Jay Lerner.

Curriculum

Choate is noted for the breadth of its curriculum, including an array of elective and interdisciplinary courses, from astronomy and architecture to printmaking and post-modernism to a dozen foreign and ancient languages. Area specializations include the Arts Concentration Program and a two-year intensive Science Research Program with summer laboratory work at universities in the United States and abroad.

The performing and visual arts programs are supported by the resources of the Paul Mellon Arts Center. The senior year Capstone Project focuses on a single academic area, and the Senior Project Program provides on- or off-campus internships in academic research, visual art, and the performing arts. Other specialized programs include American Studies, creative writing,economics, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, religion, debate, and the Fed Challenge. One-third of Choate students participate in study-abroad programs in China, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

There are about 240 courses in the curriculum, which has requirements in community service and in contemporary global studies. All disciplines have honors courses. There is advanced placement preparation in 25 areas, and more than 80 percent of students score a 4 or 5 on AP exams.

Choate regularly produces semifinalists and finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search and in the Siemens Competition in science. In economics Choate's Fed Challenge team was the 2009 national champion and has won the New England District Championship in 10 of the past 12 years. The school's chamber orchestra performed at the White House in December 2009 and the Maiyeros, an a capella group, performed at Westminster Abbey in 2008. In the past two years Choate orchestras and choral groups have toured Europe and China, and performed at Lincoln Center in New York. The school's student-operated radio station, WWEB, is FCC-licensed and has been broadcasting since 1969.

Statistical profile

Choate enrolls 630 boarding and 220 day students representing 41 states and 41 countries. 38 percent of students identify themselves as persons of color. For the 2008-2009 year total fees were $43,380 for boarders and $33,030 for day students. Financial aid totaling $8.5 million was awarded to 33 percent of the student body, the average award being $33,570 for boarders and $22,400 for day students. For the 2009-2010 year there were 1,682 applicants for 269 places.

The faculty numbers 109 full-time and 10 part-time instructors, 70 percent of whom hold advanced degrees. There are in addition 48 administrative faculty. The student-faculty ratio is 6:1, and the average class size is 12. Edward J. Shanahan has been headmaster of Choate since 1991, when he arrived from Dartmouth where he had been Dean of the College. Each spring Shanahan teaches a senior elective course on Irish Literature.

Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish chaplains serve Choate's campus ministry. Services include Christian fellowship, Roman Catholic mass, Buddhist meditation, Hillel, the Spiritual Alternatives and Monthly Reflections programs, and other student worship groups.

There are five college-placement counselors at the school. From 2005 to 2009 the most popular college destinations of Choate graduates were Georgetown with 48 matriculating, 33 at NYU, 32 at Yale, 27 at Boston University, 26 each at Boston College and George Washington, 25 each at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and Tufts, 24 each at Harvard and Wesleyan, 23 at Dartmouth, 21 each at Princeton and Penn, 20 at St Andrews University in Scotland, 19 each at Johns Hopkins and Colgate.

In June 2007 Choate's endowment was $267 million. In November 2006 the school inaugurated a capital campaign with a target of $200 million and by January 2010 gifts and pledges of $167 million had been secured.

The school fields eighty-one interscholastic athletic teams in thirty-two sports. Choate's historical archrival in athletic competition is Deerfield Academy. The final weekend of the fall season is Deerfield Day (at Deerfield it's called called Choate Day), when the two schools compete in every sport at varsity and sub-varsity levels.

Buildings and facilities

The 458-acre (1.85 km 2 ) campus contains 121 buildings in a variety of architectural styles. Georgian Revival predominates (examples by famed traditionalist architect Ralph Adams Cram and by Polhemus & Coffin), but there are also eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses and dramatic modernist structures (examples by I.M. Pei and by James Polshek). All dormitory rooms have Internet2 high-speed access, and there is wireless access in all academic buildings, the Student Activities Center, and Johnson Athletic Center. Choate Information Place (CHIP) is the electronic information resource for the campus.

Principal buildings are in Georgian red brick, often with imposing classical porticoes that were, by design, the unifying architectural feature of the early building phase. Of this type are, in chronological order: