Huzzah and
Wassail! Here's a briefing on NCSSM (The
North
Carolina
School of
Science and
Mathematics). It's generally referred to as the School for
S&M, though. It's a live-in school, and there's now one of its type in essentially every state. It's a lot like one of the
charter schools and has been around for 20 years. Students apply in the Fall of their
sophomore year, and if accepted, live at the school for their Junior and Senior years. In the 2001-2002 school year, it had around 550 students.
Its teaching facilities are
advanced and the school as a whole is sort of the
bragging rights of the otherwise stagnant
North Carolina education system. It has many highly-qualified teachers, many of which have their
doctorate. It can even boast John Kolena, the chair of the department of
astrophysics at
Duke University, a pleasant walk away.
It's extraordinarily boring on campus most of the time, so the students get off as much as possible, to local stores like
School Kids Records and the ubiquitous shopping mall. There's also a significant attitude problem: people so brilliant don't like being taught. Another unfortunate problem is that since most students of NCSSM are
minors, the State has a responsibility to keep tabs on the students at all times. This can be frustrating. Either way,
pranks run rampant through the hallways of NCSSM. This also leads to the fact that as graduation nears, the most common letter string seen on campus is
IHTFP.
Seriously, though, it's an excellent place to attend if you want a challenge in your courses.
As an odd side note, though, the drama department of NCSSM seems to have a bigger following than science or math. Perhaps this proves that drama people are indeed just as scientifically minded as their peers Just one of those unsolved mysteries, I suppose.