A Laboratory for Science Education in NYC

With an alumni association reads like a dream science team from Fantasy University, Stuyvesant High School proves itself as one of the best in the nation.

Published July 1, 2006

By David Cohn
Academy Contributor

The principal’s office at Stuyvesant High School is lined with trophies of many shapes, but only one size: big. A few of the prizes are for sports, such as swimming, but most are for cerebral pursuits such as science, math, and chess. In one corner of the room looms a giant check from the Intel Science Talent Search, which awards $1000 to a school when its student is chosen as one of 300 semifinalists in the annual nationwide contest. Stuyvesant’s check for this year is made out for $8000, but that’s nothing unusual.

With a strong focus in math and science, Stuyvesant, located on the Hudson River at Chambers Street in Battery Park City, is recognized as one of the best public high schools in the country. The school has produced four Nobel laureates, and the membership of the 30,000-strong alumni association reads like a dream science team for a game of Fantasy University.

Members of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) who are Stuyvesant grads are too numerous to list here, but they include Brian Greene of Columbia University, a leading authority on superstring theory; Eric Lander of MIT, the genomics pioneer; and physicist Nicholas Samios, director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Joshua Lederberg, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1958 for discovering the mechanisms of genetic recombination in bacteria, is a Stuyvesant grad, class of 1941. He recalls bright young students bouncing ideas off each other and “arguing the merits of going into science,” an atmosphere not too different from today’s.

The Top Achievers

Stuyvesant’s 800 incoming students represent the top achievers from the 25,000 children who take the Specialized High School Admissions Test, the SAT-like exam that determines who can attend one of New York’s special science and technology public high schools. “If I walked into the 9th grade assembly and said ‘Will everyone who was valedictorian and salutatorian last year in their junior high please stand up,’ about two-thirds would stand,” says principal Stanley Teitel.

Once accepted, students can choose from a varied curriculum that includes ten language choices, tough basic science classes, and advanced science courses in fields including oceanography, molecular biology, and psychology. Students leave Stuyvesant “prepared for the next level,” says Teitel, which is often a top-tier college or Ivy League university. In fact, Stuyvesant has limited the number of colleges to which students can apply to seven, to reduce overlap.

From All-Male to All-Star

The formerly all-male school became coed in 1969, and moved in 1992 from East 15th St. to its new campus in Lower Manhattan, a stone’s throw away from Rockefeller and other Battery Park City parks where students go to relax, eat, and take in majestic Hudson River views. The school’s remarkable labs, which specialize in everything from earth sciences to robotics engineering, “really capture the energy and enthusiasm of the school,” says Robert Sherwood, president of the Alumni Association, which donates most of the money to fund the facilities.

The location, only a few blocks from most major subway lines, makes it convenient for students who come from all five boroughs. The location also opens young minds. “Coming from Queens, I didn’t have much interaction with Manhattan,” says Emi Suzuki, president of ARISTA, a national honors society and Stuyvesant’s largest club. “So when I started at Stuyvesant, commuting really exposed me to all kinds of different people.”

Suzuki, like many of her classmates, has already had time in a professional lab. With the help of an internship advisor, she was able to spend last summer at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center under the mentorship of Dr. Harold Varmus, 1989 recipient of the Nobel Prize. Suzuki cultured cells, and produced and purified immunoadhesion-marker proteins. Others in her class interned at prestigious laboratories at Columbia, NYU, or Cornell.

“Stuyvesant absolutely does not give us internships on a silver platter,” Suzuki says, “but I do think that our school’s reputation helps.”

Learn more about educational programming at the Academy.