Here's a Chem/Phys story, and what it can mean for students, ETHS

 A former student wrote to me out of the blue. It was incredibly sweet and humbling, as it is every time I hear from former students who are appreciative and grateful for their time with me in high school, and how it helped determine how their academic & professional lives evolved years after graduation. This student has just completed his PhD at Stanford in environmental economics, and will soon cross the country to be an assistant professor at MIT. This alone is beyond impressive, but not surprising because of his interests and abilities in high school that allowed him to do research and actually DO science and other activities most students don't get the chance to do...and it made that long-term road to where he now is possible, because he realized he was passionate about discovery and figuring complexity out. 

But then what he told me is how this approach to go beyond textbooks and the confinements of typical course curricula has made a much bigger impact on students, as well as on society. Zane roomed with two other PhD students that were also from my classes back in Evanston. They knew of others from our program who were also currently at Stanford, about to get their doctorates in STEM (and one in English, but also from Chem/Phys). They knew of 9 or 10 ETHS students who were getting their Stanford PhDs; they then checked something else, and this is the same as the number of STEM PhD candidates from the whole of the United Kingdom! If this is accurate, I'm shocked, since we are talking Stanford, and countries form the EU certainly encourage many of their best and brightest to study at Stanford and the other powerhouse STEM US universities. 

There are hundreds of former students who have went on to get their Masters and Doctorates in so many STEM fields, as well as MDs and MBAs and law degrees. This is the tradition and possibility this program is designed to do for students, by not only giving AP curricula, but more importantly, offering a couple dozen different ways of pursuing their individual interests and passions, discovering what they want to do and allowing them to work on it prior to college! 

Check out what our students have done while in high school.  And see where they have gone to college over the last quarter century.