For most people, school is a place they attend. A temporary setting in the background of childhood: lockers, classrooms, teachers, schedules, eventually left behind for adulthood. But after fourteen years at Francis W. Parker School, Parker has never felt temporary to me. It has felt architectural. Foundational. Less like a building I entered each morning and more like a landscape I grew up inside.

I first came to Parker in Junior Kindergarten when I was four years old. At this point, I cannot remember my first day because I cannot remember a version of myself before Parker existed. There was no dramatic transition into this community for me; Parker has always been woven into my understanding of the world. My memories are organized through classrooms and hallways, through teachers and traditions, through the strange phenomenon of growing up in the same institution long enough that it begins to mirror the stages of your own becoming.

And nowhere feels more symbolic of that passage of time than the auditorium.

I can picture it perfectly now: the blue fabric seats with their black backs, the dark stage floor polished beneath the heavy navy curtains, the strange stillness that exists in the room before an audience arrives. Over fourteen years, that stage has held nearly every version of me. I stood on it in JK carefully placing a piece onto the “house” during the piece of the house performance. I stood there again in third grade reading the Thanksgiving poem with trembling hands into a microphone far too tall for me. Then came the fifth grade knighting ceremony, middle school musicals, eighth grade graduation, Upper School theater productions, assemblies, concerts. The stage itself never changed, yet somehow I did every single time I stepped onto it.

And soon, I will cross that same stage one final time for graduation.

There is something uniquely disorienting about spending nearly your entire conscious life in one place. Parker stopped feeling like a school years ago. Schools are places you visit. Parker became somewhere I inhabited. Somewhere I returned to so consistently that certain staircases became instinctual and certain classrooms absorbed entire emotional eras of my life. The hallway outside the library became sacred simply because my friends and I claimed it years ago and kept returning, day after day, until it quietly transformed into a home. Even the smallest rituals became meaningful. I already know that one of the things I will miss most absurdly is the Parker bagel, the kind of tiny institutional detail that feels insignificant until you realize it has accompanied nearly every morning of your adolescence.

That is what Parker does so well: it turns repetition into belonging.

But Parker also teaches something larger than familiarity. From a very young age, the school instills the idea that you are participating in something much bigger than yourself. Parker students inherit traditions, language, expectations, and responsibilities long before we fully understand them. The culture here teaches you that you are not simply attending the institution; you are becoming part of its living history. In many ways, Parker convinces you that you are a part of its story rather than it being part of yours.

That realization shaped me more than any individual class ever could.

I could not tell you much of what I learned in fourth grade writing, and most of my seventh grade science knowledge has disappeared into the void somewhere between finals weeks and sleep deprivation. But Parker was never solely teaching content. What Parker truly teaches is citizenship: how to exist thoughtfully in a community, how to contribute to conversations larger than yourself, how to engage seriously with ideas and people and responsibility.

At its best, Parker teaches students that education is not simply preparation for adulthood; it is participation in the world itself.

Some of the most transformative moments of my Parker experience happened far away from traditional classrooms entirely. The fifth grade Lorado Taft trip remains one of the defining experiences of my childhood. At the time, it felt monumental simply because it was the first time I had ever been away from home without my family. But looking back now, I realize the trip represented something much larger: the beginning of trust in myself. There was no singular cinematic moment that changed me. Instead, there were countless smaller moments of uncertainty and courage stitched together quietly over the course of those days. Moments where I learned that bravery often looks much less dramatic than people imagine. Sometimes bravery is simply realizing you are capable of existing independently in the world.

This year, returning to Taft as a Big Sib felt strangely circular. Watching younger students experience the same nervous excitement I once carried made me realize how deeply Parker’s culture depends upon continuity. Older students guide younger students because someone once guided us. The community regenerates itself through mentorship and memory.

That cycle exists everywhere here.

This year, I spent time mentoring fifth graders through Big Sibs while also mentoring younger high school students through YRJS. Those experiences feel deeply representative of Parker itself: a place where your youngest and oldest selves constantly coexist. One moment you are remembering yourself as a nervous fifth grader stepping off the bus at Taft; the next, you are the older student reassuring someone else through the same experience. Time folds strangely inside this institution. Your childhood does not entirely disappear here because younger versions of yourself are constantly walking the same hallways behind you.

Of course, no place that shapes people this intensely can do so perfectly.

The “Parker bubble” is very real, and at times it can feel suffocating. Parker creates an environment where ambition becomes so normalized that students often stop recognizing how relentless it truly is. Stress functions almost like a second language here. Students overload themselves with advanced classes, rehearsals, leadership positions, athletics, internships, and impossible expectations, then casually compare exhaustion with one another in the hallways as though burnout were simply another extracurricular activity.

And I participated fully in that culture.

For years, I treated stress as evidence that I was doing enough. I obsessed over grades, extracurriculars, college admissions, leadership positions, and constructing the version of success I thought I was supposed to pursue. In many ways, Parker rewarded that mentality. The school pushes students toward extraordinary opportunities and extraordinary ambition, and I am deeply grateful for the ways that pressure shaped me into someone capable of pursuing difficult things.

But I also think Parker students sometimes become so focused on building futures that we forget to fully inhabit the present.

Senior year changed that for me.

As activities began ending one by one, I found myself grieving experiences I once rushed through without appreciating. Finishing my final tennis season felt emotional not because I plan to continue playing competitively, but because of the years attached to it: the bus rides, the routines, the teammates, the strange comfort of repetition. The same was true for theater productions, student organizations, and countless smaller moments that once felt ordinary simply because I assumed they would continue forever.