Home schoolers find transition easy

The University might be alien and intimidating to most freshmen first setting foot on campus, and one might guess that, for home-schooled students who have never spent a day in a classroom, the experience seems earth-shattering. But the change in lifestyle for the home schooled is not noticeably turbulent, many former home-schoolers say.

Before coming here, Anna Megill '06 spent her entire education at home in western Pennsylvania. Megill's learning experience involved independent work and a curriculum tailored to her interests.

To supplement her solo study, Megill participated with her local high school's athletic teams and was named captain of the volleyball and diving teams her senior year. She also took a number of AP courses online.

And taking the next step to college was not as large a hurdle as one might expect.

"I don't think [the transition to college] was less than typical," Megill said. "Everyone has an adjustment, but I didn't find mine to be severe. The courses are more difficult, but in a sense, the format is the same with more longterm assignments that I had."

For others on campus, like Joanna Shawruss '07, the transition from home schooling to a classroom setting occurred a little earlier than college.

Shawruss first stepped into the traditional classroom as a high school freshman at Villa Marie, a private school outside of Philadelphia.

She soon showed her impressive preparation by taking the AP test in Latin — a language she had been studying since the age of seven — at the end of her freshman year.

Shawruss said home schooling enabled her to focus on her studies without much of the wasted time and other distractions of the classroom setting.

"Basically, one feature I found with home schooling is that it eliminates a lot of the superfluous time that gets wasted, particularly at the grade school level, as opposed to less time wasted as when one reaches the higher educational levels," Shawruss said.

She said she also believes home schooling provides a greater degree of social options because it allows students to pick social groups without the constraints of a formal educational system.

"People who have never home schooled somehow think we're unsocial — people who live in a dark corners," Shawruss said. "In fact, I believe that as a home schooler, I was able to become more socialized than I would have otherwise because I wasn't forced to be confined with one particular artificially constructed group for all my activities and time."

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Perhaps, Shawruss joked, the greatest challenge for home-schooled students aligning to a classroom setting is getting used to sleep depravation.

Shawruss is, Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye said, the norm for home schooled students.

"It is rare to see students that are home schooled for their entire education," Rapelye said.

And while home schooled students are not numerous at Princeton, they are represented in each class.

She added that home schooled applicants are considered in the same manner as any other applicant.

"Students are primarily judged on their accomplishments, as is everyone who applies," Rapelye said. "We try not to make judgments about anyone's high school either. We just try to judge applicants based on how they've done in their settings."