Phillips Exeter Academy

Neil Chowdhury: Why Exeter?

Neil Chowdhury

Why Exeter?

I had heard it’s a great place to grow both academically and socially, and that there was a big community of people interested in math and science.

Harkness

I came to Exeter for the high-quality content that I would get from the teachers, but what I found was that the students here help you learn just as much as the teachers. In math classes, and even in Math Club, we solve problems collaboratively. Oftentimes we might come to class not having the solution to one of the homework problems, but together as a class we’ll put the pieces together and eventually get to the solution. Harkness is a really important part of my math classes.

Adult support

I’m grateful for all the support I’ve received from everyone. For my ninth- and 10th-grade year, my adviser was Mr. Hutchins, who works in Admissions. Whenever I needed anything, he would be there to help me. I could just call or text him.

Personal growth

When I arrived on campus, I was shy and not really comfortable talking to strangers. But as I participated in Harkness conversations, it felt more natural to interact with other people and talk to them. The skills that Exeter has taught me in terms of communication — Harkness, being respectful and listening to one another — that’s one of the biggest ways I’ve grown.

Competitor

I participate in math competitions through Math Club, and I’m learning about a lot of different types of competitive math competitions. We have individual and team competitions where you get some time to solve a set of problems and your score is based on how many you answer correctly. The competitions are really engaging. And you can see where you are and how you can get better over time.

Climate science

One of the biggest challenges facing the world is climate change and the inaction of our government. The younger generations, we’re going to have to step up to solve that issue. We’ll need to be innovating and creating legislation to solve a problem that big. Exeter has, through climate action days and also curriculum, inspired us to think about this issue and about solutions. It’s something that I’m really interested in. I can see myself being a climate scientist or advocate someday.

Advice for prospective students

If you’re looking for a place to interact with people from all over the world and engage with a new culture, and grow academically and socially, and gain some mental toughness, you should consider coming to Exeter.

A Guided Tour of Bill Jordan’s Classroom

Bill Jordan stands in classroom next to Harkness table.
Variety of colorful political pins hang on cork board.
The Political Classroom book stacked on a desk.
Ballot card hanging on classroom wall
Teacher holds sticker that reads "I could be wrong"

Drawing on experience

Serving up history

Wild about nature

Global Initiatives:

Global Initiatives:

Live to learn

Travel the world with your fellow Exonians. Explore Global Opportunities

Embracing change

Kristyn McLeod Van Ostern ’96 began her term as president of the Trustees on July 1. She also serves on the Executive and the Governance and Nominations committees as well as the Student Safety Committee. Outside of Exeter, Van Ostern serves as an outsourced chief financial officer and owns a small business, Wash Street, which she co-founded to make laundry easier for busy families.

This feature was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Exonians in Review: Fall 2024

Songs of myself

What is a second act?

The Road Not (Yet) Taken

Changing Course

A Musical Life

More Alumni Second Acts

Seeking Complex Truths

Principal Rawson stands at podium on Assembly Hall stage

Academic excellence is a defining strength of our school and one of the reasons students choose Exeter. Our core value of academic excellence states: “In every discipline and at every level within our curriculum we inspire students to develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths.”

At Opening Assembly this year, I talked about what it means to seek complex truths, why that is important, and how we do it. 

We grapple with complex truths because we understand that simple narratives often are false, and false narratives often are simple. We are not at Exeter to pursue simple truths when complex truths are required to understand the world. We are committed to helping students learn how to seek complex truths that take into consideration all relevant facts and respect the dignity and equal worth of all human beings.

The learning that we seek at Exeter starts with being open to different points of view, and with being curious about why people from different backgrounds and experiences, or maybe similar backgrounds and experiences, might see things differently. It requires listening to other perspectives with empathy, humility and respect, and with the understanding that learning at Exeter is a collaborative process.

This kind of learning requires a certain measure of resilience. It requires understanding the difference between being uncomfortable and being unsafe. At Exeter, we want students to learn to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, so they can engage with facts and perspectives that might not seem to fit their worldview, plumb the depths of an issue, and seek complex truths. This is what we mean by “rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse” in our core value statement of academic excellence.

As I said in Opening Assembly, the qualities that we seek to encourage in our students — listening with curiosity, empathy and humility; being resilient; being open to different viewpoints; and being comfortable engaging with facts that challenge their thinking — are skills that will provide a foundation for everything they will do and achieve in life. We think of them as Harkness skills, or goodness and knowledge skills, but they also are life skills.

Our diversity at Exeter — our commitment to youth from every quarter — also is a defining strength of our school that propels our learning. We understand that the promise of our diverse community is realized fully only when we commit ourselves to rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse.

By contrast, anything that narrows our thinking, or closes our mind to different points of view, will inhibit our learning as individuals and as a community. When we stop being curious, we stop learning.

History Instructor Alexa Caldwell has a poster outside her classroom — a variation on the famous World War I-era U.S. Army recruiting poster — that shows Uncle Sam pointing his finger at the viewer and saying, “You Could Be Wrong.” Her colleague in the History Department, Bill Jordan, created the poster after reading the award-winning book The Political Classroom; in a similar spirit, he hands out stickers to his students that read, “I could be wrong.” And in the classroom next door to Bill’s, History Instructor Aykut Kilinc greets his students with a sign that quotes my remarks from Opening Assembly in 2022: “We should expect a diversity of viewpoints on almost every subject worth exploring.”

These are just some of the ways that we aim to teach students how to think, not what to think, and how we seek to inspire them at all levels to develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths.