Recent alumni offer their report card on how SHS prepared them for elite colleges

Graphic by Jessica Li

While UC Berkeley offers a tiresome uphill hike from SHS, Yale, Harvard and Stanford lead to an easy downhill slide.

Saratoga High, one of the top public high schools in California, is consistently commended for its academic rigor and success, according to data from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). The 2023-2024 U.S. News national high school rankings reports that 91% of the students achieve proficiency in math, 94% in reading and 65% in science. With these high scores, the school is ranked 24th out of 2,613 public California high schools by US News.

Each fall, dozens of seniors apply to top colleges such as Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), UC Berkeley and Stanford University, and many applicants then are admitted to these schools and choose to attend them. But once they’re there, how well do they do? How well does the school prepare students for college-level classes at the most academically demanding universities?

To understand whether the rigor of courses and competitive culture at Saratoga helped ease their college experience, The Falcon interviewed four recent alumni: Harvard University senior Jeffrey Xu, UC Berkeley junior Oliver Ye, Stanford University sophomore Anthony Qin and Yale University sophomore Anouk Yeh.

Ivy League students find the competitive culture at SHS boosts them academically in college

Class of `20 alumnus Jeffrey Xu, who is majoring in computer science, minoring in economics and pursuing concurrent master’s degree in statistics at Harvard, noted that almost every aspect of his experience at the school was competitive. He remembers students scrambling to play the most sports, have the highest grades and curate the longest list of extracurriculars, constituting what he described as a “grind culture.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Xu has found Harvard has a similar environment. The biggest difference he sees is the makeup of the population: SHS has a somewhat homogenous environment in terms of goals and values while Harvard offers a more diverse student body.

At SHS, he took classes with peers who were not just ethnically or racially from the same background, but also from nuclear families who shared similar cultural values and ways of viewing the world.  At Harvard, he has seen that students come from all over the world and have greatly different life experiences and points of view.

Xu notes that while growing up within a narrow, high-achieving demographic can be beneficial, he feels that it’s ultimately more valuable to experience what different cultures and environments have to offer. For example, while SHS students often value academic achievements, Xu has found that Harvard students tend to focus on a more diverse range of goals that include maintaining a social life and a healthy lifestyle in addition to academic pursuits.

“When you’re in that bubble, you tend to think that everybody thinks that way, but that’s not necessarily the case,” Xu said. “The values that we instill at SHS are good, but it’s also good to look elsewhere for college and just learn what is really out there.”

College has also shown Xu a new outlook on academics. He finds that his high school academic experience largely reflected the “grind culture” prevalent here. However, in college, academics are just one of his several priorities and no longer his main focus.

“In college, you realize there’s much more to school than academics that it’s not quite about scoring the highest on tests and having the best extracurriculars,” Xu said. “An advantage of Harvard is that you really get to see the best people at the top of every single category who expand the limits for the horizons of human capability, which really prompts you to discover yourself in all of that.”

Xu recalls never experiencing any significant challenges with the school’s curriculum. However, upon entering college, he found that, for the first time, not everything came naturally to him.

In high school, he participated in a variety of extracurriculars that propelled him academically, including several science-related Olympiads, being president of various STEM-related clubs, being a research intern at Stanford University and much more. He excelled in competitions and landed leadership roles such as being editor-in-chief of The Falcon in his senior year, but college was the first place where he truly started to experience any degree of failure. 

As a result, Xu developed massive imposter syndrome in freshman year and frequently felt incompetent relative to those around him. (Roughly 1,650 of the most elite students in the world enter Harvard each fall as freshmen.)

However, in comparison to his peers who didn’t come from schools with Bay Area-level rigor, he feels that his early struggles were manageable. For example, one of Xu’s other friends from a less competitive high school in another state struggled with entry-level calculus whereas Xu remembered skating through a graduate-level statistics class because of his background in math.

Xu feels that SHS academics and extracurriculars still gave him a significant advantage when tackling college courses. He believes that the same goes for all over-achieving SHS alumni attending any college. 

“Regardless of where SHS students go, they’re going to have an academic edge just because of how well SHS sets up their students for success with a strong curriculum and great teachers,” Xu said. “SHS absolutely sets you up for success in the long run as long as you take advantage of the opportunities and carry forth that same academic spirit into college.”

Alumnus finds underrepresented SHS humanities curriculum to be helpful for Yale’s humanities-focused approach

Class of `22 alumna Anouk Yeh, who is currently studying global affairs and film at Yale, emphasized the academic foundation SHS built for her, despite having to transition from a STEM-oriented high school to a humanities-centered university.

“At Yale, the humanities are taken really seriously, which is a contrast I appreciate after seeing everyone around me in high school take on STEM-based approaches,” Yeh said.

Despite the STEM-based culture of SHS, Yeh has found the humanities-related classes at SHS helpful when adapting to college.

“I think SHS has a very strong English, language arts and writing department, especially my English 11 Honors, AP Literature and APUSH classes, which were all phenomenal. The teachers pushed me to think in a way that is helpful for college-level writing,” Yeh said.

Being at SHS helped Yeh figure out what she wanted to pursue in the future and taught her how to manage her time while taking on an abundance of extracurriculars. Despite aiding in her mental organization and time management, Yeh still feels trapped in the mindset of trying to do as much as possible.

“The con of being conditioned to tackle a bunch of things in high school is that you don’t really slow down when you get to college,” Yeh said. “But it can also be a positive thing, since you can do a lot without feeling overwhelmed, so it’s a double-edged sword.”

Yeh noted that Yale’s student body is generally high-achieving. However, she feels that, compared to high school, the culture is a lot more constructive: Students are more willing to extend a helping hand rather than act purely in their own self-interest.

“It doesn’t feel as cutthroat as high school, which is an interesting dynamic because everyone in high school was doing more similar things versus in college everyone is doing radically exciting things,” Yeh said.

Being able to prioritize humanities has allowed Yeh to focus solely on her passions instead of maintaining a balance. Yeh is currently pursuing human rights research for Yale’s Law School and working as a video producer for one of Yale’s fashion and art collectives.

One of the primary changes Yeh has seen in Yale’s humanities courses in particular is their structure. For example, sometimes the entire class is dedicated to a student-led discussion period, taking the high school-style Socratic Seminars to a deeper level by allocating the entire class to student-led thought, rather than having a teacher guide the flow of the discussion.

In these discussions, students are graded based on the academic rigor of their thoughts — a higher bar than she remembers experiencing in high school.

“Having the entire session being centered around exactly what you think and the idea that there isn’t a right answer and you’re just freely discussing was really interesting,” Yeh said.

For Yeh, college has been an opportunity to use her freedom to build a balanced life where she can pursue all her desired goals. 

“Everyone on campus is living such a different life, so you have a lot of freedom to structure your daily schedule and create a life you want around your classes,” Ye said.

Alumnus feels a minimal cultural shift, yet experiences universal academic hardships with peers at Berkeley

Class of `21 alumnus Oliver Ye is currently a junior studying under UC Berkeley’s Management Entrepreneurship and Technology (MET) program to pursue degrees in both electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and business administration. 

Since the student population of Berkeley is predominantly California students — in 2022, 79% of graduates were in-state students — Ye took his high school habits of overscheduling himself to his Berkeley life. 

In high school, Ye was president of the Engineering and Spanish clubs, ran a nonprofit organization called Silicon Valley Youth where he taught middle schoolers science and philosophy concepts, prepared for multiple biology Olympiads and much more. Continuing this mindset, he made the mistake of signing up for an overwhelming number of classes in freshman year.

“I was definitely part of the grind culture in high school,” Ye said. “I took a ton of APs and I think that got me into the mentality of going into college so for the first four semesters, I basically speed-ran my coursework, because I was taught that I needed to take a lot of classes and do a ton of things at the same time.”

However, Ye quickly found taking the maximum number of courses within his first two years took a toll on his health. As a current junior, he is learning how to pace himself and assign himself a reasonable level of commitments. 

Despite his exposure to rigorous math and science courses here, Ye still found the academic transition to college difficult because of the program he entered. He had to tackle an influx of new concepts from naturally tough UC Berkeley courses such as Digital Signal Processing, Optimization Models in Engineering and Operating Systems.

“In terms of the rigor, I think it was a lot to adjust to at first because Berkeley courses are a lot harder than SHS classes,” Ye said. “SHS was a good foundation on math and computer science, acting as ‘building blocks,’ but the majority of the content in Berkeley was very new to me.”

The reason behind the course difference stems from the mathematical logic that motivates different concepts. Ye said the math behind computer science and electrical engineering differs from the math taught in high school classes like algebra and calculus. 

The two college courses he took that are the most similar to the SHS math curriculum are multivariable calculus and linear algebra, but even challenging classes like Calculus BC and AP Computer Science still left him ill-prepared for Berkeley’s rigor. 

“I’d say Berkeley courses are universally hard for anyone who takes them, and Bay Area students also find themselves in the same boat,” Ye said.

For Ye, Berkeley classes were particularly difficult in terms of each class’s workload. While he could pass SHS exams with passive studying techniques like memorization, Berkeley classes required him to have a deeper understanding of the concepts and real-life applications, which called for changes in how he has studied for tests.

Ye had to adjust from his old strategy and shift from skimming his notes a couple nights before the test, to taking thorough notes actively throughout the months leading up to the exam and also taking four to five practice midterms.

A saving grace at Berkeley has been the supportive community of fellow students, a polar opposite to the competitive nature here. Preparing for exams has proved to be a “super positive” experience with everyone working together to excel, he said.

“There’s no sense of being cutthroat or competing with people,” he said. “At Berkeley, the competition is tougher in the sense that there are so many smart people and the classes are so large, but the people are much more positive and friendly; they’re happy to sit down for a few hours to help you out.” 

Stanford student finds that the key to adjusting in college is maintaining good habits and self-discipline

Anthony Qin, a Class of `21 alumnus and a third-year undergraduate student at Stanford majoring in computer science and minoring in music, has found the classes at Stanford offer a different form of difficulty from high school: The challenge lies in maintaining discipline and discovering personal studying strategies while being surrounded by the thrill of living with friends.

Qin anticipated that college would be a step up in difficulty, but he has found it to be shockingly less rigorous than high school. He mainly attributes this to the competitive environment he had adapted to and the wide variety of extracurricular opportunities at SHS, given that he founded the Aspiring to Create English (ACE) club, was the events coordinator for UNICEF and a Music Education at Saratoga High School (MESH) mentor. He feels the average college student is most likely not as prepared for academic rigor as an alum of a competitive Bay Area school like Saratoga High.

“I’m taking classes with the same people around the world where they didn’t have as many options and opportunities as we do at SHS, so I do feel very ahead of the herd,” Qin said.

However, the shift to living in dorms and being surrounded by fellow students helped Qin realize the importance of self-control, prompting him to sustain his good habits and skills like learning how to juggle multiple activities developed in high school.

“It’s a lot more dependent on yourself to be successful and to put yourself in a place where you can both work and play hard,” he said.

For Qin, SHS was the perfect environment to cultivate good study habits and a strong work ethic, where he held himself to high standards and took as many classes as possible while still doing well. 

He invested a lot of his time in the music program here and building his skills with the saxophone. This, along with academic demands, resulted in little leftover time to complete his homework, demanding Qin’s highest efficiency.

“I was forced to develop effective and efficient study habits,” he said. “Time management skills were crucial for me because if I faltered for one second now, I’d fall behind instantly.” 

Those habits have accompanied him to college, where he keeps himself accountable by ensuring his assignments are done days in advance of the deadlines before participating in leisure activities like poker with friends.

This way, when a busy week comes up, Qin has a lot of buffer space because he always stays ahead of his work.

Ultimately, Qin feels that his current stability in college was primarily from developing self-discipline and other critical habits he learned at SHS. He is thankful for the school’s compassionate teachers and the small class sizes that fostered greater connections between peers.

“Personally, SHS was easily the best high school I could’ve gone to, and I’m really excited for my siblings to experience SHS because of the quality of teaching and the intimacy and connections between everyone,” he said. “In that way, it feels like we’re all in this together.”