<p>Hello, </p>
<p>I’m a current Junior at Cate, so hopefully I can help. I have plenty more information to give, so feel free to ask for any thing else.</p>
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<li>As far as I can tell, you are correct in thinking that Thacher is “outdoorsy”, but as a non-student I can not be definitive on that. Cate does get an artsy reputation, but I would not say it defines the school like Thacher’s outdoor program. We have accomplished Carnegie Hall musicians, artists that go on to Rhode Island School of Design, and several theater gurus that have bright futures in Hollywood (not to mention their parents; it’s very cool to see celebrities on campus during parent’s weekend).</li>
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<p>I would say Cate is vaguely like Choate in the sense that we have a good arts reputation, but the overall academics is what we strive for and are proud of. The national champion of the American Mathematics Contest is a senior this year, and the winner of the National Brain Bee in Neuroscience graduated last year to go on to Harvard. We have a pretty well balanced group.</p>
<p>In my personal experience, the most competitive departments are English and Science, with the largest groups of students either wanting a medical career or to be authors. It does feel very competitive and get very stressful at times to deal with the workload, but all of the students look out for each other. I’ve heard of students at Andover hiding library books to win the curve on a test, but at Cate the students would typically send out an email on what book they should look at. The work is difficult, but you’ll certainly have a support system to get yo through it. I have heard that the workload at Thacher is slightly more reasonable, but again, as a non-student I can’t be sure.</p>
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<li>I think the prestige of each school comes with the area that it’s in. While Andover and Exeter are popular with Harvard/MIT in Mass., Thacher and Cate are popular with Stanford/CIT in Cali. I have to say I had some doubts as to whether Thacher/Cate would carry name weight, but when I mentioned to a CalTech admissions officer I went to a boarding School in southern California he immediately guessed Cate and said he knew us well, so I’m sure we have gained some recognition. Besides that, the majority of my friends turned down the likes of Andover, Exeter, Choate, SPS, Taft, etc. to come to Cate (I’ve heard it’s the same at Thacher), so we do compare to those schools at least in terms of student body.</li>
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<p>Let me know if I can help any further!</p>