“Students [at Choate] dress like L.L. Bean models and carry lacrosse sticks across carefully manicured lawns… [Choate] is the button-down boarding school boasting such noble alumni as John F. Kennedy and Glenn Close—a place of birch and magnolia trees and colonial revival brick buildings with white trim, intimate dormers, and gilded towers,” reads a May 1991 article in Time Magazine. This sort of glossy image—the sort of description one would likely find in Curtis Sittenfeld’s now-infamous interpretation of boarding school life, entitled Prep—is summoned up without fail when the media mentions prep schools. Although the widespread persona of boarding schools—one of popped-collars, lacrosse teams, madras plaids, cable sweaters, and squash courts—stems at least partially from fact, there is a lot more to Choate and its peer schools than meets the public eye.

Unreliable as they may be, stereotypes are rarely cast out of thin air. The image of prep schools as institutions reserved for the social elite—as bastions of good breeding and excess wealth—was, in fact, accurate at one time. Before Rosemary Hall merged with the Choate School in 1971, it was widely recognized as one of the most exclusive finishing schools for girls. In a 1936 article published in Time Magazine about headmistress Caroline Ruutz-Rees, it was written that “Miss Ruutz-Rees is famed for the definiteness of her notions. She frowns on pearls because they are not ‘real jewels.’” Students at Rosemary Hall wore “wool or tweed uniforms in winter and gingham ones in the spring,” and for exercise “Rosemarians” were said to play hockey, ride horses, and go on “bounds”, or walks. By 1936, Rosemary Hall had “educated some 1,800 girls from prosperous families.” The Choate School, too, boasted a high reputation very similar to that of its sister school. With origins like these, it’s not hard to see why prep schools come across as so snobby.

But while our schools’ distant histories may be partly responsible for the image of boarding schools now, equally to blame is a lazy media that plays up the distasteful qualities of prep schools and perpetuates an outdated version of what we stand for. For example, in a 2005 New York Times editorial in which Choate is mentioned, writer Curtis Sittenfeld maintained that “The self-containment of boarding schools can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it’s March, or to receive an S.U.V in celebration of ones 16th birthday.” Sittenfeld didn’t limit her critical opinions of prep schools to an editorial, though; her novel Prep cast a harsh light on boarding schools as places where only WASPs fit into the social scene.

Meanwhile, it seems that the media only covers boarding schools in the context of scandal. Jaw-dropping events—such as the expulsion of fourteen Choate students during the 1980’s for an attempt to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. or the outrageous salaries and benefits of senior administrators at St. Paul’s several years ago—land boarding schools on 60 Minutes or the front pages of the Wall Street Journal; yet rarely do these same schools attract coverage for their innumerable positive qualities. Movies and magazines also portray boarding schools as filled with spoiled brats simply for the entertainment value. It doesn’t help that the Choate alumni who end up in the media’s eye are American royalty like John F. Kennedy and Ivanka Trump.

Luckily, these generalizations are not entirely all-pervasive. The global view of Choate and other boarding schools in general focuses on their ability to provide a top-notch education. Overseas, particularly in Asia, schools like Choate are seen as gateways to American universities and a sound education. One Korean student described that in her country, Choate “is like the Harvard of boarding schools.” And a Thai Choate student said that his family found out about the school during their search for good schools to help him get into a good college.

In some ways, we do live up to the public’s estimation of us. Preppy? Certainly. Exclusive? Well, we want the cream of the crop academically, but financially, we try not to be. It is true that only 27% of students receive financial aid, but the reason is not that we are necessarily exclusive but simply that we just don’t have the resources for need-blind admissions. And prestigious? Well, according to our website, the most popular college choices of the past 6 years have included Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Cornell, so that would be a yes. Yet those things that the public does see not are perhaps the most important: Choate is a friendly, caring, accepting, and global (hailing from 24 countries and 42 states) community.