“My sister was three years older than I am, so she had been in the country only a few minutes. We were going with someone from our housing project on a bus, and my sister asked her in yiddish, ‘What is that building? It looks different.’ And this woman said ‘that’s not for you. That’s a very special school, you can’t get in there because you’re an immigrant.’ My sister walked into that school with hardly any english and met Mr. Kopelman. He spoke yiddish to her and said, “you can come if in one month I can see that you can fit in here. If not, you have to go to another school.’ My sister, within one month, learned English, showed her ability in science. She’s the only student I know of who ever got into Bronx Science without taking the test. She was a brilliant student. But i think, when you ask me about Bronx Science, that school had a soul. It wasn’t just a technical entry exam–it had people there who had a kind of life experience, motivation, and a profundity about human beings, and that’s what made that school very special. It’s kind of the beauty and also the charisma of that school.”

Daniel Libeskind '65

“Most of us were looking for a theoretical and political rationale for dealing with the world. Many of us came out conservative because as we argued our way through lots of facts and ideologies, […] it became clearer and clearer that The Great Society wasn’t working” […] By the time Reagan showed up, half the team had become Reaganite conservatives before the fact.”

Lisa Schiffren '77

“I think there was a clear sense of entitlement and an arrogance that went along with myself and my peers in high school–there was a shrewdness and a hustle and I think that hopefully transformed into more leadership and responsibility–but I think overlooking the sense of entitlement and arrogance might be shortsighted.”

Bryan Weisgal '10

“Bronx Science shaped my life. It taught me that I could think critically, it taught me that I could hold my own with really smart people, it taught me that it’s ok to be different from everyone else […] I always kind of felt like an outsider, but I found my group, and we were all outsiders [...] I stole a doorknob from one of the classrooms, which I still have, because I wanted to have a physical memory of the school. So I’m on the lam.”


Valerie Smaldone '75

“Reading and rereading and rereading a poem causes it to change. That became my model in general–you know, you take the object and you try to study it. Because the kind of focus required to learn a poem was useful trying to understand my Halladay and Resnick Physics textbook, was useful for calculus, was useful for a lot of things.”

Fred Camper '64

“The class that saved me was Science Survey, which was the school paper, and Leonard Mannheim, who was the teacher of that class, was just superb […] He helped unlock my love of literature, which is something that has followed me for the rest of my life.”

Buddy Stein '59

"You can go to Bronx Science and for a moment all other things are suspended. Afterward we'll split up and go where our footholds in society take us […] but there is that feeling of this amazing squad of students […] There are those kids coming out of Fieldston who have read Dostoyevsky and analyzed and I didn’t. But I got these experiences and these friends that transformed my understanding of the city, which changes your life."

Zohran Mamdani '10

"Every year 6,000 people see the benefit of public education. Over 10 years, that's 60,000 people [...] You build a whole constituency of people who feel committed to public education. It would diminish our commitment if you closed the specialized schools. That question for me has long since been settled. We absolutely have to preserve them."

Daniel Marks Cohen '88

"Very few of my students end up becoming humanistic academics. But what I am hoping is that the kids I have in freshman humanities, who have to take it whether they like it or not, on some rainy day 25 or 30 years later when they're successful lawyers, whatever, and they're a little bored, take down one of those books that they for some reason saved."

Richard Streier '62

"Probably 90% of the graduates from '71, by the time we graduated college, were committed to some kind of social change. We walked out of those colleges into a world we felt we had to make a change in some kind of way. The last thing on our mind was salaries, or income. It was all about what are we doing for the collective good."

David Calvert '71

"There was a healthy sense of competition, but at the same time I think there was a great sense of helping one another. That's the experience that I had."

Karen Bhatia '94

Encompassed is an oral history-style podcast series and interactive timeline exploring nearly eight decades of 77 years of Bronx Science alumni’s experiences. The interviews revolve around “encompassing moments"–experiences that both immersed the young student in discovery and, like a compass, provided direction for the next steps of his or her life. Listen to the first thirty conversations now, and keep an eye out for new episodes every month.

Daniel Libeskind '65

Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories

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