High School Admissions Resources

Instructions: Please create and upload a 3-minute video when you cover two topics:

1. Fill a bag with three objects that help explain, describe, or show aspects of who you are. As you take them out, share the significance and meaning of each one. Be creative!
2. Teach us something! Show us how to build, create, or do something that you know and/or like to do.

You decide how you want to allot the three minutes.

The video submissions will be used to determine which students are invited to participate in the next step of admissions, which consists of a writing prompt and interview.

• 01M696: Bard High School Early College
• 12X641: Bard High School Early College Bronx
• 24Q299: Bard High School Early College Queens

STEM Prompt

Write a single response that is 250-500 words and addresses the following prompt:

1. We would like to learn how you would use science, technology, engineering and/or math (STEM) in the following scenario: You have been elected to head one of the New York City government departments listed below. You have been granted $10 billion dollars to use to improve your community. Please tell us which agency you would be the head of and how you would use the money to change your community to make it better. What would you make them do? Remember, to describe your community and explain how you would use STEM.

• The Department of Environmental Protection 
• The Department of Buildings
• The Department of Sanitation 
• The Department of Transportation 
• The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
• The Department of Parks and Recreation 
• NYC Emergency Management
• Department of City Planning 
• Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture

Humanities Prompt

Please read the following passage and write a single essay that is 250-500 words and addresses the following prompt:

1. Explain what Walker is saying about her mother. Select a quotation that you think reveals what Alice Walker is saying about what makes her mother special. Then write about what sets you apart that other people sometimes overlook.

In Search of Our Mother's Gardens by Alice Walker

In the late 1920s my mother ran away from home to marry my father. Marriage, if not running away, was expected of seventeen-year-old girls. By the -- time she was twenty, she had two children and was pregnant with a third. Five children later, I was born. And this is how I came to know my mother: she seemed a large, soft, loving-eyed woman who was rarely impatient in our home. Her quick, violent temper was on view only a few times a year, when she battled with the white landlord who had the misfortune to suggest to her that her children did not need to go to school. She made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers' overalls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds.

During the "working" day, she labored beside-not behind-my father in the fields. Her day began before sunup, and did not end until late at night. There was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts; never a time free from interruption-by work or the noisy inquiries of her many children. And yet, it is to my mother-and all our mothers who were not famous-that I went in search of the secret of what has fed that muzzled and often mutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the black woman has inherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to this day.

But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit?

The answer is so simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high-and low.

For example: in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., there hangs a quilt unlike any other in the world. In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is considered rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quilt-making, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling. Below this quilt I saw a note that says it was made by "an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago."

If we could locate this "anonymous" black woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers-an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use.

……….

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

And so it is, certainly, with my own mother. Unlike "Ma" Rainey's songs, which retained their creator's name even while blasting forth from Bessie Smith's mouth, no song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother's stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories-like her life-must be recorded. It is probably for this reason that so much of what I have written is about characters whose counterparts in real life are so much older than I am.

But the telling of these stories, which came from my mother's lips as naturally as breathing, was not the only way my mother showed herself as an artist. For stories, too, were subject to being distracted, to dying without conclusion. Dinners must be started, and cotton must be gathered before the big rains. The artist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only after many years. This is what I finally noticed:

Like Mem, a character in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in. And not just your typical straggly country stand of zinnias, either. She planted ambitious gardens-and still does-with over fifty different varieties of plants that bloom profusely from early March until late November. Before she left home for the fields, she watered her flowers, chopped up the grass, and laid out new beds. When she returned from the fields she might divide clumps of bulbs, dig a cold pit, uproot and replant roses, or prune branches from her taller bushes or trees-until night came and it was too dark to see.

Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms - sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena… and on and on.

Video Interview

The video interview gives you an opportunity to tell us more about yourself, in your voice, beyond what you have written. Sharing a one to two-minute personal video is a helpful way to show us who you are and why you are interested in attending Bard High School Early College. Please submit a 1 to 2 minute (maximum time) video that includes the following:

1. An introduction to who you are
2. An answer to both of the questions below:
   1. Our school mission is premised on the belief that many students, from all cultures and backgrounds, are ready and eager to begin taking college-level courses in high school. What makes you want to attend an early college?
   2. What about being a Bard student most excites you?