I have a confession. I am obsessed with all-girls school. This has not always been the case. When I was 13 years old I had to apply for boarding school as it is a tradition in my family that you go to boarding school starting in high school. That is not to say that, if I had not wanted to go, my parents would have forced me to. Rather, I think they would have loved me to stay at home for another year. But, I way ready to leave the nest and started researching all of the schools in a 2 hour radius – the only limit set by my parents.

There was one stipulation. I had to look at Miss Porter’s. My mom, aunt, godmother, and a slew of distant relatives had all gone there. I had only been on campus once or twice for reunions. I was totally not game. You see, Miss Porter’s is an all-girls school (cue gagging). As a boy crazy middle schooler the concept of being on a campus with 300 girls and no boys to coo over was shocking and seemed like a form of medieval torture. However, rules were rules. On a brisk fall day I went to campus with my mom who had some meetings with the Alumnae Office. I took a tour, interviewed, and dropped off my bags with the girls I would be spending the night with. I remember that night vividly.

We went to a movie and we were so scared that we spilled popcorn everywhere, did face masks and painted our nails while dancing around to blasting music, and quickly I realized that this wasn’t so bad. On the one hour drive back home I started to process my experiences. The night had been amazing, the interview was fun, our tour guide was super cool, but more than that, it finally clicked that the biggest difference I had seen between my current educational situation (a 1,000+ person coed public middle school) and Porter’s were the actual classes. I had sat in on a physics class taught by a teacher that I ended up having my sophomore year. The configuration of the classroom, the enthusiasm of the teacher, the size of the class (<13) and the engagement of the students encouraged class discussion and participation far beyond what I had ever experienced.

That day changed how I thought about my education. I disregarded acceptances to coed schools that I had been drooling over just waiting for my letter for Porter’s. It was as good as I had imagined, confetti and all.

When I started looking at colleges my Junior year at Porter’s, I was determined to go to a coed school. Feeling like I was done with the all-girls environment, I chose Lewis & Clark in Portland, OR. After deferring for a year, I arrived on campus in Portland excited, nervous, and a little bit scared. I hadn’t been in a classroom with boys since I was 13 and I didn’t know what to expect. My first class was small, only 15 students, and set up in a circle. There was a level of discourse that was impressive and the teacher encouraged students to speak up, never shutting down an idea as illegitimate. In some ways I felt at home.

However, it only took a few days for me to realize what had been the true value of my all-girls school education. As I asked people what classes they were taking, there was a clear divide between the “boy classes” and the “girl classes”. With few exceptions, the girls were freaking out about organic chemistry and computer science, the boys scoffed at the idea of gender studies or anthropology as a major.

While I had been at Porter’s, my peers had been indoctrinated with the idea that girls aren’t good at math and that the few girls who are brave enough to kick ass at math aren’t “real” girls. While girls flocked to english, languages, and the social sciences, the engineering, mathematics, and physical science classes were astoundingly male dominated. I asked friends at other schools if they saw this as well, hoping it was a fluke. Sadly it was not.

So, when I decided to transfer back to the East Coast and was unsure of where to go, there was one school I felt like I needed to look at – Barnard.  At Porter’s, we did not fear neuroscience or AP computer science because, rather than walking into a room and being the only girl, we walked in and saw other supportive, caring, and equally ambitious women. Now as a sophomore at Barnard, it has sunk in even deeper that while the lack of distraction, greater autonomy, individual attention, and small class sizes were all great benefits of my all-girls school education, the greatest benefit by far was that all subjects were “girl subjects”.