2017 promises to be an exciting year for Abelard. In addition to the incredible projects we’ll tackle in our classes, we are thrilled to be marking our twentieth anniversary this year. To kick off the celebration, we thought we would share some of our proudest recent accomplishments. We have spent the past two decades consolidating our unique curriculum and believe that we are the best high school in the city for academic excellence, breadth, and depth.
The majority of our current teachers either teach or have taught at university level, including all of our science teachers, who work concurrently at U of T, and our math teacher, who has taught at Brown. All of our teachers are passionate about working with high school level students to assist them in developing the intellectual skills and maturity which will help them to thrive once they graduate.
Abelard has become a school of choice amongst university professors: in the past 5 years, 27 university professors have sent their children to Abelard, realizing that we have a remarkable track record in preparing our students to succeed in university.
University professors (and admissions officers at Ivy League colleges) tell us that our graduates are far better prepared than most first year students.
Our graduates are all accepted to university, and they have won hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships from schools such as Cambridge, the Sorbonne, St. Andrews, Columbia, NYU, Berkeley, Brown, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Dartmouth, Wesleyan, U of Pennsylvania, U of T, McGill, McMaster, Waterloo, Queen’s, Western, King’s, UBC, and Dalhousie.
Abelard alumni have won 2 Thiel Fellowships: Chris Olah (2012) and Vitalik Buterin (2014) — this is remarkable! Only 20 of these internationally competitive $100,000 fellowships are awarded each year to students under 20 and since its inception in 2011 two of them have been Abelard alumni! Chris is now working for Google in San Francisco. His specialties are machine intelligence and neural networking. Vitalik has been named one of Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40 for 2016!
Vitalik Buterin also won the World Technology Award for IT software (over Mark Zuckerberg!) in 2014 (only 2 years after he graduated from Abelard). He and the crypto-currency company he founded, Ethereum, have been profiled in Fortune, The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine.
Blyth-Cambridge Trust Scholarship winner: in 2015 Abelard student Malcolm Kennedy was one of only 22 Canadian recipients of this $150,000 scholarship. Malcolm is studying linguistics at Cambridge.
And just look at the track record of our graduating class from last June:
1 $65,000 Kluge Scholarship winner: an admission scholarship to Columbia, to study astrophysics and creative writing.
1 Schulich Leadership winner: out of only 25 $80,000 scholarships awarded to study in a STEM programme. He has enrolled at York to study Biomedical Science.
1 entered Wesleyan University’s liberal arts programme.
3 were accepted into U of T’s prestigious Vic One programme to study Political Science, French and History respectively. 2 of the 3 won the University of Toronto Scholars Program, awarded to the University’s most outstanding students on admission.
1 entered Waterloo’s Nanotechnology Engineering programme.
1 entered Waterloo’s Biotechnology programme.
1 entered Waterloo’s Chemical Engineering programme.
1 entered University of Toronto SC’s highly competitive Financial Management and accounting co-op (only ~180 students accepted).
1 entered McGill’s Faculty of Science on an entrance scholarship.
1 entered Queen’s Faculty of Science on an entrance scholarship.
1 entered U of T’s extremely competitive Honours and Conservatory programme in Theatre and Drama.
We can’t wait to see where our current students will go!
The Abelard School 