Tales out of School

No doubt attending a great high school gives students a leg up in the college sweepstakes. But admissions officers today aren’t necessarily looking for applicants with laundry lists of clubs and activities — it’s the passionate and in-depth pursuit of one interest that really makes a kid stand out. We’ve profiled seven high achievers — and one entrepreneurial dropout — who discovered life-changing passions outside the curriculum and followed them to success. And for your homework assignment, we offer a backpack full of real-world activities to help you energize your child’s own talents.

Amber Permsap
High school: Nazareth Academy, Philadelphia | This fall: Freshman at New York University

Amber Permsap looks like the type of teenager a four-year-old dreams of becoming: long, wavy hair, frilly skirt, impeccable nails, a penchant for pastels. Oh, and she’s an aspiring professional ballerina. “Ballet is so unnatural,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve done all the dances. It’s the hardest.”

She should know. Permsap, 18, a Bensalem native whose mother is an administrator at Wharton and whose Thailand-born father is an architect, has been practicing for four or five hours a day since she was 10, and has appeared in The Nutcracker at the Academy of Music many times. Her efforts culminated in her recent admission to New York University’s hypercompetitive dance program at Tisch School of the Arts.

Though she was always a first-­honors student, Amber never really considered going to college until she visited Tisch, with which she promptly fell in love and into which she figured, just as promptly, she’d never get. Her early-decision acceptance proved her wrong. “You could tell they take dance really seriously,” she says. “I always thought I’d go straight to a dance company, but you make no money, and so most of the girls who do it are rich girls. Like, their parents are so happy they made it into a company that they’re buying them an apartment on Rittenhouse Square! I’m not like that.”

She’s not like most kids you know; she attended Nazareth Academy because the academics were more rigorous than those at the performing-arts schools her dance friends were attending, but she never really saw much value in high school beyond the classes. “Some girls were so into the school. We’d have
these assemblies and they’d be like”—she lets out an ecstatic scream and pumps her fist—“‘NAZARETH, WOOOOOH!’ And I’d be sitting there like, freaks! I mean, I don’t think I’ll be looking back at high school as the best days of my life.”