At lunch, a freshman wanders his way into the Bronx Science cafeteria for the first time. He holds up the lunch line searching for his I.D., then drifts timidly through the room looking for a suitably unintimidating table at which to sit. Once he finally finds a relatively empty table where he can eat his lunch in peace, the freshman trips and spills his lunch all over the table’s only other inhabitant.

While this anecdote may seem to be one of a kind and apocryphal, many of Bronx Science’s incoming freshmen tend to collect stories as embarrassing as this one. Our school is a big place, with many new and exciting ways to make a fool of yourself, and most of Bronx Science’s upperclassmen know this first hand.

Take Feizza Fazilatun ’19 as an example. Many students have accidentally gone to their Physical Education class on their double science days, not too egregious an error. However, Feizza’s story is a bit more severe than that. “I changed and went to my floor spot where I sat for twenty minutes waiting for the rest of my class. My teacher then pointed out that it was Tuesday, and I almost burst into tears,” she said. Fazilatun’ Physical Education teacher was nice enough to give her a late pass, but she still had to run from the locker room in the basement all the way to her third floor Biology class. Luckily for her, her biology teacher, Ms. Stern, was quick to forgive her.

Alice Abas ’19 also knows a thing or two about embarrassing stories. On the very first day of school, she went out to one of the food trucks to purchase her lunch. The food trucks tend to have boisterous crowds of students vying to purchase their lunch. For Alice, who is more mellow, this meant that she had to wait until the bell had rung and the crowd dispersed in order to order her food. Unfortunately for her, this meant she had to “awkwardly [walk] into [her] next class 15 minutes late eating a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich.” After  this experience, Alice has learned her lesson. “From that day on, I proceeded to slyly sink in from the sides of the crowds to the front ,whenever I ordered food,” she noted. Alice emphasized that she has never been late because of food since then, a fact of which she is proud.

Mariam Van ’19 also found herself with schedule issues. She found herself constantly walking into her English period a period early, since she had a free period during the period prior to the class. “Then students would look at me with a funny expression on their faces, and I would walk back out feeling embarrassed,” she said. After making this mistake several times, Mariam made sure to completely memorize her schedule so that it would not happen again.

“Always reach out for help. If anything, you will end up liking the school instead of ‘just fitting in’.”

These upperclassmen’s stories are just a sample of the many different comical and slightly embarrassing tales floating around the school. To avoid finding yourself in a similar situation, it is important that you do two things after experiencing an incident similar to these: learn from your mistake and move on. “You’re going to realize that the embarrassing moment didn’t affect you as much in the future as you thought it would. It’s the least of your problems and you’ll most likely be happy that the embarrassing moment happened, because you can laugh about it and also learn a new lesson from it,” said Puspita Dasroy ’20. There is far too much academic work to do at Bronx Science to dwell on a silly mistake that was made. Afifa Areya ’20 has this final word of advice; “Always reach out for help. If anything, you will end up liking the school instead of ‘just fitting in’.”