Using New York City as our classroom and laboratory, CITYterm brings together seven residential faculty and 30 intellectually adventuresome juniors and seniors in high school for a semester of intensive, experience-based learning.  Our mission is To encourage students to engage fully in learning and thinking for themselves, about themselves and about who and what is beyond themselves.  Our goal is for students to leave CITYterm with the intellectual tools they need to understand and express the complexity of New York City and the emotional and social tools to participate constructively in their community.

CITYterm challenges its students to think, question, speak up and grow.  It asks them to embrace new experiences and to share in the process of becoming more self-aware with peers from all across the United States.

At CITYterm we believe that the most profound learning takes place when it is rooted in experience.  Our students recognize that learning can happen on any City block, and that the best instruction does not culminate in an exam, but with a seminar featuring a novelist or a poet, a meeting with an architectural historian, a dinner with a homeless person, an afternoon giving a neighborhood walking tour, or a night at the theater. 

The Masters School launched CITYterm in the fall of 1996.  Since then, more than 100 public and private schools from across the country have sent almost 500 students to CITYterm.  While CITYterm is open to students from any school, a core group of member schools which joined the CITYterm project at its inception typically send one of two students to CITYterm each semester.  CITYterm's member schools are:

Come explore what CITYterm can be for you…

CITYterm does not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or national or ethnic origin in the administration of admissions, financial aid, employment, educational policies or other school programs.