Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City

“I do have to agree with Cooper,” Kyle, the sole senior in the group, said. “Before him, I always felt like the world was unchangeable. Like, this is the way things are; we have to follow this structure.” Mamdani’s unexpected electoral triumph had called such received wisdom into question.

Scattered on the classroom whiteboards were equations, a few desultory doodles, a thunderhead cloud of cramped A.P. U.S. History notes about the Spanish-American War (“Progressivism → idk”), and, written in Japanese, “I like Stray Kids,” referring to a K-pop boy band. Shelves of small cacti under grow lights filled one window. Joan, a junior in glasses with thick black frames, said that he was impressed with Mamdani’s 2-K and 3-K efforts. Child care was something that his parents had worried about after arriving from the Dominican Republic. “I know a lot of family and friends who would have really benefitted from a program like that,” he said.

Mariam, a junior, wore a loosely draped black head scarf. She said that she liked the degree to which Mamdani seemed immersed in New York’s daily life. “The fact that he took the subway,” she said. “Isn’t this guy supposed to be in a limousine?” Her commute involved taking the 2 train to the 4, with a transfer at 149th Street, a stop that she called “a red flag to transit New Yorkers,” because “drug use is extremely prevalent”—something she hoped Mamdani could address.

There were knowing nods from the rest of the group regarding 149th Street. Namira, another junior, said that she didn’t take public transportation very much, in part because of her parents’ safety concerns.

Namira, whose dark hair had burgundy streaks, wore hoop earrings and a tangle of gold necklaces. “My parents are really supportive of Mamdani, because I come from similar religious and cultural backgrounds,” she said. “I’m Bengali.” Namira lives in East Elmhurst, where several bus stops had recently been removed, disrupting her mother’s commute to Times Square and inspiring her to action. “My mom has a history of not being trusting of politicians in general,” Namira said. “But recently she took the liberty of e-mailing Mamdani.” Namira’s mother often asks her children to copy-edit her e-mails. This time, Namira said, “We made her send it as it was, because we just thought it added to the factor of, like, Mamdani would understand.”

The Mayor was, the group agreed, someone who they could easily imagine as a Bronx Science student. To judge by the present company, this meant ambitious and busy. The students had a dense roster of extracurriculars among them: student government; debate; Model U.N.; National Honor Society; newspaper; and groups that, variously, opposed bullying, promoted restorative justice, and provided test prep. Namira hoped eventually to study journalism and international relations. Cooper, a self-described “well-rounded student,” professed an interest in education policy; previously, he had worked for the Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres.

As the students held forth on community, diversity, and under-resourced schools, they all sounded slightly as though they were running for something, however yet undefined. They spoke like people who were accustomed to being evaluated, and accepted it with good humor. The ordeal of admissions was still present in the minds of upperclassmen, as was the fact of Stuyvesant, the public-high-school Harvard to Bronx Science’s Yale. Mamdani, for one, has admitted that he didn’t get into Stuyvesant. (“Mamdani plans to convert Stuyvesant High School into a government-owned mixed-use building,” the Stuyvesant Spectator reported, in a humor piece.)

Cooper volunteered that he’d ranked Bronx Science as his first choice, against his parents’ wishes. “They wanted me to go to Stuyvesant,” he said.

“Similar to Cooper, I did choose Bronx Science over Stuyvesant,” Kyle noted.

Mariam explained that she’d been admitted to Bronx Science through a program called Discovery, for students from disadvantaged backgrounds whose test scores fell just below the school’s cutoff line. “I got that e-mail—I was, like, wow, the school must really want me to come here,” she said. Her story was a reminder that the school’s promise and its limitations were difficult to disentangle.