What a graduating class of fewer than a hundred students has produced.
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Crystal Springs Uplands graduates fewer than a hundred students a year, yet its alumni include a chess grandmaster, an MIT cognitive scientist, an international footballer, and a jazz vocalist. The pattern is not a single pipeline into one industry. It is a set of people who went deep on something unusual early, which is consistent with how the school structures its own academic program.
A Chess Grandmaster Who Started at Crystal
Daniel Naroditsky attended Crystal Springs Uplands for middle school and most of high school, graduating in 2014 before going on to Stanford. He had already published Mastering Positional Chess at fourteen, making him the youngest published chess author in history, and followed it with Mastering Complex Endgames. He earned the grandmaster title in 2013 and became one of the most respected teachers and commentators the game has had, writing an endgame column for Chess Life and later a chess column for the New York Times.
Naroditsky died in October 2025 at the age of twenty-nine. Crystal’s head of school wrote that during his years at the school he was known not only for his intellect and chess mastery but for his warmth, humility, and kindness, and that the loss was felt deeply within the Crystal community. For families reading an alumni list to understand a school, that sentence says more than any accolade does.
Crystal Springs Uplands Alumni in Science, Sport, and Music
| Alumnus | Field | Known for |
| Josh Tenenbaum | Cognitive science and AI | MIT professor whose research bridges psychology, neuroscience, and machine learning in the study of how humans and machines learn |
| Verónica Pérez | Professional football | Striker for the Mexico women’s national team |
| Kitty Margolis | Jazz | Vocalist and improviser, known for Heart and Soul: Live in San Francisco |
Three careers, three unrelated fields, one small school. What they share is not a discipline but a disposition: each built a body of work around a specific obsession rather than a general credential.
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What the Crystal Alumni List Suggests About the School
Crystal removed AP designations in 2012-13 and replaced them with 38 honors courses, student-initiated projects, investigative research, internships, and global programs. A curriculum built that way tends to produce people who go unusually deep on one thing rather than uniformly well on ten. The alumni list is small enough that it should not be read as proof of anything, and we would caution against choosing a school on the strength of who graduated from it twenty years ago. But it is at least consistent with what the school says it is trying to do. Our guide to reading school rankings and reputation signals covers how much weight this kind of evidence should actually carry.
If your child is the sort who disappears into one subject for months at a time, Crystal is worth a serious look. If they are still searching, that is fine too, and the school’s small classes make it easier to search out loud.
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