Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City
Youth is relative: thirty-four may be young for a politician, but it is not, actually, all that young. On the ninety-first day of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, a group of five truly young New Yorkers convened in a physics classroom at the Bronx High School of Science—Mamdani’s alma mater—to discuss his time in office so far. It was April 1st, the last day before spring break, and outside, a humid warmth that would be foul in July was, for now, novel and welcome.
“One of my memories of being at Science,” Mamdani told me a few days later, “was being surrounded by people smarter than myself, and that is something I continue to have the privilege of experiencing each and every day at City Hall.” Bronx Science is one of the highly competitive specialized New York City public high schools where access to a free, élite education rests on a single admissions test. As such, it is at once a symbol of the city’s grandest opportunities (because anyone can take that test and, if they score well enough, attend) and of its most entrenched inequalities (because this process routinely results in student populations with far lower percentages of Black and Latino students than in the public-school system as a whole). Mamdani, who graduated in 2010, seemingly sees it both ways. He has criticized the admissions test as a mechanism that perpetuates educational segregation. But he has also described Bronx Science as the place where his understanding of the city expanded beyond his parents’ Ivy League milieu, where he made friends with kids from similar immigrant backgrounds and became “proud of [his] brownness,” as he once put it in a podcast interview. The school “introduced me to the breadth of life across New York City,” he told me.
Throughout the 2025-26 school year, the Mayor had enjoyed the status of a home-town hero on campus. “I really think there’s very few places that have as much support for him as the Bronx Science student body,” Cooper, an animated junior in a polo shirt, told me that day in the physics classroom. “Everyone felt this pride toward him.” Students found the scale of Mamdani’s ambition exciting in itself. “He’s advocating for this progress that I feel like we haven’t seen in politics,” Cooper went on. “At least in our, like, remembered lifetime. Which is kind of sad to say.”
“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.
First-year politicians and élite high-school students have something in common. They both have gotten what they want—they got in!—only to find that the hard work begins all over again. Mamdani’s freshman year in office has barely started, but, as anyone who’s been a high schooler knows, four years can go by shockingly fast. On the way to the next goal—reëlection, college admission—both groups must clear a series of hurdles made up of largely artificial deadlines and events: a press conference, a ribbon cutting, a semester, or, for a mayoral administration, the first hundred days.
Such deadlines lend themselves to compressed frenzies of activity. On day ninety-seven, Mamdani walked home to Gracie Mansion from City Hall, evoking his walk down the length of Manhattan just before the primary. As his ninety-eighth day in office became his ninety-ninth, he’d visit overnight work sites in Queens, an all-hours show of appreciation for city workers that called to mind the late nights and early mornings that he spent cheering on Department of Sanitation crews during winter snowstorms. (The administration was young but possibly capable of nostalgia already.) The Mayor would round out his first hundred days with a celebratory rally at the Knockdown Center on Sunday (day a hundred and two). In the meantime, a flurry of press releases read like self-issued report cards attesting that he was a pleasure to have in office. But his hope, he said, was to use the hundred-day mark to call attention to the “often unrecognized” labor of the municipal workforce. “The position of being the mayor comes with a platform,” he told me. “The reality is that you are only able to accomplish things because of the team that is around you.”
So, between 11:00 P.M. Wednesday night and 1:00 A.M., his motorcade prowled Queens. In the ambulance bay at Elmhurst Hospital, Fire Department emergency workers were waiting for calls. On Exit 4 of Jackie Robinson Parkway, a Department of Transportation road crew was repaving an on-ramp. And, on a quiet residential street in St. Albans, a team from the Department of Environmental Protection was using equipment that it compared to a stethoscope to check for subterranean water leaks. At each location, the Mayor, wearing a departmentally appropriate windbreaker and an expression that conveyed indefatigably active listening, asked city workers how many years they’d been on the job. Cameras bobbed and staffers thronged. (“He rolls pretty deep,” I overheard the F.D.N.Y. commissioner, Lillian Bonsignore, observe.)
In St. Albans, a bus driver leaving home to start her shift at the Queens Village Depot was shocked to find the Mayor standing in the middle of her street. “I told him thank you for coming about the water,” she explained, after they’d chatted for a moment and posed for a photo.
At Elmhurst, a resident in a Tufts University School of Medicine zip-up wandered out to see what was going on. “I went to Bowdoin,” he said, watching from the periphery as the Mayor inspected an ambulance. “Two years behind him.”
In Forest Park, Exit 4 vibrated underfoot as a steamroller advanced. The pavement was sticky if you stood in one place for too long. Mamdani (hard hat in place, D.O.T. windbreaker on) climbed aboard the truck responsible for spreading asphalt. For a while, he stood listening, as he’d been doing all night, to someone’s account of a job they’d had longer than he’d had his own.
“All right, let’s do it,” the Mayor said, preparing to take the driver’s seat.
The truck rumbled, and an operating engineer stationed at his side shouted the news down to the crowd gathered on the steaming pavement below: “THE MAYOR IS DOIN’ IT.” ♦
