Lydia Bach

Bank Street School for Children '23

Bank Street certainly helps foster direction and finding your own passions.

In 2025, Lydia Bach is a high school sophomore at Bard High School Early College Queens, where she contributes to the podcast and Substack, This Teenage Life. She and a few of her fellow contributors were recently featured on The Today Show to talk about their work, which addresses themes ranging from the daily struggles of being a teenager to global issues. 

Lydia got involved in the podcast at 11 years old when she was still a student at Bank Street School for Children. Moved by a particular episode, she emailed the creator who responded with an invitation to contribute.

“Bank Street fosters this idea of just reaching out to people and showing interest,” she said. “There’s not this sense of embarrassment— I also emailed my favorite author just to say thank you for writing their book.”

Lydia has been shocked by the “incomprehensible amount of people” they’ve been able to reach with the podcast. An aspiring writer, Lydia produces the Substack, which has a readership of over 800. She has the freedom to write about whatever topics inspire her, and she credits her sense of self-direction to Bank Street, saying “Bank Street certainly helps foster direction and finding your own passions.”

This Teenage Life has contributors and readers located all over the world, which has offered Lydia the opportunity to understand international perspectives. She recently produced an episode on gun control and the response to school shootings. 

She said, “I interviewed some of the kids from India and they had a very different perspective, which was really interesting and gave me insight into how other people might see this issue. There are so many different ways of living and different ways of being.”

For Lydia, This Teenage Life and Bank Street share a common goal—“Both places help teenagers put feelings and words together. There’s not a lot of room for that in the world, and that feels special.”

Looking back at her time at Bank Street, she remembered completing a household budgeting project in 6th grade. Each student was assigned a character, a job, and yearly income and then went grocery shopping and found an apartment and child care. Lydia recalled the impact of seeing how the identity they were assigned could result in a lower salary or increased cost of living. 

“Bank Street shapes you a lot,” she said. “How to treat other people. How to approach other people. That’s something I’ve definitely taken with me.”

Hear more from Lydia here: