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However, at the high school level, how do you differentiate between a boy who spend all his time working on a research project that he did by himself, and a kid who just went to a lab and mooched off of a professor? Honestly, I am pretty sure anyone can write a paper once you work at a lab for a couple months. My school has 6 winners(semifinalists in siemens), and I've seen their projects. A lot of them mooched off of professors at big institutes. Do you guys honestly think thousands of high schoolers come up with these amazing projects themselves? I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and it seems a bit like stealing. You join a lab, do a little bit of work under the guidance of a mentor(who could probably do the whole thing himself), and write a paper, often using the project that the mentor came up with. Did you come up with the idea yourself? NO! Could they have done this project all by theirself as if they were in their mentor's place? NO, they don't know everything they need to! Did they write the paper without substantial help from their mentor? NO.</p>
<p>This probably doesn't describe the majority of the winners, but I do know this happened frequently. It angers me because so many kids just join "labs" where they do work over the summer, and then write a paper. I think that the most important part of research is learning to ask the right questions. Being able to come up with the project is more important than getting results
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<p>Uh, I COMPLETELY fail to see what the heck that has to do with anything. Ok, so some Intel/Siemens winners didn't do all that much work. Fine. So what? What does that have to do with Harvard specifically? So you don't think that any of those people ever go to other schools like MIT? </p>
<p>Look, if you have a problem with some of these winners, then you should condemn ALL the schools who admit these people. Why single out Harvard? </p>
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sakky clearly thinks Harvard is just slightly better than life itself
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<p>Come on. I never said that either.</p>
<p>What I believe is that we don't need to be going around putting down other schools. Being proud of your school - that's fine. But putting down other schools? Why do you need to go there? There's a very good chance that sometime in your life you may end up working with or working for people who went to that school that you were putting down. Every top school, whether it's MIT or Caltech or whatever, have profs and graduate students and postdocs who came from Harvard. Heck, you may even end up going there yourself for later schooling. Who knows? </p>
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But there's still a lot more nonsense.
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<p>And I have to object to this word also. Sure, to you it may be nonsense. But to other people, it may be important. </p>
<p>Let me give you an example. It's about Yale, not Harvard, but it's the same theme. In 1946, an African-American named Levi Jackson entered Yale, one of only 3 African-Americans in the entire school (undergrad+grad) at the time. This was still the 40's, and Yale (and the rest of the US) was still a highly racist society. Many students and profs wanted nothing to do with him. However, Jackson endeavored to gain social acceptance by engaging in many of the activities that you might call 'nonsense'. By the time he graduated, Jackson was a tremendously popular student on campus, having not only joined the Yale football team (being the first black football player ever at Yale), but ultimately becoming captain of the Yale football team, rewriting the Yale football record book. But not only that. He was also a strong student, having been elected to various academic honor societies. Furthermore his pursuit of social acceptance was highly successful - he was ultimately tapped for Yale's Skull & Bones society, (which he ultimately turned down). Still, he was the first black person to ever get tapped for Skull & Bones. </p>
<p>Think about that - a black man in the late 40's getting tapped for Yale's Skull and Bones. This was a time when many US hotels, restaurants, stores, and transportation systems, mostly in the South but also many in the North, refused to serve blacks. This was when Jim Crow still ruled large swaths of the country and before anybody had ever even heard of the phrase 'affirmative action' - in fact, most schools actually practiced a form of "anti-affirmative action" by deliberately discriminating against minorities. It would be years before Brown vs. Board of Education, or the Civil Rights Act or any of these social changes that we now take for granted. Heck, back in those times, it was perfectly socially acceptable for whites to refer to blacks by the 'N-word'. Yet Levi Jackson, a black man, was so socially successful that he was able to get an invite to Skull&Bones. </p>
<p>How many of us could have done what he did? How many of us could have accomplished similar things as a black man in the 40's? </p>
<p>Note, he pursued social acceptance not just for 'fun', but because he felt he would need it. He ultimately became a civil rights pioneer in US business, becoming the first black executive at Ford and being responsible for changing Ford (and by extension the entire US auto industry) from lily-white organizations into highly racially diverse companies. He was able to accomplish that precisely because he had social acceptance in both the white and black world and so could act as the bridge between them.</p>
<p>Hence, my point is, some of you might think that climbing that social ladder is just a bunch of nonsense to you. But other people think it's important, for a variety of reasons. It certainly wasn't nonsense to Mr. Jackson. In fact, he would never have been able to achieve the things he did without climbing that social ladder. True, Levi Jackson wasn't an intellectual in the sense that he didn't get his PhD and spend his life trying to discover something. However, I think we can all agree that what he did accomplish was highly important in its own right. Hence, you can't simply assume that intellectual success is always more important than social success. Some of the most important advances in world history have come not through intellectual breakthroughs but through social breakthroughs. Just because the Civil Rights movement didn't involve any intellectual breakthroughs, I don't think anybody would assert that it is nonsense. Would you? </p>
<p>My point is, there's no need to throw around words like 'nonsense' or other such invectives. If something's not important to you, then fine, it's not important to you. But it may be important to other people. The next great alumni from MIT or Caltech may be recognized not for intellectual reasons but for social reasons. Hey, who knows? It might happen.</p>