<p>I attended the Air Force Academy which definitely shaped me. I was stellar through HS until college where I met people just as bright and more driven. The Academy set me on my career which, like AllThisIsNewtoMe, has given me great opportunities to move around the country and pay taxes. And like many others here, I met my wife. All good things.</p>
<p>An intriguing but complex question for me. The short answer is no, and here’s the long answer: I went to a Seven Sisters school, where smart girls were supposed to go in the days before coeducation. I applied to other places, but not with much conviction, because I had a feeling I wouldn’t end up at any of them. My college choice wasn’t so much a choice as an expectation–though one I willingly embraced. I do not think my women’s college did a good job in those pre-feminism days of building courage, self-confidence, and ambition in average students like me (I believe that most of the exceptional students came to college equipped with the self-worth that I needed some help developing). So my college experience left me feeling defeated, and it took a moderately successful career trajectory in the six to seven years after college to make me feel like a complete, competent person. </p>
<p>Like DougBetsy, though, my life from ages 17 to 21 was fraught with emotional angst–along with some health issues–that had little to do with my college experience but affected it. And unfortunately, unlike DougBetsy, my college sweetheart was the wrong person to marry–a mistake I later corrected! But the angst and the misguided marriage might have happened anywhere. </p>
<p>However, I have wonderful, lifelong friends from college who are like sisters. The social atmosphere felt like another family. I have a well-rounded liberal education that supports my genetic predisposition to be intellectually curious. Thinking of New England in the fall makes me yearn for Mountain Day. I wish I could go there now. But my alma mater didn’t shape my life. My career, my friends, and my life with my second husband and our son have done that.</p>
<p>That’s why I don’t automatically jump on the prestige bandwagon, though I admit to feeling a little twinge when I sent my son off to a big midwestern state university a year ago. But his experience so far has all the positive aspects of my college experience, with little or no angst and (I hope) no faulty personal choices.</p>
<p>Gee wiz - some of you posters sound awfully full of yourselves. Were you that way before you went to college or did your colleges make you that way? Oh, and to the original poster’s wife – thanks for changing the world for the rest of us.</p>
<p>I liked my undergraduate college, but I don’t feel that it shaped me in any particular way. I had the same sense of identity coming out as I had going in. I just knew more. But I was a first-generation student who viewed education as pretty much utilitarian; I didn’t expect my life to be changed, and so it wasn’t. I hope my kids’ experience in college is much different, and I’m sure it will be, because they were raised differently than I was. I guess I agree with the tired saying, “College is what you make of it.” If you want it to shape you, it will, because you’ll be open to life-changing experiences. If not, you won’t, and it won’t.</p>
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He entered his New England LAC a wiseacre lower-middle-class Jew […] and he left a functional WASP.
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<p>He…wait, what? He went from being a Jew to being an Anglo-Saxon Protestant? How did that happen? Talk about colleges that change lives.</p>
<p>The night before I started college, my Dad and I stayed with his parents, and my grandmother pulled out some college letters home of his that she had saved. Some of the early ones practically made me cry. He was so disoriented and depressed. Everything he knew was wrong. He had spent much of the money he had saved from part-time jobs on a college wardrobe, and he hadn’t purchased a single thing he could wear without attracting scorn. One letter had a long list of things that his brother (a year younger) should and should not buy. (Handpainted ties - bad. Khakis and suede bucks - good.) Fraternity rush was an exercise in being snubbed, something he had never experienced before. Even the Jewish fraternity didn’t want to touch him. Each letter was pretty much a load of misery.</p>
<p>But he learned to identify with his captors, so to speak, and to imitate them. Three years later, only his nose and his last name distinguished him from anyone else there. He was president of a fraternity whose national charter still forbade him to join, a member of a secret society that was (and remains) the pinnacle of that college’s prestige system, and on his way to Harvard Law School. </p>
<p>The truth was, he didn’t love his parents much – they weren’t the nicest people in the world, to put it mildly – or his community, either, and college gave him something he COULD love.</p>
<p>My college had a big impact on me.That was due in part to its unique structure, which no longer exists in the same form. The college I attended is VERY, VERY different now that it was back then. </p>
<p>My mom saved the first letter I wrote home. I was absolutely panicked. I felt so much less prepared than most of my classmates–and I was. When I read Sonia Sotomayer’s description of her first year at Princeton, it rang true–and I was a white, middle class kid who had gone to a suburban high school in the Midwest. I had to write more pages in my first semester of college than in my last three years of high school. </p>
<p>College was like heaven to me. I really enjoyed the academic part of college. I also made friends. I was still very different than most of my classmates–but different in a different way than I had been in high school. Being different was okay in college. It wasn’t in high school.</p>
<p>JHS, thanks for providing more detail. That is sad. I hope your father had happier times after all of that. Having to compromise your very identity in order to fit in must be sheer misery.</p>
<p>I went to an Ivy very far from home and it did not affect me very much. I am in touch with no one other than my husband, who I met there. College was only four years, but since my junior/senior high was all one school, it lasted six years and was much more influential. I am still in touch with a large group of those friends from home, even though none of us live anywhere near our original town. I have always felt that those six years between ages 12 and 18 were more important developmentally and intellectually than the college years.</p>
<p>The one lasting influence from my college years was the large population of foreigners. Not only did I marry one, but discussions with classmates from all over the world contributed more to my education than any college classes ever did.</p>
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<p>Yes. I loved my alma mater, but I’m equally sure I would have loved any number of places had that been how the cookie crumbled. I would say I blossomed socially compared to high school, though – it was nice to be in a place where it was cool to take academics seriously.</p>
<p>I hated my college while I was there. It didn’t nurture me, and it barely educated me. It was large, and I was lost. I quickly changed majors when it got too hard in my original choice, and no one ever ever ever gave me encouragement or told me to “stick with it; you can do it!” </p>
<p>I didn’t become the person I am until about six to eight years later. DH played a sport with people from his college – an Ivy – and we hung out with the guys and their girlfriends/wives. I decided I was like those people – just not yet living like them. So I took matters into my own hands, went to graduate school, and “fulfilled my destiny” to a much greater extent.</p>
<p>I concur with AllThisIsNewToMe. Wholeheartedly. Same college experience. Same political view. Maybe we went to the same college. :-)</p>
<p>mantori, my father’s situation wasn’t tragic at all. He didn’t LIKE his identity at all; he was thrilled to have a chance to adopt a somewhat different one. He felt he really became himself at college, and got away from a jackass of a father and a smothering mother very much in the Mrs. Portnoy mold. He felt far more comfortable in the world and in his own skin for having gone there.</p>
<p>The kid next door goes to the same college now, and is in my Dad’s old fraternity. My Dad loved meeting him and chatting about the frat and its history. I never shared that with him.</p>
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He felt he really became himself at college, and got away from a jackass of a father and a smothering mother very much in the Mrs. Portnoy mold.
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<p>Ah, I see. I read Portnoy’s Complaint two years ago and understand exactly what you mean now. Well, then, good for him! Was everyone in Phillip Roth’s neighborhood like that?</p>