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Sakky, you have to understand that we are looking at relative scale while making comments (otherwise whatever you or I say is always untrue since there is always some exception). Granted that the Harvard undergrad community has a few internationals. But compared to grad level proportions it is almost zero. At the grad level, you will find very few americans (and I speak of Physics, DEAS, MAths, bio, eco, business, english, etc and not sociology which abounds with americans.) That doesnt mean americans are any less smart. That only means that when you are looking for the best brains to do research from all over the world, the chances of a single nation drastically goes down and the quality of students shoots up. Harvard at the college level is an american univ with a global outlook but havard at the grad level is a truly global phenomenon.
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<p>Uh, are you sure about your characterization of the English department being filled with international grad students.</p>
<p>Look, I'm well aware of what you're talking about, and I certainly agree that in certain disciplines, notably the sciences and mathematics, international students make up a giant chunk of the graduate student cohort, in some cases, probably the majority. </p>
<p>But then, as you said, there are other departments that are almost entirely American. Like sociology, as you mentioned. Like organizational behavior (which is basically just applied sociology). Like public policy, which is technically, a GSAS program (it is a joint program between GSAS and Kennedy). Like Health Policy which is also technically a a GSAS program. </p>
<p>Now, I agree with you that, still, overall, there are more international grad students than there are international undergrads. But my point is simply not to oversell this notion. There is indeed a significant percentage of high-powered international undergrads at Harvard. </p>
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This statement again is completely false. Most GSAS students didnt even apply to Harvard as undergrads since they did their schooling at their respective countries. For example have you heard of the IITs in India? It will be madness for a student who gets admission to IIT to leave that and come to Harvard at the undergrad level since it simply doesnt match their standards. Harvard maybe the best in America at undergrad level, but way below at the international front
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<p>Huh? Your statement is completely false. I think we can agree that schooling, particularly undergrad schooling, is not solely about 'meeting standards'. It's also about prestige, it's about career opportunities, it's about networking, it's about a wide range of features. I would hardly say that an Indian guy who had the choice between IIT and Harvard would choose IIT, simply because Harvard means getting out of India and a better life. IIT is extremely difficult. Why go through that level of rigor, if, frankly, you don't have to? Like it or not, Harvard has the best brand name in the world, and many (probably most)students are there for the brand name, because they know they can leverage that brand name and the social opportunities to further their career. But the bottom line is that schooling is FAR MORE than just about the education alone. </p>
<p>Look, I'll put it to you this way. Harvard has by far the highest yield of any undergrad school in the world, despite the fact that it is unclear that Harvard really does offer the best undergrad education. For example, just in the US, many people believe that the LAC's offer superior undergrad education. I know quite a few former Harvard undergrads who either got into top LAC's such as Wellesley, Williams, Amherst, etc. and turned them down, or (in a few cases) went to them, and then transferred to Harvard as juniors, despite them believing that the LAC actually offered a superior education to Harvard. Heck, I know one girl who absolutely agonized over choosing Wellesley vs. Harvard, and still chose Harvard even though she was completely convinced that Wellesley offered a better education. What was the problem? Simple. The Harvard killer brand name and the resultant career opportunities it endengers. Basically, she made a determination that she was going to turn down a better education at Wellesley because she felt that the Harvard brand name would open important doors for her career. </p>
<p>One could say that it's a triumph of style over substance. But I would simply point to the analogy of business competition and remark that you can produce the best product in the market, and still lose to a product that is not quite as good, but that is well-marketed. For example, Mercedes really doesn't produce that well-engineered of a car, as evidenced by numerous auto surveys that enumerate Mercedes's manufacturing defects. But Mercedes markets itself extremely well such that people THINK that Mercedes is well-engineered. Similarly, an interesting study that came out recently indicated that randomly selected people who were selected to rate the Internet search results of Google and Yahoo chose Google * even when the search results were swapped <a href="such%20that%20those%20who%20thought%20they%20were%20looking%20at%20Google%20search%20results%20were%20really%20looking%20at%20Yahoo%20results,%20and%20vice%20versa">/i</a>. That's a simple demonstration of the power of the Google brand name. </p>
<p>But the point is, anybody who discounts the importance of branding has to answer the question of why companies bother to spend billions of dollars in building their brand name. If branding doesn't create demand and drive sales, then why are these companies throwing all that money away in building something that has no value? Are they just being dumb? </p>
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The situation completely changes at the grad field. Here Harvard is THE best and attracts THE best students and faculty. Harvard is harvard because of its research and not for its undergrad quality (coz then u would have seen swarthmore at the top). In fact the undergrad reputation of harvard is largely derived from its superiority at the grad level research.
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<p>Again, is it really 'the best' (the way you define 'best'), or is it really just the best branded? Trust me, I know a LOT of Harvard graduate students who have privately admitted that they chose Harvard largely for the brand name. </p>
<p>In fact, I'll tell you about one of them. I know a Turkish guy who's a Harvard doctoral student. He has stated that he doesn't really think that Harvard is the best program in his field and that he got into several other programs that he thinks are better. So why Harvard? Simple. He ultimately plans to go back to Turkey and work for the government, including perhaps one day running for political office. The voters in Turkey don't know what the best programs are in his field. They're just going to see the Harvard brand name. And he knows that. That's why he chose Harvard. I know a LOT of Harvard Business School MBA's who don't think that the education they get is that good, and they knew that coming in. So why go? Again, the killer HBS brand name. {We have to keep in mind that many MBA students aren't that interested in the education anyway - many of them are really there for the recruiting and the networking.} </p>
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Ok ask yourself what is brilliance. Brilliance is traditionally defined as superior mental abilities. It is not about exuding confidence despite knowing nothing or having great interpersonal skills (in which the harvard undergrads clearly excel although I attribute that more to a cultural ease since the grads are largely an international population and hence cannot be expected to be socially smart when the "social" setting is not their home base). </p>
<p>It is simply madness to compare the brilliance of the harvard grads with the undergrads. The latter cant even do simple mental maths like what is 6.3.times 3!
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<p>Don't you think you're engaging in hyperbole. Are you seriously contending that Harvard undergrads can't do basic arithmetic? </p>
<p>But anyway, see below. </p>
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The undergrads will write pages after pages of fancy reports for their labs, collect volumes of data and read all possible books to find all possible details but when it comes down to one simple question "So how will you improve the existing methods?" they go blank! They cant think out of the box, they are just concerned about their grades --- ONLY their grades. The sole motivation for their study is getting good grades, not understanding the subject, not figuring out how to change things for the better
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<p>But wanting to change things for the better or understanding the subject automatically makes you brilliant? </p>
<p>Besides, like I said in my previous post, MANY grad students are only interested in understanding the very narrow area that corresponds to their research - AND NOTHING ELSE. For example, I know a lot of Harvard doctoral students who were forced to take econ courses, and didn't care about most of it. For example, if you're a business econ PhD student who specializes in strategy, you probably don't care about topics like General Equilibrium. You just don't care. It has nothing to do with your research. </p>
<p>You also talk about undergrads being motivated ONLY by grades. First, I would strongly dispute that point, as I think that plenty of undergrads are also quite interested in learning the subject, either from a love of learning or because they want to be PhD students themselves. But even if what you are saying is true, and these undergrads really are motivated only by grades, hey, at least it's some sort of motivation. PhD students are barely motivated by grades at all. Hence, when they encounter a topic of which they just don't care, they REALLY don't care. Again, to take the example of the strategy guy who doesn't care about general equilibrium, when the class turns to that topic, he probably won't do anything. Heck, he may not even show up to class anymore. You can threaten him with bad grades in that section of the class, but, like I said, it's hard to motivate PhD students with grades. So when they don't care, they really don't care. At least an undergrad can still be spurred to study topics he doesn't really care about by a motivation to get good grades. </p>
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On the contrary PhD programs admit people solely on the basis of brillianc and NOTHING else. It is the undergrad admissions which takes into account extra-curricular stuff like how you spent six weeks working with african NGOs but at grad level nothing matters except sheer brilliance. And the grad admission process is such that they will weed out all the "I-can-talk-glib-but-dont-know-anything" easily because it is based on a synergy of high GRE scores, great recommendation letters from respected researchers, top notch grades at undergrad level, published papers in reputed journals and research experience. Only those who excel in each and every such criterion are admitted in.
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<p>Well, no, that's not true at all. The VAST MAJORITY of Harvard doctoral students are admitted despite not having any published papers (at least, not yet). Nor do many of them have stellar grades.</p>
<p>Let me give you an example. Molliebatmit is currently a Harvard bio PhD student. She doesn't (yet) have any publications. And she had only a 3.4/4 GPA. I wouldn't call that 'stellar'. Yet Harvard admitted her anyway. So did every other PhD program she applied to. </p>
<p>Molliebatmit actually pointed out another important aspect of the admissions process. You have to be indicating research potential in a topic that the faculty is actually interested in. If your indicated research interest is about something that the faculty doesn't do, you're probably not going to get admitted, no matter how 'brilliant' you are. I know some Harvard PhD students who were rejected from every single other program they applied to, and got only into Harvard. They think (and I agree) that the reason this happened is because their research had to do with exactly what one Harvard professor was looking for, and so that prof was pushing to get that person admitted. But that means that PhD students are not really being admitted to much for 'brilliance' but really for research fit, which is a feature that is idiosyncratic to a particular school. I'm sure that other, more 'brilliant' candidates were rejected in order to make room for those guys. </p>
<p>But the major issue is, like I said before, that they are admitting you on * research potential * which is not the same thing as 'brilliance'. Let's not romanticize academia. Most academic research out there is not really 'brilliant'. You don't have to be a genius to do it. After all, most of it is empirical work - you run a study/experiment, you gather data, and then you interpret it. You don't need to be a genius to do that, and do it well. You have to be knowledgeable about experimental design and statistical techniques, but frankly, you don't have to be a genius. It takes hard work, it takes patience, it takes attention to detail, but it doesn't really take brilliance to do that. Pick up a cross-section of academic journals and read the articles and you should find that most of the empirical results articles are things that you could probably have done yourself if given the equipment (and once you get past the jargon).</p>
<p>Take even the theoretical modeling papers. Again, most such papers are little more than extensions of other ideas. You take an idea, you apply the idea to a particular instance with a bunch of assumptions, and you state the results. Heck, I just read 5 economics papers in the last 2 days that were nothing more than applying the economic concept of bundling/tying to incumbent markets, and then reporting different results depending on what the original assumptions are, for example, how many firms exist, whether you are attempting to deter firm entry or firm exit, etc. etc. These models really aren't * that * brilliant. Any decent economics student could write a similar paper and report different results with different assumptions. Yes, I agree, you have to understand the economic mechanics of bundling, but once you understand that (which is not that hard), and can wade through the jargon (again, not that hard once you spend time to learn it), it's not that 'brilliant'.</p>
<p>The point is, I am warning everybody here not to romanticize academia. The harsh truth is that the vast majority of papers and research projects, even at Harvard, is not that brilliant. It may be important, but it's not 'brilliant'. </p>
<p>To illustrate the difference between the 2 concepts, the epidemiology studies that established the link between smoking and cancer is not 'brilliant' (because all they were were just papers using standard statistical sampling techniques, controlling and regressing for various parameters) , but is obviously extremely important from a public health standpoint. These studies obviously involved a lot of hard work in simply getting all the data in the first place, but once you have all the data, it's not that hard to run a number of statistical regressions on it. Neither the data-gathering nor the statistical analysis steps required much 'brilliance'. </p>
<p>Brilliant papers would be ones from Einstein. Or Richard Feynman. But the vast vast majority of papers are not like that. Let's not romanticize academia. Most Harvard graduate students are great experimental researchers, but not necessarily 'brilliant'.</p>