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<p>You are going to be very disappointed when you get to college if you expect very academically smart people to not make dumb decisions in their personal lives.</p>
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<p>I’ll echo collegealum’s last post. Smart in academics and smart in personal life are very different things. </p>
<p>The thing is in college, you end up realizing that not everyone is going to be in the same place forever. It certainly seems everyone is roughly in the same boat in high school, even if some people are the “smart kids” and some people are the “popular kids” (with some potentially nontrivial intersection). So you end up choosing who you’ll spend your time with, and what you’ll do outside of school. </p>
<p>Sometimes, what you do outside of school will be determined more by who you spend your time with than the other way around; if you prefer one batch to another, you might get used to some things that batch does, which you didn’t see yourself doing earlier. </p>
<p>For instance, some smart people go down the path of academia, and others go down a totally different path. This in and of itself can differentiate who you spend time with, what you find to your taste and what is not so much.</p>
<p>@ Piper - thank you, I hope in a good way :)</p>
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<p>Often, people only get drunk in an atmosphere full of people they trust. Putting yourself in bad company AND getting drunk is something I might actually pin down to be stupid, because in that case, you are right that there is a high risk of something bad happening at some point in time.</p>
<p>“Often, people only get drunk in an atmosphere full of people they trust. Putting yourself in bad company AND getting drunk is something I might actually pin down to be stupid, because in that case, you are right that there is a high risk of something bad happening at some point in time.”</p>
<p>So you’re saying it would be dumb to get drunk at a frat party full of strangers, but it wouldn’t be dumb to get drunk when you’re just with friends? I guess I could sort of live with that.</p>
<p>“I don’t like talking to people I don’t know. It’s hard, I don’t know what to say, and I feel uncomfortable.”</p>
<p>I’m going to say that you will improve your personal life drastically if you step outside your comfort zone and start talking to people you don’t know. I mean, when you first go to college, you’re not going to know anyone - and if you keep that mindset, you never will.</p>
<p>And I don’t know your school, so I’m not saying you’re wrong about there not being smart drinkers/social people - in your school. They do exist elsewhere, though.</p>
<p>Rhino: If people talk to me first, I’ll talk back. I find it easier. That’s how I got all of my friends. So I doubt I won’t meet anyone in college if I don’t change. I still would, however, like to change, I just have no idea how to do it.</p>
<p>nonexistent</p>
<p>Onamatapia there are two types of nerds I believe. The ones like you and me who work for it without any one pushing us to. We are focused and thus feel like any partying would ruin us. The other nerd is the one whose parents forced him/her to study. Once out of parents grasp they feel free and want to party. However it’s always good to relax once in a while and you can do it the way you like. There are all kinds of people at MIT from geeks seeking to be the next einstein and have no time for mortal play lol to people who just want a good life and feel like MIT can give that to em.</p>
<p>For them a party is getting a can of beer and not drinking it but trying to figure out how much metal the can is made of and stuff like that. And they do parties like this in small groups with coffee or tea and u need a fancy calculator and a computer both. And then everyone laughs wierd and they all go to bed early.</p>
<p>Let me also note that drinking and getting totally wildly drunk are two different things, for the record. One of these <em>CAN</em> lead to doing very stupid things, including becoming a menace to those around you.</p>
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<p>It is probably worst if the company is almost certainly bad company. With strangers, it’s always a gamble, but some batches of strangers are noticeably sketchier than others.</p>
<p>Instead of calling anything dumb and not dumb, let’s just say no matter what, it’s dumber if you’re around questionable company than not.</p>
<p>I think all this is very obvious though.</p>
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<p>Yes :P</p>
<p>And @mathboy - Definitely in a good way ^_^</p>
<p>@onamatapia - In any case, I think your impression of how stupid alcohol can make someone is very exaggerated (which, if you have no experience with alcohol, is probably just due to unrealistic programs at school that talk about this). It’s okay to have this knee-jerk reaction against alcohol right now, but it’ll be harmful if you come here and have a high-and-mighty position against anyone who has ever touched alcohol. If you do end up coming here, I just ask you to keep an open mind, judge people based on whether their actions are directly helpful and harmful, and let yourself change based on what you find. (This goes for a lot of things other than alcohol, as well.)</p>
<p>It seems you sort of have this tragic idea in your head that you must be a loser because you are smart (and you already admitted this isn’t necessarily so, given one person at your high school). It seems like you’re resenting people who can have both social life* and intelligence - but you can too! Maybe not at your high school, but you can here. You don’t have to resent people who do.</p>
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<li>I feel like this post way overexaggerates the role alcohol and partying plays in social life at MIT – so I want to reemphasize that it’s really not necessary at all for having a happy time here. I say this as a person who regularly has awesome weekends and hasn’t been to a frat party in over a year.</li>
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<p>Mathboy: “Let me also note that drinking and getting totally wildly drunk are two different things, for the record. One of these <em>CAN</em> lead to doing very stupid things, including becoming a menace to those around you.”</p>
<p>Well, I was considering getting drunk having more than 3-4+ beers on one occasion.</p>
<p>Piper: “I think your impression of how stupid alcohol can make someone is very exaggerated (which, if you have no experience with alcohol, is probably just due to unrealistic programs at school that talk about this).”
If anything exaggerated my impression against alcohol, it would be the fact that my dad is an alcoholic cheater who ruined our family.</p>
<p>“It seems you sort of have this tragic idea in your head that you must be a loser because you are smart (and you already admitted this isn’t necessarily so, given one person at your high school). It seems like you’re resenting people who can have both social life* and intelligence - but you can too! Maybe not at your high school, but you can here. You don’t have to resent people who do.”
You make it seem like I don’t have any friends. I do have friends, just not as many as most people.</p>
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<p>There’s a range of drunkenness (from slightly buzzed to unconscious and in danger), and how much alcohol it takes to get to any of those stages varies from person to person.
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<p>Ah, yeah, your knee-jerk reaction is way more understandable now. I’m sorry for your situation. Alcohol is just like many other things - ranging from illegal drugs to the caffeine in soda - it can be addictive. This doesn’t make addiction typical use.
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<p>I may be misreading here - my point was that it seems you conflate bullying, alcohol, popularity, and stupidity. None of these have to go together.</p>
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<p>The nerd world is far, far more diverse than this.</p>
<p>“There’s a range of drunkenness (from slightly buzzed to unconscious and in danger), and how much alcohol it takes to get to any of those stages varies from person to person.”
I wasn’t considering getting buzzed the same as getting drunk. I would put getting drunk at the point where your judgement starts getting clouded.</p>
<p>Avatarmage: I don’t believe this is true. I wouldn’t limit it to being only two types of “nerds” as you say. I am a self-driven “nerd” who doesnt have parents who require me to get top grades. I get top grades because I want to. But I also dont have a problem with drinking (although I never have myself). As long as you are Smart about drinking. Yes, there are people who binge drink or drink and party every weekend (including kids at my high school) and they NEED the drinking to help their social life – i.e. they only have friends who like to party with them… THIS I would consider dumb.</p>
<p>But then there are kids who just drink occasionally, and not just to become drunk and have a crazy party – to get a little buzzed but then still “play games” and stuff.</p>
<p>Then there is the group of people who would never drink alcohol and never be around a party with alcohol. </p>
<p>Then there is everything between those. </p>
<p>Onamatapia: I completely respect YOUR decision to not drink. This is totally fine – as of right now, I have made the same choice (I have a group of friends who is also like this and we have really fun parties without any alcohol). But I warn you, don’t let your dad’s alcoholism cloud your judgement about this topic. Although YOU have made the choice not to drink, other people havent, and drinking can be done in a smart and safe way. </p>
<p>I bet you that at a large frat party with 200+ people and drinking is involved, there are people on all ends of the spectrum: people who don’t drink at all (it can be fun to be around someone who is drunk while you are sober), people who just get a little bit buzzed (have a few drinks, let loose), people who get drunk and lose control, and people who are binge drinking (which this I would say is “stupid”)</p>
<p>Onamatapia, I know what you mean, its very hard to imagine the holders of the highest IQ’s in the world getting drunk and partying hard. It’s a small portion of the population of that population that is like that, but its there. In my high school, there are only 3 or 4 kids in the gifted program of 23 or so that drink and do drugs and needless to say, very popular, but actually, there are no complete social rejects in the program. And most of the program have 4.0+ GPAs. I’m a pretty prime example of a gifted kid on the social level. We all have social lives, and our ideas of parties are 10-30 kids hanging out at the pool or video games. From when I visited and really got to know the campus(though I may be wrong), its about half of those kind of kinds, maybe more or less, idk, but there’s a huge percentage that are more or less socially active but not to a drunk and drug level. Thanks so much everyone who posted, I love MIT, its a relief to hear that there’s such a variety of levels of partying at the school.</p>
<p>Field report: I went to the wedding of two friends from MIT last night in Las Vegas. There was an open bar, and much dancing. There was also a lot of sitting around and catching up with MIT friends I haven’t seen in a while. I had half a cocktail, and I didn’t see anybody who was drunk. (The bachelor party on Thursday night, which my husband organized, was a different story. ;))</p>
<p>Note: I never said I thought getting buzzed was stupid. I only said I thought getting drunk was stupid.</p>
<p>onamatapia i don’t really comment ever but i just have to say: You are a moron.</p>