Comments from a first year

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
41

<p>Newmassdad:</p>

<p>I do think you were a little out of line in your response. I, too, found Sig. Borgia's comments unpleasantly arrogant (something I imagine lots of Chicago students are capable of from time to time), but I don't see anything in them that justifies some of your attacks. And I think it's a little incumbent on the adult-adults here not to tee off on the young adults too much, especially when what they are doing is acting like young adults act. Which sometimes includes unpleasant arrogance.</p>

<p>Specifically, I did not get the sense that Sig. Borgia was complaining about the easiness of his first-year calculus sequence, having elected to re-take basic calculus. He was complaining about the lack of intellectual excitement from his fellow students, and to some extent about the "watering down" of his Accelerated Latin course. I have to take the first on faith as reflecting an honest account of his subjective experience. I have no idea what the second means -- I never thought of learning a (Western) language as intellectually stimulating per se, what's intellectually stimulating is what you do with the language after you've learned it, and I can't imagine that anyone intelligent was being held back from learning the Latin he wanted to learn by a course syllabus.</p>

<p>Universities are what they are: a collection of buildings and scholars, and the students they attract. Wherever you are, you have to find the people who are doing things that engage your interest, faculty and peers. And sometimes, you have to be open to what interesting people are interested in, rather than insisting that your self-generated expectations about what should be interesting be met. Sig. Borgia's problems in this area look like a character flaw to me, sure, but there's also some flavor of internet chest-thumping to it.</p>

<p>And, to give him his due, how many aspiring young hedge fund minions are so crabby about the rigors of their Latin courses? My guess is that Sig. Borgia finds himself a little out of place wherever he is. That isn't a character flaw.</p>

42

<p>I think that it must be difficult coming out of Exeter - it is, absolutely, an amazing academy - concentrated knowledge, and wealth, and a legitimate belief in scholarship. It seems to have suited CB to a t. If your highschool was, for you, the gold standard, then college may well be a disappointment. </p>

<p>But, how boring it would be if everyone were the same and Chicago didn't have CB to stir things up a bit. One of the things that attracted my son to Chicago is that there is a fair diversity of opinion and politics and class.</p>

43

<p>Perhaps Chicago's challenge factor is overblown. Some classes, professors, students are more intellectually stimulating than others. Sure. Some of this lofty ivory tower stuff is a myth, the "Aims of Education" address and all, it sounds pretty, if gives the study of verb endings in Goethe a sense of purpose and meaning, but doesn't always follow one's real-life experiences here.</p>

<p>Warning: lame analogy follows.</p>

<p>If Harvard were a swimming pool, there would be a pretty big wading pool. In this wading pool would be concentrations like economics, government, and English, the concentrations which, according to my friends, the majority of classes are pointlessly easy, the classes are large, and students skate by unnoticed. Some of my friends at Harvard have stayed in the wading pool, for one reason or another. (My brother stayed in the wading pool at his Ivy, and did not know how to the library's reference system after graduation). The wading pool would pretty dramatically slope down into a bottomless pit, though, after the wading pool at Harvard or any school. UMichigan would have that same bottomless pit option, but there would be a lot more in the 8-feet and 10-feet range. I have friends at H and friends at Michigan who have buried themselves under piles of books, have enlightened themselves and others, who have contributed to intellectual life in significant ways. Some of these people I know have gone on to pursue doctoral degree and post-docs at Chicago. Their verdict? Harvard was harder. For my friend who, as a sophomore, took grad-level physics at Michigan, Michigan was pretty rough, too.</p>

<p>At Chicago, there is no wading pool. One really has to get wet here. However, just like Harvard and just like Michigan, there's a sliding scale of how deep you want to go. As Chicago, Harvard, and Michigan have large and prominent graduate schools that (at least at Chicago) encourage undergraduate crossover, one can go in deeper if he or she wants to.</p>

<p>Chicago students are forced to be more challenged than Harvard and Michigan students from the outset, but how much further do Chicago students venture simply because they want to? I don't know the answer, and I'm not sure it matters that much. Every student I know has come here with the knowledge that there were other school that offered an easier routes to graduation, and that they chose the more rigorous option says a lot about them as people, if not their intellectual capacities and their earth-shattering observations about Marx and Weber.</p>