1000%. I was surprised by the research I did.
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Yeah, just heard a friend describe how he got in (FG) student into a very exclusive social club at H a few decades ago. Sporting prowess, physical attractiveness helped!
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The thing is, most clubs at Harvard are casual clubs open to all.
But others involve “comping”, which is a process to get admitted. But confusingly, the term comping is used for both completion-based admission processes, and competition-based admission processes.
A completion-based comping process will take anyone who completes the necessary work. Students don’t get cut, unless they fail to attend meetings, or fail to do the “homework” for the club. But the homework for some can be considerable, almost like another class, so there is some attrition there.
And yes, some clubs are competitive entry, meaning that they will only choose a certain number of students.
I know nothing of your friend’s daughter, but the overwhelming vibe I got from the video above was of an intelligent student who excelled at her high school without having to work hard, and found it difficult to adjust to the pace at Harvard, and therefore struggled both academically and socially. In contrast, the students who come from rigorous high schools find the pace at Harvard quite manageable.
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Yes, and the traditional NE boarding school kids probably fit in best of all.
Many boarding schools are certainly rigorous, but many public high schools are too. My children attended the latter.
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College is harder than high school. Especially good college. I am told that the academic work load went up about 60-70% in college when compared to high school. This is apart from a 20-25 hour/wk of extra-curricular work load. You can do the extra-curriculars if you can manage the increased academic work load. My son had 70-80 hrs/wk of work altogether during many semesters in college.
Mine did too at times, but that was by choice in order to take some of the famous courses that are offered. But these courses were not certainly not necessary in order to graduate. That’s why I keep saying Harvard is only as difficult as you choose to make it. In contrast schools like Princeton have more rigorous requirements, including a senior thesis.
I’m talking about the social piece.
For 99% of students this is true. I am just piping up, in a small voice, to say that my kids, who attended a rigorous boarding school said that very clearly, college was easier. And they went to “good” colleges.
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90% of the students are not from boarding schools, so that may not be that helpful socially. Being physically attractive and athletic seems to matter more.
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Ok, so Harvard is hard, or maybe not. What does that have to do with competitive clubs? This isn’t a thread about Harvard.
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You can also coast at Princeton. All of this load is self-inflicted :-). As he tells me, there are no guard rails at Princeton. The department generally doesn’t stop you from taking whatever you want. Because there are always kids who can. So they don’t want to stop. Unlike high school, where your guidance counselor doesn’t let you. If you coast through high school, it takes some time to adjust to college and load, because you are also dealing with other kids who are taking courses like Organic Chemistry and making it look easy.
That the young lady in question may or may not have the time to do the work to be in the competitive club, because the academic load may also have been heavy. Also, if there are a limited number of slots, say in the debate club (suppose they take 15 new students a year), and Harvard gets its fair share of nationally ranked debaters, if you want to be competitive with them and be on the Harvard debate team, then you need to put in serious time into debate, apart from the heavy academic load.
I am just saying the academic load interferes with what you can do on the club side at any college, and if you don’t come into college with some skill in the area in question, then you don’t have time to pickup and be competitive to join any random competitive club.
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I think that there are high schools that are academically rigorous and culturally non-competitive. Some schools even actively discourage kids from competing with each other either inside or outside the classroom. For students used to a more collaborative and inclusive culture, a competitive extracurricular and social scene can be really off-putting. I just don’t think rigorous academics necessitates a competitive culture though sometimes they go hand and hand.
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Agree. That was what I meant by NE boarding school graduates being a good fit socially and academically with colleges that are both academically and socially challenging.
I can really only talk about my children and their peers and my peers.
Some social clubs are invite only. I can easily picture the situation where a boarding school grad who finds the schoolwork easy (whether because of HS rigor or choice of easy courses) and knows right away what to do through social cues or whatever and has already been through the BS social scene.
I am not saying that I like the system or that I have benefitted or that I am disgruntled. I’m just an observer.
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It all depends. My son did not think high school was competitive. He doesn’t think college is competitive. He does think it can be made hard. Or easy. He is close friends with a whole bunch of kids that are all very collaborative. They all work very hard, and are generally successful by traditional metrics. I have heard other things about our high school and college from other people. Some people call our high school a pressure cooker. Some of this is personality of the kid. Some of it is other things in terms of how easily you are coasting through. If a kid is finding either high school or college hard, it is difficult for them to distinguish whether the place is just hard or competitive. Likewise with the club entry situation.
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Yes, I feel like I have already disclosed too much, but the student attend one of the top feeder schools to Harvard so workload is generally fine, but the social aspect was vastly different.
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I was about to say there is no social aspect to professional clubs. But I realized that was not true. Surely there is a social aspect. I am told that when you are bringing new kids into the club, ability to work together is a very important consideration. There are wide bands of course as to who you can work with and who you can’t. But if current leadership feels it is hard to work with someone, they wouldn’t let you into the club. This is a sad fact of life. It is also a sad fact of life post graduation when you are looking for jobs at tech companies, finance companies, law firms, consulting firms etc. Jobs that don’t need interaction with other people are rare. People make judgments all the time as to whether you are easy to get along or not. So this social aspect is determinative of whether you can get into a club or not.
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With regard to Harvard, I am specifically addressing social clubs.
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Yes. My son tried out for club soccer as a freshman this semester. There were more than 250 men trying out for 5 spots. They settled on 3 seniors and 2 juniors; 1 of which had previously played D1. They cut the group down over three tryouts and told my son, a finalist in the last 15 that they don’t take freshman anyway.
I knew it would be competitive, but thought that was crazy.
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