<p>Play* harder</p>
<p>WindCloud: My 24-year-old works two regular jobs with a minimum of 70 hours/week, plus travel time, and additional one-off freelance gigs, to make about $35,000/year. None of them is an intern-type job, either. His main, full-time job is one where he is the only person in the organization with that job who does not have a relevant master’s degree, and the others involve management or tech work in the arts. All of his employers are nonprofit or no-profit.</p>
<p>In my first real full-time job, after law school, I was working 7 am to midnight (those were the hours the computer system was on) an average of six days a week. I was being paid as a GS-7, which today would mean about $42,000, plus decent health benefits and, as a practical matter, access to free long-distance phone calls, which really meant something in those pre-cellphone, pre-ATT-breakup days, especially if your girlfriend was in graduate school 150 miles away. </p>
<p>So I am not really impressed with the notion that consulting and IB hires don’t make that much on an hourly basis. If you are calibrating your work to how much you are paid per hour when you are in your 20s and just out of school, you are on the fast track to nowhere. And they are being paid multiples of what other people are paid for the same amount of work, or not much less.</p>
<p>Harvard students socialize plenty. The center of life is houses: freshmen are in the yard and a few other dorms, and all eat in one dining hall (Anneneberg, amazing space) but everyone else lives in self-contained communities in their houses, each with its own dining hall. You certainly meet other students in classes and extracurriculars, but I don’t think you can understand Harvard’s community life without understanding the house system.</p>
<p>There are a lot of success-oriented, career-oriented students at every school these days, and many Harvard students are, indeed, headed for success of one sort or another. But there are plenty of students with genuine intellectual passions. You find your people.</p>
<p>It’s great that you went to a class. Was it a large introductory class in a large department? Was it a gen ed class where people were taking it to satisfy distribution requirements and not for a major (“concentration”)? See if you can visit a smaller more advanced class for those concentrating in that department.</p>
<p>The disinterested and unfriendly Harvard student body (as it seemed to me when I visited) was the reason I turned down Harvard in favour of Yale. This article in the Harvard Crimson might be illuminating:
[The</a> Cult of Yale | Magazine | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/20/the-cult-of-yale-bfor-god/]The”>The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>^anthro - best of luck when you enroll at Yale. It’s a fine institution and you should embrace it. But I think stress and depression can be part of any institution. For some reason at Harvard, it’s accepted, even expected to express that emotion. At other schools, Yale comes to mind, the culture is to just keep smiling, even if you’re dying on the inside.
[Julia</a> Lurie: Everyone’s Battle: Confronting College Depression](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>Everyone's Battle: Confronting College Depression | HuffPost College)</p>
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<p>Oh, pleeeeeeease! With one child at each school, I can attest that stress and depression are found at both institutions — and neither Harvard nor Yale’s administration talks about it openly to incoming or prospective students. It’s a topic that’s deeply buried at both schools, and it’s something that is NOT accepted or expected by either student body. In fact, showing stress and depression is considered a sign of weakness at both schools . . . and that is the problem, as articles in the Crimson and Yale Daily News continually point out.</p>
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<p>Exactly my point, gibby. I just think it’s easier to see it on the surface at H</p>
<p>Is depression more common at the ivies because of competition? Pretty much all the kids at these schools were HS superstars. Issues of grade inflation aside, it’s harder to stand out when you’re surrounded by that much talent, and do the elite schools self-select for kids who have a harder time dealing with their relative mediocrity? I don’t know; it’s just a theory.</p>
<p>^ I don’t know starsky. I think college age, in general, can be a difficult time for a lot of kids. If depression is more prevalent at the most competitive colleges, I’m not sure if it’s because of the high degree of competition, or whether it has more to do with a kid’s upbringing that made them seek out the top institutions in the first place (crazy, perfectionist parents) Food for thought, anyway</p>
<p>Harvard students socialize and have fun, and many are engaged in their majors. Of course, some aren’t. There is no one kind of person there.</p>
<p>If you observed the science center, that would be seriously misleading and I hope you don’t make any decisions based on that. Spend the $11 and go into a dining hall instead.</p>