Social life at U Chicago? Any place for a non-nerd?

<p>Teehee, UChicago8810. I was overgeneralizing intentionally. I have a good number of friends who care about their appearance more than I do-- I set the bar pretty low (it is clean? does it have obvious wrinkles in it?)-- and most people I know here do make an attempt to look decent, and not in a way that I find condescending in the slightest.</p>

<p>My general point is that I find it easier to like people who are like myself than I find liking people who are unlike myself, at least at first blush. This is not to say that my sets of friends are better than your sets of friends-- if anything, I think it’s just indicative of human nature and the role of personal experience in navigating the world. In a past life, I’ve been made to feel uncomfortable by the items of clothing my parents refused to buy for me, so I think I still carry those feelings around with me. And believe me-- I’m not particularly proud of the fact that while my friend group extends pretty broadly, my closest friends and I have remarkable similarities-- down to the fact that a bunch of our parents attended the same graduate school at the same time.</p>

<p>But my broader point is that it’s very easy to write folks off for a variety of reasons, and while I think we all do it, we should make a concerted effort not to do it, to the best of our abilities.</p>

<p>Gah, I can’t help myself from sounding like a Barney episode here, but when I interpret a comment (one not that uncommon on CC) to say something like, “All of the kids at School X suck for Y and Z reasons,” I can only think to myself: really? Is it that THEY all suck, or…</p>

<p>Well, I happily concede that my post may have been unclear. When I was writing it, part of my brain was like, “Okay, someone is going to read this and say blah blah blah,” so I tried to clarify and add disclaimers, such as saying (in the last paragraph) that surely not all the kids at U Chicago suck and that part of it must be my friend’s mental state, which is WHY I decided to ask for help. If I really thought you guys sucked, I wouldn’t ask! Well… long story short, that obviously didn’t work out. And because you guys clearly aren’t dumb, I can only say that it must have been a mistake on my end. :)</p>

<p>I agree with your point in your last post. I’m more interested in something else I thought we disagreed on, which is whether it is EVER okay to reference a stereotype. But it looks like we aren’t REALLY disagreeing there either. ;)</p>

<p>I think that in general I’m pretty good about having a wide range of friends (most of my best friends are of different ethnicities and socioeconomic classes than I am), except that I don’t usually make friends with people who are really into partying. I mean, I have nothing against partying, but I mean REALLY into partying. I’m sure there’s more stuff that I do unconsciously though.</p>

<p>“And he considers most of the frat guys and football players a bunch of tools.”</p>

<p>You know I see so many posts on this Chicago forum about wanting to attend a university without the “highschool social ladder” and how people here despise the high school standard of making judgements on individuals.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, the persons making such opinions (even at a school like UChic) are for a large part, the so-called “nerds” themselves. </p>

<p>That quote is completely ignorant and contradicts why many desire to attend The College. I hope your friend matures out of his hypocritical elitism.</p>

<p>Completely irrelevant post, but I memorized Pi to twenty decimal places…3.14159265358979323846 lol
I’m not a nerd though, I’m actually very social in high school.</p>

<p>@kafkadream: I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that everybody at UChi is enlightened to the nth degree and never falls victim to social pettiness, but yes, in general the school is too big and people are more alike (in that they all kinda like books and ideas and school and such) than different (that they might have outwardly different personalities, backgrounds, ideological orientations). </p>

<p>However, I did overhear some sorority-specific gossip the other day, the kind of gossip that one imagines exists everywhere at every school… I think what’s unusual is that it took me over three years to overhear that kind of stuff.</p>

<p>Could anyone here consider that there may be football players at Chicago who aren’t tools or full-on partiers? That there may be a few who are of an intellectual bent? And who even got into the school based on academics, not athletics?</p>

<p>This thread makes me so happy, words can’t even begin to describe it.</p>

<p>CountingDown, notice the “most of” phrase. Clearly not every football player is the same, and especially at a place like Chicago, there are going to be plenty of “Chicago-type” players on the team. It’s not like anyone is saying that none of the football players have the academic merit to be at Chicago.</p>

<p>To be more specific, I had originally asked him (and one of his female friends who was hanging out with us at the time) what they didn’t like Chicago. Their responses agreed:</p>

<ol>
<li>The weather in the winter</li>
<li>The weather in the winter</li>
<li>How every now and then everyone seems like a pretentious know-it-all (however, at other times it’s very nice that there are other people who actually understand what you’re talking about)</li>
<li>How most of the football players and frat guys were pretty toolish</li>
</ol>

<p>Anyway, at any school with 5,000 undergrads, there are bound to be people of all sorts. This includes tools and “elitists.”</p>