<p>OP, I’m going to let you in on a little secret, this is the reality of today’s elite colleges. You will find people who drink a ton just to “live the life” of the stereotypical college student, especially at the elite colleges. </p>
<p>That sports theory is ridiculous, Columbia people party a ton, they just goto the clubs and bars in the city, so you don’t see it as much on campus. Dartmouth is notorious for their hard parties, Cornell also has a large percentage of heavy drinkers. Schools like Northwestern (which is in the Big Ten, but not very good in sports) also have a large number of hard-partiers.
You’ll find that college kids drink and engage in stuff they might regret later on, in all schools. Sometimes more in the elite schools. </p>
<p>There’s a ton of overachievers, perfectionists in the top schools. They want to be the best at everything, and that includes being the baddest partiers around. </p>
<p>Generally tho, the higher the engineering population, the less partying.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone for the comments!
We have a good discussion going.
I think the ‘sports culture’ plays a decent role in affecting campus culture.</p>
<p>I’ve just been a tad disappointed to find that many of those at elite colleges seem to be a lot like the grade-grubbing, superficial types that flood my own high school. Many of the smartest and most interesting people I know from my school are attending Michigan actually. </p>
<p>However, from what I hear, Duke has a certain culture about it that makes it somewhat anti-intellectual and resume-padding. It isn’t a Southern thing because Penn (I visited last week) seems to have it to an even worse degree… lol and they don’t have so hot of a sports program. </p>
<p>The irony is that I’m going to look like the anti-intellectual for having a 3.7 GPA, lol. </p>
<p>My favorite schools so far have been Columbia, University of Chicago, and NYU, I loved Yale but I don’t think I’m getting in there, lol.</p>
<p>
No, it’s not Southern. haha! Brah is the ‘socially appropriate’ way of saying bro when you’re really trashed, I think.</p>
<p>He would have asked you to show him your moves, and scream “COME ON!,” and you would not have been able to live up to his standards of universe-imploding, villain-exploding awesomeness. Also, he would have gotten utterly plastered and laid every night while still getting all of his work done perfectly. God, he is the man."</p>
<p>^LOLOLOL (I don’t know how to officially quote so someone could help me out here)</p>
<p>Intelligence and willingness to achieve tend to blur at the “elite” universities. Regardless, there are definitely people who kiss massive ass with average intelligence (imo) and make their way into prestigious colleges. People who are extraordinarily intelligent (or believe themselves to be) tend to be lazier than those people who aren’t as clever as them, thinking that knowledge comes to them more naturally. Rarely do demigod intelligence and deadly effort come in a single package.</p>
<p>And perhaps your impressions came about cause you were with the wrong people? Regardless of where you go, there are definitely going to be people spouting words like “brah” (unless you go to Tibet or something). Truth be told, were not all as intelligent as we’d like to believe. And especially in our business-laden world today, colleges definitely look for the “leadership” trait. Not all schools are good at making presidents like Yale, but they all strive for it.</p>
<p>You’re mixing up intelligence and intellectualism. Duke just doesn’t have the prevalent intellectual (and maybe pretentious) culture that Columbia or Chicago may have. At top schools there will be a mix of students who are innately intelligent and those who’re simply ambitious. There is that stereotype of the “intelligent” personality, aka introverted and well-spoken and all of that, but someone could be absolutely brilliant and still like to kick back and have fun… and that’s still not mutually exclusive from even abstruse intellectualism. Not to say that everyone you’ll encounter at a top school is brilliant, but they all got in for a reason, and the motivation to achieve that you mentioned is probably a common denominator.</p>
<p>I can certainly say sports are one of the best draw at least application wise.</p>
<p>Schools like Boston College,USC, and Duke were much much easier to get into a few years back when sports while great wasn’t televised 24/7.</p>
<p>Also with a 140 IQ, I can single handedly tell you intelligence and good grades are not even close to linked. There are people like me that get 90s-100s on all test, yet get a B or a C for a term because they didn’t do homework.</p>
<p>In college admissions (and life, probably), motivation, and not necessarily extraordinarily high intelligence, can get you very far. The kids you met at D/M probably went out of their way to join lots of extracurriculars, study for tests, do their homework, and review for the SATs in high school. They probably had decent essays and teacher recs…maybe they were hooked for some sport. </p>
<p>The people you met, however, are probably just a subset of the actual population, although that subset is probably a lot smaller at schools like Columbia, UChicago, etc.</p>
<p>For the record, Feynman had an IQ of 120. Does pure intelligence really matter?</p>
<p>I think that at schools like Duke, you get students who are intelligent, but who don’t do much with their intelligence. MIT, Chicago, Caltech, Duke, Penn, and Northwestern might have students of (on average) approximately equal intellectual ability, but the former three schools undoubtedly have more students who are devoted to applying it than the latter three.</p>