<p>oooh oooh oooh! I'm a current student, so I can talk about stuff!</p>
<p>Okies. The quirkiness, the intellectualism, the focus on the discipline rather than the career. I love the disregard of application and practicality. Joining academia is, I strongly believe (though I have no actual facts to defend myself with), a more popular ambition at UC than anywhere else I've visited. I love that the heaviest partiers in my dorm love philosophical and epistemological arguments as much as I do.</p>
<p>I adore the discussion classes, which I desperately wish I could've had in place of abysmal English classes in senior year. My performance in a class correlates strongly with the intellectual effort it actively demands of me; I strongly tended to bomb classes that emphasize busy-work. (Being at UC allows me to use the past tense in that sentence ^_^) I fought hard for an A- in Human Being & Citizen this quarter, and at UC, I harbor no doubt that I earned it. That's a lovely feeling.</p>
<p>I have absolutely zero impression of competitiveness. None whatsoever. It's gorgeous.</p>
<p>My other options were Mudd and MIT, both engineering schools, and I will admit that going to Chicago probably necessitated some loss of depth in my fields of interest. IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER, however: as a high school senior I had already narrowed my field of expertise considerably beyond what most sane people should have, with the effect that the previous statement connotes a specificity that one would normally expect applied to graduate school applications. (Apologies if that was overly verbose.) Chicago is, overall, very strong in my general field, it simply has certain minor weaknesses in that field that correspond closely to my own areas of preexisting expertise.</p>
<p>The result is that I will take certain graduate classes considerably earlier than most students in my field might, and because graduate students generally take fewer classes than undergraduates, there are fewer total classes for me to keep myself busy with. The natural response is twofold: to aggressively move for research opportunities, and to diversify beyond my narrow subfield of preexisting interest. This isn't quite so satisfying a conclusion, I'll admit -- it is difficult to constrain my interest in a field that so piqued me as to inspire such aggressive pursuit in high school -- but I honestly consider it an acceptable sacrifice because I so love the humanities discussion classes, the wonderfully intellectual classmates and housemates, and because...gah. You know.</p>
<p>In retrospect, Freud might suggest this was more an effort to work out unresolved angst about my own decision than discussion for the benefit of prospective students. Freud, however, can do whatever unspeakable action your mind fills into this sentence. I've talked about things from the standpoint of someone who's grunted through a full quarter of these things, rather than visiting for a day or reading an admissions brochure, and that's the best I can do.</p>
<p>PM for arbitrary questions, comments, what have you.</p>