<p>I’m speaking of the culture- I doubt people who are smart enough to get accepted will be into 24/7 party, rah-rah, let’s worship the athletes etc.</p>
<p>I’m fine with people drinking and partying, but I think if that’s what a sizable part of the school does with little emphasis on academics…well, I won’t enjoy attending such a school.</p>
<p>We have fixed amount of money for recruiting. I will use schools as my first filter, pure and simple. I will look at a candidate from a school I am not familiar with from a personal referral. There are so many students looking for jobs, I don’t need to dig that deep.</p>
<p>I guess sometimes recognition is what we need to get on with life.</p>
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<p>fully agree</p>
<p>“I’m speaking of the culture- I doubt people who are smart enough to get accepted will be into 24/7 party, rah-rah, let’s worship the athletes etc.”</p>
<p>Perhaps one of the most important lessons you’ll learn in college is that your preconceived notions of many people are wrong.</p>
<p>I wasn’t meaning to imply that those everyone who attends a state school isn’t as intelligent as a person who attends a more selective college- if it came off as that, sorry, I’m extremely busy lately. Nor did I mean to say that people attending selective colleges WON’T be rah-rah, party hard. My point is that I don’t particularly enjoy the culture at most of the state schools that I’m familiar with (there are some obvious exceptions) and would infinitely prefer to attend (as many would) other schools that have cultures that I’m more comfortable with. </p>
<p>By chance, or perhaps not- my friends at higher tier schools seem happier than my friends at state schools, despite not fitting into the typical college student archetype. I share many similarities with these people and as such, think that I, too would prefer these environments to those of the schools my less content friends attend. Since the major differentiating factor between those two subsets of schools appears to be the heavy emphasis on nonacademic/EC activities by much of the population, I made the admittedly-imprecise and inaccurate statement above.</p>
<p>For me, it’s that I want to be somewhere where people will actually have worked hard to get in rather than just having coasted in out of high school without trying. In the past year, I’ve greatly ramped up my ECs, improved my grades, changed my senior schedule multiple times to include harder classes, done well on standardized tests, and worked hard to refine my essays, and while I know this isn’t for everyone, I’d rather not be somewhere where I’d be an anomaly for actually having worked to get in among all of the apathetic or lazy types. I also want to feel like the work I’ve done has mattered.</p>
<p>Also, I don’t want to be talking to one of my college friends, bring up Goethe, Mozi, or Jaco Pastorius, and hear, “uh… wha? Is that another one of your manga series?”</p>
<p>Feel free to call me stuck-up or condescending, but if you don’t like my attitude, you probably haven’t spent much time on CC yet.</p>
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<p>Even at the most selective colleges, you will likely encounter students who did not work as hard as you did (taking the hardest courses in high school and having deep involvement in extracurriculars) for various reasons (some are just brilliant, but others may have come in through various “back doors” such as the non-athletic hooks). The brilliant ones may do better than you in college even if they do not work as hard as you do in college.</p>
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<p>What makes you think that people at top schools know who they are?</p>
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<p>ucbalumnus and barrk123, this is in relation to other universities.</p>
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<p>I don’t know who Mozi or Jaco Pastorius are (had to look them up on Wikipedia), and I went to a top 20 university. Neither would either of my kids, who are at top 20 schools. And all I pretty much know about Goethe is that he wrote Faust. So what, though? Not everything that interests you interests everybody else.</p>
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<p>This is mostly true of me too, although i know a bit more about Goethe since i recently read his Wikipedia page (was a polymath, wrote a poem called Prometheus [have no idea if it relates to the movie], etc.)</p>
<p>I think his general point was that you can discuss topics of intense intellectual breadth at universities. That’s not a view i’d exactly agree with. Intellectual discussions in universities, in my experience, are typically consumption and contribution. You might talk about Goethe and Faust. I might mention that Leibniz had the second highest IQ behind Goethe, or that i heard that Goethe had a deep influence on certain philosophers, most prominently Kant. After a discussion about Kant, i might shift the topic to to Frege, and his influence on philosophy of language, foundation of mathematics, and modern logic, and perhaps Russell’s paradox, Cantor’s work with set theory, etc, etc, etc. </p>
<p>When we’re both done with our conversation, we both leave having learned new things and (imo) feeling at least slightly intellectually satisfied.</p>
<p>Ironically enough, i first heard of Goethe from a classmate in community college. (who’s now at Berkeley.) You’ll continue to amass and expand your knowledge on a variety of issues if you’re so interested. I plan on learning more about The Anti-trust Paradox (or perhaps reading the book) but would much rather enjoy discussing it with someone. I have no idea when that’ll be however.</p>