wow. has it been a year already?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1

<p>So here I am, a freshman, just about two months into term. A little skinnier, a little wiser, not much worse for the wear. </p>

<p>So here I am, having stared at problem 4 on a calc pset for upwards of an hour, shifted my weight here and there, fiddled with this and tinkered with that, second cup of mountain dew and third bowl of pistachios, one test this week and two the next, pencil tip tap-tap on college-ruled paper.</p>

<p>This is just spam. Stream of consciousness type stuff. Let it drift to the bottom of your busy busy page if you so desire.</p>

<p>Some realizations: I procrastinated obscenely in high school. I'm really not nearly as good at physics as I thought I was (though I'm getting better). A 100 on the first test doesn't mean you should stop going to lectures (and recitations) permanently - because there is such a thing as a second test. And a third. Nights are days are nights. Microwaves in dorms are bad. Microwave-shaped blankets perched on shelves in dorms are perfectly o-k. Always-always check for cats before shutting your door and leaving for hours on end - unless you happen to have a litterbox in your dormroom which we did not-nono... Sometimes, Febreeze is your friend. Winter can come before fall- only if global warming is in a particularly good mood. Shower or be showered.</p>

<p>A HASS-D class you switched into at the last minute (the sound was: mumblesgrumbles), because none others fit your schedule, can turn out to be your favorite class of all. Make certain you have consumed something, anything, within the 24 hours before your swim test. Reuse is pretty. They're not joking, physics psets WILL take 20+ hours to complete. Note the "+". Pass/no-shame. No one is going to cook for you. Or wash your dishes. Keep your eyes peeled for rotten tomatoes. They pop up where you least expect them. Like amongst your shoes. Careful. East Campus has poor ventilation but somehow you love it anyways. The buildings with W's in front of them are very very far away. Bemis staircase is finally o-k to use again. Don't fall into the Charles River- just don't do it.</p>

<p>Oh and there's so much more... but I have class at 9:30 and a lofted bed right behind me. Good night.</p>

<p>-Lulu</p>

2

<p>That was a very nice message : )</p>

3

<p>Lol, well the West Campus dorm perspective is slightly different. Like all E buildings are far far away. Sloan? Fuggetaboutit!</p>

<p>100 on your first test? That's so nice. I've only done that once, and that was when the class average was 91 :p.</p>

<p>Currently, Im awake at 4:22am studying for a test on Wednesday. (Have to, I have two that day).</p>

<p>Nice realizations. I look forward to seeing your streams in the upcoming semesters ;)</p>

4

<p>Well, yet another perspective from where I stand. Wow. Has it been 18 years already?</p>

5

<p>Pebbles - so nice to see you here again. :-) It does seem like a lot less than a year since you were posting here from the other side. Time is a crazy concept.</p>

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<p>:)</p>

<hr>

7

<p>Yeah it's been a whole damn year. Who thought that I'd be involved in the things I'm involved with now just a year ago. Crazy things, pebbles. Unfortunately Simmons Hall is quite wonderful even though you may disagree. I can tolerate EC.</p>

8

<p>A year isn't a very long time.</p>

<p>College is supposed to be the place where you find yourself. From the earliest, most formative years of a child's life, it is not creativity, innovation, ingenuity, or outside-the-box thinking that earns her candy or a gold star. It's academic performance -- doing what is asked in the classroom. Punching that answer out of the problem set and doing so faithfully and methodically. If she gets the grades, she's doing what has been asked of her. She's reaching the pinnacle of excellence in life as an <18-year-old because school is supposed to be her foremost responsibility. Without a career or a family, classes are her full-time job, and if she's a good student, what more could anyone want, right? Her parents, her grandparents, her teachers, the most important adults and authority figures she has ever known, give her a big hug when she brings home that 100%, that 800, that 2400.</p>

<p>When she arrives at college and readies herself for orientation week, visions of purpose and direction loom overhead. College is where she can put all of her scholastic prowess to the test, evaluating the smorgasbord of resources, fields of study, departmental open houses, and late-night problem set marathons to gravitate toward what she feels she's best at. She identifies with and is defined by her long history of academic strength. Her life existed chiefly within the context of the mortar and bricks of her schoolhouse; when she was not studying for an exam, she was organizing some school-sponsored event or acting as the president of some club. She counted the numbers of hours she spent on these activities, because how else would she quantify her efforts when people went searching for her devotion? When a counselor or a college interviewer asks her who she is, a monologue of scores and grades and community service hours is returned, with only the most sincere glow in her eyes. She's happy and she's proud.</p>

<p>But what does this mean on a broader level? We are training people from their infancy to find pride and satisfaction through success in directives issued by others. Students aren't rewarded for constructing their own assignments and excelling on them; that would be dismissed as absurd by almost any teacher. And when there's no reward for something, why do it? That intelligent, methodical student reaches the campus of her chosen college and excels in her studies because it's all she's ever known. She wakes up, goes to class, completes her homework, and goes to sleep. And she's rewarded for this performance with internships, job opportunities, and admission to fine graduate schools. She's continuing to do what society expects of a good student.</p>

9

<p>I've been thinking about that lately, and I think it finally struck me in words a few nights ago: things that don't have direct academic merit don't necessarily have no merit. But it's sometimes hard to look at things that way when the incentives from your parents, teachers, school and peers are academically-oriented, be it involved with actual classwork, school clubs, or teams. But life would be very boring if all utils were academic utils. </p>

<p>Yay economics. =)</p>

10

<p>
[quote]
We are training people from their infancy to find pride and satisfaction through success in directives issued by others.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>LSA -- It's not clear that there's a point in your post, but my best effort to find one yield something like "our academically focused society rewards -- and thus increases the number of -- people who are fundamentally good at jumping through hoops but aren't particularly creative or intellectually original, and isn't that a shame."</p>

<p>I think this is nonsense. Think about the absolute best hoop-jumpers -- the ones who ace all the tests, get into the best graduate schools, etc.? It is no secret that in many fields the most academically successful students go on to be academics. And what do professors do? They sit around coming up with original ideas. Flip through Econometrica or The Annals of Mathematics. Do the papers seem to you like dutifully completed assignments, extrinsically imposed? Err... no. The point of research is to think of interesting ideas -- to give yourself your own assignment and then excel at it. And those guys are good at it.</p>

<p>The advances in the sciences during the past 50 years show that the most successful products of the current system are immensely original and creative -- and that traditional academic training seems not to stifle originality, but to discipline it.</p>

<p>Thus, I think the picture you paint is closer to a dystopian fiction than a description of the way our current academic system works.</p>

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<p>LSA, I... nevermind.</p>

<p>:/</p>

12

<p>LSA... I could say there are a number of us who don't function like that. But then you'd say we aren't the people who get into MIT.</p>

<p>You're right. Most of early life doesn't award creative, outside-the-box thinking. But you have to realize, the real world does. The people who work and create like machines, although they may be the best at what they do, do not tend to get far. </p>

<p>The world doesn't care that you got that 1600 or that 4.0. Anyone who raises a child to think that is setting the poor thing up for the greatest fall of his life. Intelligence is great, but it's that something special that some people have... the ability to fit themselves into any niche, the ability to look at something that exists and see something new. These are our entrepreneurs and our inventors, scientists and scholars.</p>

<p>It's the job of the university to find those people. The people who, while intelligent, are most capable of success. Your gripe seems to be that as a society, we're raising children to be machines. It's important to understand that many universities (MIT especially) are working to weed out those machines, and get the students who have that natural drive, that passion. </p>

<p>Are they successful? I doubt the system is perfect, and just by the very nature of it, it becomes difficult to discern who founded such-and-such club for a college resume versus who did this-and-that activity out of a natural drive to do it. After all, if you just look at numbers and lists, it becomes very hard to discern the reasoning behind any of these activities. That's what the essays are there for, to help these universities find the people who <em>really</em> want to go out and make a difference.</p>

<p>Again, there are the high-priced counselors that will engineer your personality to get into any college, and (sadly) many of them are good at it. I suggest you go to the parent's forums and read Ben's post in the thread "Whoever has the most APs wins." It's no one person's fault, but it's definitely something the parties caught in the middle (the schools) are trying to move away from.</p>

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<p>I believe a parent's job is to help a child develop self-esteem, in whatever field that is (as long as legal). The CC board is geared towards those who excel academically. Our elementary and MS were never demanding, and left lots of free time for reading, sports, whatever. There were definitely some who spent every day including weekends studying, but that is as much parent's fault for tacitly rewarding such one-sided behavior.
I like the fact that MIT asked GCs to state if applicant naturally smart, or a really hard worker. I also have faith that admission committees have a sensitivity to lopsided geniuses, e.g. Einstein. Though I adore many of his writings, I don't know how well he would have performed on SAT verbal/writing</p>

14

<p>If there is one inevitability we must all come to respect, it is time. A year is 1/80th, 1/50th, 1/20th of your life. Your life, as all ever you will know, is your eternity, and any fraction of eternity cannot be dismissed so brusquely by the wave of a hand.</p>

<p>"LSA", I wish you wouldn't be so hard on human nature. It is a defining characteristic of human nature to seek validation, and try as you may, even you, with all your idealism and criticisms and your two-year-the-older-and-wiser, cannot shake free of the demon yourself. It's about personal goals. An overwhelming majority of us are here because we have drawn knowledge as one of our personal goals. And that same overwhelming majority is aware, at least on some level, that knowledge and wisdom are not mutually inclusive, nor interchangeable, nor even occupants of the same level of existence.</p>

<p>I don't believe anyone builds her life solely from numbers. That assumption is too easily made by those familiar with only one facet of her life. She uses the numbers to validate the knowledge she has gained, and, yes, to mark her place among the masses. Just as masterpieces define great writers, achievements define great knowledge. And sure, there is a competitive spirit there, and condemning that would be just as futile as condemning human insecurity itself. </p>

<p>Academics incite intellectual curiosity. Even if against all odds and without the traditional system of grades as motivators I'm going out and I'm going to finish this rant much later. Bye,</p>

<p>luvlulu</p>

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<p>a civil discussion isn't an ad hominem one, pebbles... :-/</p>

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<p>But there've been plenty of civil non-ad hom replies, LSA. Tell us what you think of those!</p>

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<p>Well, I think we should all hesitate before attacking LSA for painting a "dystopian fiction." While I honestly do know people who fit his description, I also think there are lots of other things wrong with education today as well. But he does have some valid points.</p>

<p>First of all, to give a little bit of premise, I would like to qualify that I come from a very competitive, well-known public high school in the Midwest. I am 15th out of 484 in my senior class and after I finish taking Honors Spanish IV this semester, I will have no non-AP/IB classes left. I'm in National Honors and Cum Laude Society and a Nat'l Merit Semifinalist. I haven't had a study hall since middle school and I participate(d) in Youth Orchestra (school and otherwise), Speech & Debate, Cross Country & Track, Science Fair, Young Independents Club, our literary arts magazine, and I volunteer at the downtown Hospital and Literacy Council. I'm also a web designer and I work part time at a pet store. I am Asian with pretty traditional Asian parents. My resume is a bloody laundry list.</p>

<p>That being said, I think I can give a valid perspective on this issue.</p>

<p>Now, before you mistake me for one of the automatons I attend school with that LSA described so well, I would like to make clear that I had the honor of learning from two extremely gifted AP American Studies teachers in my sophomore year who showed us that learning and thinking are far more important than any numbers game we might try to play. However, there are many people in our school that have not had that sort of... enlightenment, for lack of a better word. We were actually discussing this in my IB Econ HL class earlier this year. Our perspectives of academics v. life are very warped but we try to recognize this.</p>

<p>The problem is not everyone does. I know people who do absolutely nothing but study. I know people who have no hobbies outside any academic-related extracurriculars except... really elaborate scrapbooking... I know people who have been too afraid to take higher-level courses because they care about their GPA that much. I know people who short-change themselves out of a valuable learning experience because they're so busy obsessing over their grades. I know people who have actually dropped classes because they know it will lower their GPA. I know people who obsessively study for tests like the SAT and SAT IIs and buy prep books upon prep books as if it wasn't supposed to be a reasoning test. I know people who dropped out of the science fair program because they're too busy with some other high-profile extracurricular and SF only shows up as a 1/2 credit course on their transcript. I've got to be the only person in the top 10% of my class that has a steady job. I know people who've made it all the way to senior year without having earned a sub-A grade in any class. I know people who do validate themselves by their GPA, who snub those who don't score as well as they do and who call me up for homework help but never otherwise talk to me. (Ironically enough, they're all the same people. 0_0 But they still don't rank as high as I do! BUAHAHAHA. Sorry.)</p>

<p>What we noticed in our Econ class was, these people, who hyperventilate over their grades and validate their existence by their GPAs aren't on the very top. Those of us at the top (I still count myself there. I used to be 3rd until a very unfortunate series of events involving family) have gotten there by learning to take risks, by working together, and by being much less uptight about the way we perform. Thus, we've formed a very strong base of friendship and we all help each other. In fact, my two best friends are the valedictorian and salutatorian and we all get along very well. (Incidentally almost all of us had the same two AP American Studies teachers.) It's the people who aren't quite at the top who are grade-OCD. But sadly, there are much more of them than of us. And in other schools where a 4.7 won't get you into the top 10 of your class, it seems even worse! When my AP Chemistry teacher told us that we would be getting reacquainted with "letters with curves" this year, I responded "If you haven't yet seen a letter with curves in this high school, you haven't challenged yourself enough."</p>

<p>The point of telling you all this is to say that what LSA said and what Olo echoed is true: that early life doesn't reward creative out of the box thinking. That the incentives in a high school system is based on points and letters and therefore puts a false emphasis on activities that one can put on a resume and keeps kids in those activities even though they may not enjoy them so much. I've tried really hard not to do that. I quit cross country because there were so many people like that in it and I got ambushed with economics questions every practice. I quit youth orchestra when it started becoming a power politics game. I see everything just becoming another huge system. You just play by the rules and if that's the case, what goes in is what comes out. Crap.</p>

<p>What bothers me so much about this system is that it creates such warped incentives. I recently wrote a bunch of content for my personal website. When I wrote the accompanying blog entry, I somewhat flippantly labeled it as time wasted because I hadn't done homework or college applications. But as I thought more about what I'd wrote, I regretted it more and more. Like I was saying earlier things that don't have direct academic merit don't necessarily have no merit. If you believe that all people are rational actors, there must have been a reason that I chose to spend time on my website than on my homework. The reason for that is because I get a sense of satisfaction and happiness out of it that is clearly greater than the sense of satisfaction and happiness I get out of finishing my homework. The problem is everything coming from our parents, teachers, schools and peers tells us to play the numbers/letters game. Even all the teen self help books (and believe me, I have too many as birthday gifts from my aunt) tell us to simply work the system!</p>

<p>And that's the problem -- most people just work the system. And they continue working the system. And then they continue working the system...</p>

<p>So if real life does reward out-of-the-box thinking, then why does high school/early life denigrate it? If high school is to prepare one for college and college is supposed to get one prepared for the real world and the real world rewards thinking out of the box, then why does high school not? Because Olo is right: the world doesn't care if you have a 1600 or a 4.0 or volunteered 20 hours a week for the local orphanage. And yet the people who achieve those kinds of things get to the top in high school and the college admissions process because inevitably, they're the ones that look best on paper.</p>

<p>While Ben Golub contends that some of the best hoop-jumpers get into the best colleges and graduate schools and become professors and its' universities jobs to find these people, there are other wonderfully brilliant people who don't get into the top universities because their high school environment never showed them how to wonder. Because despite what pebbles may insist, a lot of academics don’t incite intellectual curiosity. ('Cause I'll tell you, the SAT and those other College Board tests sure don't incite any curiosity in me.) I know people who are absolutely brilliant who don't get anywhere because they were never challenged and they didn't want to simply work the system. They ace all the tests but don't want to do the busywork to pass a class. The same goes for people that might just not be good at taking multiple choice tests. Like bookworm brought up, Einstein was a brilliant individual, but how would he have done in the current system? They fail, yet the people who obsessively study and learn facts instead of understanding concepts just for tests succeed. Why is that? Why has communication been replaced by multiple choice bubbles? Why has reading comprehension been replaced by fill in the blank? Why is the first time a lot of my classmates have ever thought about why we think the way we think in our senior level Theory of Knowledge class? Why do they take it solely because it is a prerequisite of the IB diploma? Why do people tell me that I think too much when I’m wondering about politics or philosophy? Why do some people never question what their parents or teachers tell them? Why is my entire high school career represented with columns of little letters? Why is being a good student not going to make me competitive in the real world? Why is not being a good student not going to make me competitive in the real world either? Why has academics become just one huge rat race? Because that is honestly what I feel like I'm caught up in this whole college admissions process.</p>

<p>But at the same time, that's what makes me so excited about MIT. From everything I've heard, MIT is a very collaborative place where thinking-outside-the-box is something that everyone does, where communications is valued because it’s a real-world skill, where I don't have to start washing test tubes if I want to start working in a lab, where I’ve finally found a major that focuses on a more creative way of biomedical engineering by looking back at the natural mechanisms of the body. And I've tried to look for other places like MIT (but it's hard, you know? =P) to apply to college to.</p>

<p>I just kinda wish that other people could get such a kick out of thinking outside the box too.</p>

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<p>(I am about to leave town but will continue this discussion Sunday.) :)</p>

19

<p>catshi06 -- more later, but I should say that as far as intellectual creativity and collaboration and outside-the-boxness, Caltech is also a place you should at least look at.</p>

20

<p>Cat
Take a look at Caltech's application. You are asked to fill a box with anything you want. Your reading for yourself, beyond curriculum, your questioning the ideas and vAlues of the adults around you, your explorations of philosophy and politics, all of that makes you an interesing person. Expressing yourself WITHIN the box will communicate so much of who you are, apart from GPA and SATs.
I do believe that your application at schools like MIT/Caltech are read by almost a dozen people, and they are experts at seeing the inner person.</p>