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Of Ivy League Schools
Buddy Lee
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I attend a state university with which I am content, but I always find myself thinking about how my life could have been if I was attending an Ivy League school. I'm not saying that I believe that life would be perfect if I was attending Harvard, but I can't help to think about how it could just be different.
Does anyone here know what an Ivy League school is really like? Are the facilities and faculty simply amazing? What type of reaction do Ivy League graduates get when interviewing for a job? What do people do for fun around Ivy League schools?
I guess I'm just curious about all of that stuff, probably because they're portrayed as extremely great places in the media... but I can't help but to regret not attending one.
Does anyone here know what an Ivy League school is really like? Are the facilities and faculty simply amazing? What type of reaction do Ivy League graduates get when interviewing for a job? What do people do for fun around Ivy League schools?
I guess I'm just curious about all of that stuff, probably because they're portrayed as extremely great places in the media... but I can't help but to regret not attending one.
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Hahaha, what a can of pickles you have opened.
It makes sense from a business standpoint. Most schools need things like good facilities to entice students to attend and pay tuition. Everyone wants to go to some college for an education, but you want to go to a specific school because of their great facilities or certain programs. You'll go to School A over School B because School A has a sweet gym with an indoor pool, a library open 24 hours, and excellent dining hall food (oversimplification).
Ivy League schools don't have to deal with any of that. In general they always have WAY more than enough worthy applicants, and for the most part whoever they accept is going to attend. They're trading on their prestigious name alone. Since they don't need great facilities to entice people to attend, it's really not that great business sense to build anything beyond the bare minimum for your students - why spend the money? They're not going to leave Harvard or Brown b/c of shitty plumbing. They know that it's your privilege to go there, so they're not going to spend any extra money on you. Basically the only way that things like that get built or upgraded is if some alums donate a shitload of money for the express purpose of building those kids a weight room.
It is all work, all the time. All work forever. You're either working or you're not working.
A cousin of mine who is maybe 26 and graduated from Columbia undergrad, didn't go to grad school, is currently making 7 figures a year.
It's not so bad, I think.
I'd have to ask what Ivy the people you know attended, because the ones I know (Cornell personally, Harvard and Princeton through visits and close friends attending) were excellent in those regards. The Ivy schools pretty consistently rank in the top nationally as far as housing and food go. Not as high as their overall ranking (in the top 20 as opposed to the top 5) but they absolutely don't just ignore those factors, not least because quality of life on campus factors significantly into the overall ranking and considering how cutthroat those can be any advantage is followed up on.
Ithaca was very very cold and (thanks mostly to the hotel school and working at Banfi's there) it was probably the best I've eaten in my life. That's probably my lasting memory.
And... yeah... Cornell probably doesn't count since half the colleges are state schools and all grades at Cornell are curved, but I've visted all the rest while there. Mostly for hockey/football (band stuff), but *shrug* Dartmouth is in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Princeton has multiple Rolex stores in its collegetown, Harvard is fun to roam, Yale/New Haven is a ghetto, Brown is... I barely even remember Brown honestly. Their hockey rink is far larger than it has any right being. And Columbia is Columbia. It's in the middle of NYC, what do you expect?
I've spent no small amount of time thinking about it, and I've ended up coming away with two points.
First, every has a different experience. You get out of college what you put into it, and everywhere there are going to be people who work all the time, jocks and frat boys/sorori-whores, slackers, any stereotype you can think of. There's really no "Ivy League experience" beyond a slightly great emphasis on networking and tradition, and you could either find the same thing elsewhere or completely ignore that while at the Ivy.
The second is that, on average, the exclusivity and name power of the Ivy's (and I'd image the upper tier Tech schools, Stanford, and some of the other big names) pays of in at the very least potential. Everyone of the dipshits you'll meet on an Ivy campus that fall into every stereotype you can think of is, in some way, smart as hell. The first time you see a socially vacuous valley girl bimbo tear the hell out of a graduate level Chemistry problem the rat race it takes to get there, and then be anything other than mediocre once you are there, is all worth it.
That isn't to say you won't meet smart people elsewhere, or the people at an Ivy are smarter or provide a more stimulating experience than anything you could find elsewhere. It just means that it's easier to go farther and do more impressive things when the resources are geared towards supporting the best possible people, and everyone around either is nigh on brilliant or is really good at faking it.
Go Big Red!
Also, humorous shorthand:
Ivy League mornings:
Penn: give Bob the Bum a dime, check on transfer papers.
Brown: smoke breakfast, say prayer for no grade system.
Columbia: deep breath of smog, take taxi to class.
Dartmouth: gargle moonshine, chop wood for heating.
Princeton: yawn, feel like a geek, dress the part.
Yale: floss, snort coke, come out of closet.
Harvard: wake up, bathe in glow of undeserved rep.
Cornell: roll over, sober up, cry.
There are other wacky things though. Like Princeton's weird social schedule. Since almost everybody is in sports of some kind, Friday's not a party night at all because there's shit to do Saturday morning. Everybody parties on Thursdays or Saturdays. Also, their eating clubs scare me.
My brother goes to Dartmouth, and judging from everything he's told me, this is an apt description of one of his mornings.
Yale and Princeton are kind of weak, since they just strike me as ripping on the school as opposed to capturing the feel of anything, but other than that I find the whole thing so funny simply because it's oddly good at perfectly capturing at least an aspect of the school in a handful of pithy words.
"Man, pot is good but is it better than cake?"
But seriously, my local Ivy isn't all that different than URI or PC, except that it has more possible programs, a better med school and a worse biology and physics department.
Also, my cousin at Dartmouth: "Wow, it's easy to be the head of every activity you're in when you're the only one who's sober."
I never noticed any problems between the haves and have nots on campus. I was dirt poor, and I never felt snubbed or limited in anything I did or got any grief from any of the filthy rich people I knew.
You won't get tapped for any secret societies, and you miss out on a lot of the legacy stuff (which always seemed cool as hell), but I never heard of someone being discouraged from pledging a frat if they weren't from the right social circle or a legacy. And as far as academics go, they really couldn't give less of a crap who your daddy is.
:P There are always exceptions.
I'm almost tempted to throw out some insufferably snotty broad generalization about how the once you have that aura of prestige (warranted or not), adding further selectivity is pointless, but the second I do someone's going to pull a ton of counter examples out and I'll feel stupid.
So I'll leave it at, it's entirely possible to have a complete and effectively unlimited experience at an Ivy regardless of your background.
Ugh. I know I'm going to sound very naive, but God, ugh. I hate that.
For one, there's a lot more variance than you'd think. The Ivy League schools (and the other handful of top-tier name schools like MIT and Stanford) aren't a monolithic entity. In my experience, the campuses at Dartmouth, MIT and Penn are dreary wastelands, while Princeton, Yale, and Stanford are beautiful. The facilities in general aren't special or anything, although each has something kind of cool and unique to offer. And while each of the big name universities attracts a handful of famous professors, it's not like the places are overflowing with brilliant field-defining thinkers. You've still got to pick and choose which place has what you want.
Some Ivys have a reputation for drinking or drugs, and their students try to act like they're really cool and don't study all the time. That's a lie; everyone at top name schools studies harder than students at more typical universities. I'd guess that's because of the application process that requires students to have superhuman work ethics. Yes, a small (but vocal) group of slacking high school students manage to get into the Ivys, and they like to brag about how they never do any work. They're the exception, and unless they go to Brown (fuck Brown) their GPAs should reflect their slacking. Drinking and drug use varies widely. As it is at most colleges, the rate of students drinking (or using drugs) is lower than you'd imagine, but yeah, there's more studying and less partying at most of the top-tier schools. Some study had 30% of Stanford students abstaining from alcohol, and the vast majority only drinks in moderation.
So yeah, SATs and interviews are kind of a shitty way of being judged as a student, but they work well. I'm constantly amazed by the quality of everyone's work at Stanford. Even the jocks in the 9 AM classes put most of my high school peers to shame in terms of work ethic and interest in the class. I've only met a handful of people who weren't completely engaged and dedicated to the material they're learning. That's why the big name schools are worth it, in my opinion. No more of that bullshit where I'm the only one in the room pushing myself to completely master the material. I hate that shit. If you're not going to even try, get the fuck out. Students acting like they're above the material was the worst thing about high school. I haven't had a problem with smart asses at Stanford.
Princeton, Harvard, and Yale all have reputations for snottiness and being for "rich kids only," but that's really a load of shit. Nobody cares about how much your parents make. That's a stereotype that was valid 30 years ago, but there's next to no rich/poor prejudice at any top-tier school today. Any exceptions are blips in the radar. There's is really no rich kid culture on these campuses.
I spend a shitload of hours at the library every week, and most everyone I know does too. I certainly hope all my hard work pays off with either a sweet high-paying job down the road, or at least acceptance into a rocking grad school in the short term. I'm too young to have any experience with the monetary pay-offs (or debt problems) that the big name schools give.
Name recognition does exist. First of all, Stanford and MIT (and a handful others) are more widely known than a lot of the Ivys (sorry, Cornell and Penn). Second, in my experience, a lot of people hate you for going to a big name school. I got a lot of flak for it at my last internship, even though I never brought it up in conversation. Just a lot of snide remarks and a general distrust. Whatever. I hope it plays to my advantage when I apply for my first job. Yeah, I know experience and personality matter just as much as the University name or the GPA when interviewing for a job, but I can't imagine a 4.0 from Stanford hurting.
Of course, this is what I've been able to piece together in my own research when deciding what college to go to. Feel free to correct whatever you think I got wrong with your own anecdotes.
as far as i could tell from my visits to nyu (where my brother went) and other colleges around the new york, new jersey and pennsylvania area, columbia and harvard werent that different from state schools.
some nice stuff (for example, some great professors, but there were shitty ones as well), some not so nice stuff (columbia food was pretty bleh).
honestly, it's not so different at all from any other college i would think. the campuses for both of my schools were relatively small i guess compared to the huge campuses they boast in the western and southern states. that's about it though.
edit: one more thing about finding a job - being from a good school whether it be part of some old football league or not IS A BIG DEAL TO ALL EMPLOYERS. as someone who has spoken to many, many recruiters, having graduated from columbia and harvard means that i have never had any difficulty with finding a job.
i have also been on the other side of recruiting, acting as a recruiter, and depending on where you went to school, we look at your application with a very different set of expectations. if you graduated from brooklyn law school, you better be one of the top 3 students or you shouldnt even apply. i mean that. if you graduated from harvard law school, as long as you havent gotten too many c's and you arent a freak of some kind, you'll probably get into our firm.
Maybe Harvard only admits the kind of student that is going to apply himself completely and plans on killing himself before dropping out of college.
The Ivys-are-actually-pushovers-once-you-get-in myth might have some merit, but I haven't ever seen it or heard from anyone who's seen it firsthand. Except for maybe Brown, but Brown's it's own weird thing.
on the first day of class, they said to us, "no matter what you do, you're going to get a b. we know you've all been getting a's all your life, but the truth is, you're all b students. only 5 - 10% of you guys will get a's, and maybe 5% will get c's. everyone else is getting a b, so just suck it up."
and what they said was pretty much true. most people got b's no matter how hard they worked.
O_o
i find the idea of law school in general being a breeze very hard to believe.
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Hmm. My Dad went to Harvard law, and I have a cousin there now. One got As and the other is getting Cs.
I guess that's anecdotal evidence for you. Who knows.
It was a bit of tangent, but I felt like putting in my 2c.
Also, Princeton is gorgeous and Harvard is the most multicultural school I've ever been to. My friend is doing his Economics PhD at Princeton and I can say with absolute certainty that if he's the in middle of class, the people there are not "coasting" by. To elaborate, he did 7 credits every year in honors economics and math and got a 99+%, which was the highest average in the province.
Most of us just use the system to experiment with classes we would ordinarily never think of taking, anyways. People who take most of their classes that way are shunned. Shunned!
no they're not, they're just called MCM concentrators
i too am a Brown grad. that basketweaving concentration was pretty awesome ;-)
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:P
The problem I had with Brown's grading scheme was that I was afraid I would wind up in some class I really loved, and be surrounded by 200 students who are just coasting by because they're taking it pass/fail and wouldn't have been in the class otherwise. Yeah, maybe those kids are trying more classes and broadening their horizons, but I'd prefer a college where you have to try your best even when you're experimenting. It'd be detrimental to me to be around a bunch of uninspired students when it could have just been me and 15 wholly engaged kids in a smaller seminar class.
Maybe that's not a fair analysis, but it's what scared me away from Brown.
it's not a fair analysis at all.
you did of course have the "easy" courses, but most colleges or universities seem to have them. we have a class we jokingly called "Rocks for Jocks," which is essentially a set of five easy multiple-guess exams for some people needing to fill a credit. but you also have excellent courses where the classwork is difficult and the students are engaged, even the ones taking the course pass-fail.
Brown has something called CPRs, course performance reports, which essentially serve in lieu of grades if you take a course pass-fail. you can ask your prof at the end of a semester to give you a CPR, so you do have a driving factor in the way of "grading." also, students who branch out to new classes and eventually take them are more engaged because they chose to take the course out of interest. the shopping period that occurs for the first two weeks of each semester reinforces this, makes students really think if they want to be in specific courses. outside of the first year seminar classes, you also very rarely get the "200 student" situation you described because of the pass-fail system. in fact, it's quite the opposite.
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i can see going to a really good school for the purpose of saying you have a degree from so and so.
but i mean... i know of one guy who went to Harvard, and now works in Illinois making something like $100k/yr as vice president of a company.
meanwhile, my father, who dropped out of high school, pulls in $300-400k annually and has sold off various companies for millions of dollars, and works from home/for himself.
it's all about how you apply yourself with the education you get. not the degree/school itself. unless you lack the motivation or ability to apply yourself in that way.... and there are a lot of people out there, and i'm sure they do great with their degrees from highly prestigious schools. especially if you absolutely know what specific field you want to go into... and aren't willing to be an entrepreneur.
most of all, most of all
someone said true love was dead
but i'm bound to fall
bound to fall for you
oh what can i do
I don't feel like I'm missing out on too much.
Outside of the admission and tuition costs of course.
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I have a story about an epic beer pong match between Cornell, RPI, and Colgate... but I guess Cornell's the only Ivy and Colgate opted out of Ivyship. Anyway, the moral of the story is "while placing your testicle on the table is a valid tactic to distract and horrify the other players, it is not a substitute for skill."
Silly drunken Colgate people.
Hey My Alma matter is not a dreary wasteland, Boston is...
Actually I loved Boston and that's coming from a New Yorker. I certainly don't feel like I got a better education than I would have gotten at say Rensellear Polytechnic, but I do think our facilities and opportunities were a bit above if anything do to name recognition alone.
Key example, while working an internship I accidentally discovered I was earning 3 dollars more an hour than the person from BU with the same level of experience. I suspect it was because the company had very close ties to MIT. The connections certainly have been nice as well. I run into old classmates everywhere. I was having lunch about a month ago and a guy stops me and says he knows me. Turns out it was my lab partner from sophomore year who now works at Space X. I don't know if it's because my field is fairly small, or what but it's shocking how often I run into old professors or classmates, and trust me this can help. Seeing someone else wearing a Brass Rat(the school ring) or having someone recognize mine gives me a little extra credibility. When I'm the youngest guy in the room and I'm leading the meeting this can be a blessing.
In the end though I think the Ivy's (and us peer institutions) aren't worth the pressure people put on themselves to get in though. Plenty of people can and do succeed from a sorts of other schools. Three years after graduation your degree is simply a piece of paper and your work history is what counts. I'm not saying don't go for it if you don't want to. I wouldn't give up mine time at MIT for anything. But certainly its not the end of the world if you don't get into one.
-Terry Pratchett
My dad dropped out of Harvard.
What is with all the lawyers/law students on this site anymore? I disagree slightly though because law is far more prestige obsessed than most normal occupations. A smart person who uses college to skill-build rather than just get a piece of paper will go just as far from any state school except in like, banking/law and maybe a few other limited situations.
youd be surprised. i mean if jack thompson can get a law degree, anyone can, m i rite?
seriously though, the way law school is set up is totally ripe for abuse.
1) for the significant majority of classes, there are no papers or tests. there is one final. that's it.
2) there are outlines for every class, specific to each professor. some of the outlines are so detailed, they include the professor's jokes, which the professors actually use again and again, every year.
3) most of the standard classes (con law, tax, contracts, property law, crim law, etc.) are not taught through the socratic method. they are lectures in front of a hundred students (at least at harvard they were).
4) again, no matter how hard you work, you will most likely get a b.
so the way i saw it was, i could bust my ass, read all the cases, attend all the classes and sweat out the final and get a b, or i could just fool around, study hard the last 2 weeks before finals and still get a b. i think the choice is pretty clear.
funny thing is, i got mostly a's and graduated with a 3.6 or so (and that's without "cheating" by taking cross classes with the undergrad).
MCM concentrators are funny. One of them lives down the hall, and I once caught him filming himself filming an episode of Seinfeld. I wonder what class that was for.
Whoops, concentrators. Not majors.
ive been here since like 2004 or something like that. as for the name game, well, im just speaking from experience. all the big law firms will love you if you graduate from a top named law school.