Similarly with MIT…you can regale the drunk chicks with war stories about your days in dear old Cambridge.
To the OP, I’m just curious, what are you planning to study at CMU?
Well, still, they did want to see the parchment at that. And you are generally expected to put the school names on your resume.
Hey, megaza, there are idiots everywhere. At least this one is going to a different college than you are.
ETA: it’s annoying to read unpunctuated posts with no paragraphs, but when people say “spelling counts around here,” what they’re really saying is “it’s fun to look down on people who don’t do it well.”
Right. There is no Ivy League “system” except how its members define it. The Ivy League schools are:
Harvard
Princeton
Yale
Dartmouth
Cornell
Columbia
The University of Pennsylvania (private)
Brown
It is simply an association of very old East Coast schools. That is all the members and all there ever will be. They play each other in sports.
However, there are other great schools not in the Ivy League that are at least as good and prestigious as those that are. Duke and Stanford are but two of them. On a departmental basis, lots of schools have programs that are more highly ranked than their Ivy League counterparts.
You school name certainly makes a difference if you are going into the field of education. Degrees from Stanford and Peabody College of Vanderbilt University are highly prized at competitive private schools.
Harvard has some unusual practices, it’s true. But I like the one that sometimes allows the D student with very high test scores admission. I can’t help but think of the geniuses that were not good students in their early years.
Harvard was all male when I graduated from high school. Even now it discriminates against women. In order to keep the enrollment approximately even between males and females, some females with higher qualification are passed over for males in a sort of affirmative action program. (Source: Sixty Minutes) That doesn’t really bother me. I think Harvard is sterling!
In the case of the prestigious public and private schools, i would be willing to bet that there are even more applicants than that who would, if there were sufficient places, be excellent students. Most of the Ivy League and other top tier schools (public and private) could probably fill each Freshman class four or five times over with perfectly good candidates.
Each year, the Atlantic Monthly runs a special section on college admission, and talks to the admissions people at a bunch of the top schools. And these people who get paid to determine who gets in and who doesn’t all seem to agree that there is quite a lot of guesswork and finger-crossing in the system. The fact is that high school performance (whether fantastic or not so great) is not always an accurate indicator of how someone will do at college, whomever they select will be something of a gamble, and there will always be some excellent students who get rejected.
Not only that, but many of the top schools have seen their applicant pools expand dramatically. Here at Johns Hopkins, this year saw the most applications for the incoming Freshman year in the school’s history, with 15,950 people applying for about 1,200 positions. This represents a jump of almost 80% in just the last six years; there were only 9,000 applicants in 2002. In an applicant pool that large, not only do plenty of perfectly excellent students get rejected, but there is also bound to be considerable subjectivity in who gets accepted.
Even though the number of applicants for the Hopkins Freshman class has increased dramatically over the past few years, it has always been very competitive to get in here. And yet, despite that, i’ve taught some students here who probably should be struggling through their local community college, not attending a world-class educational institution. Despite the incredible competition, i still sometimes see students who can’t put together a coherent sentence, who can’t argue a position, who can’t read a book or article and summarize its main argument. And i see others who are clearly smart but just aren’t interested in doing the work. I’ve also seen some absolutely brilliant students, students who make me look back to my own 18-year-old self and think, “Fuck, i wasn’t anywhere near that smart and composed when i was 18.”
I don’t think so. The point of standards isn’t so everybody can be a snob. It’s so that communication among everyone will be facilitated by something that everyone recognizes. If every single person wrote in some odd way with weird punctuation, grammar, and capitalization, posts would become harder to read. Even the LOL-speak crap is standardized to the degree that people can see familiar initials and know what they mean.
Didn’t say it was, just that there’s some snobbery at play here. But I should back off: I sympathize with the OP but I agree that it’s pretty funny to see him ranting about Harvard without bothering to use the Enter key or, in most places, capitalize.
Harvard is overrated. I applied there for the hell of it back when I was high school. I got in, but decided to go to Rice instead.
Turning them down was fun. They were kind of baffled.
“You know you got accepted, right?”
“Right. But I’ve decide to go to school somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?”
“Not Harvard.”
“Um … ‘Not Harvard’ … I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“‘Not Harvard’ means ‘Not Harvard’. I’m going to school somewhere else.”
“I’m sorry … we must have a bad connection. For a second there it sounded like you said you you weren’t coming to Harvard. Ha ha … .”
“I’m not. I’m not coming to Harvard.”
“But… you know you got accepted, right?”
The above dialog has been exaggerated for humorous effect. However, the admissions person I talked to was pretty incredulous.
Jumping in to insult people who criticize the OP /= “Sticking up for the OP”
Or maybe it does, in your world.
Congrats on getting into CMU. I got rejected from all of the reach schools I applied to except Northwestern (who waitlisted me). I’m perfectly happy to be Purdue class of '12 though. It is a little bit disappointing that someone like you described was chosen over me to go to Harvard but I doubt I would have enrolled even if I had been accepted. Good luck at CMU!
It does when the person jumping in to insult people who criticize the OP is only following the general tone already established by said people.
Or, did you think brownie55 was the first person to hurl an insult?
Either way, it is obvious that you have no idea what a “thread shitter” actually is, since you used the phrase to mean its opposite.
OK guys, sorry for writing so quickly and disregarding those basic tenets of grammar and punctuation; hopefully the point still came across. spectre, i will probably major in chem and might minor in math, physics, or comp sci. Unless I get into the place I was waitlisted at (an awesome school in Cali) I’m pretty much set on CMU. I have to say I’ve mellowed out a bit since I found out this douche bag got in, I bet the thought that he is purely riding on his parent’s coattails is more damning than a harvard rejection. And who really cares, anyway? There’s always grad school, and no one will give a shit where you go in 10 years. Well, I’m off to play an hour or two on my ps3, I love being a second semester senior.
It can become irrelevant even in academia. I’ve worked as a research assistant and as a research scientist at four different universities around the world, and none of them seemed to care where I got my degrees from. Or at least, I put that info on my CV, but no one ever asked me about it at my interviews. They were far more interested in what sort of research I had actually done in the past.
Indeed. And our meaningless grades are actually sufficiently meaningful on their own that we don’t need to take standardized tests. A 95% average in a Saskatchewan high school is just as good as a 95% average in an Ontario high school when it comes to university admissions.
Well, since you’ve already decided upon your major, I’d’ve thought this would have played a much greater role in your selection of schools than the overall prestige of the institution. CMU, for example, in renowned in my field as an excellent place to study computational linguistics. They’ve done (and for all I know, are still doing) some excellent research there, and if you go there for your undergraduate education you’ll be learning from some of the best. On the other hand, I can’t think offhand of any significant CL research done at Harvard, or of any well-known CL faculty there.
I have no idea about the relative strengths of Harvard, CMU, and other institutions with respect to their chemistry programs, but that’s definitely something you should consider when choosing a school, especially if you think you might go into research.
Spelling and punctuation count on this board, and on the entire planet.
In any case, legacy admissions is a sort of affirmative action for rich White people.
Am I reading the same OP as everyone else? The pile-on started with almost immediately with people attacking OP’s punctuation and structure. Okay, fair enough. I’ve seen worse. But then, OP is accused of being entitled:
I don’t see it. He’s entitled because he thinks the Harvard admission went to someone who had connections, not someone who really deserved it? He never claimed he deserved it more than privileged kid. On the contrary, he expressed gratitude that he was accepted to CMU.
Now, this is just misleading. I don’t think the OP was so badly written that some basic reading skills would show that he wasn’t complaining that he wasn’t admitted to Harvard. OP never indicated that he even applied to Harvard. Just that he got in to CMU and “a couple of other places.”
Maybe he knows someone who deserved it more (harder working, better grades, who knows?) and got rejected and he’s watching this from the sidelines bemoaning the fact that Harvard’s selection process seems capricious.
Pit or no, I don’t really see any reason for the viciousness. I just see people looking for something to be vicious about.
As to the OP, all I can say is that time and time again you will discover that life isn’t fair. I heard that phrase growing up and have passed it on to my kids. The key is rolling with what you get in life. If you can change the injustice and you have a dog in the fight, fight for the change. If you can’t, look for something positive amidst the shit and accept that.
Yes, there are privileged people out there who seem to get everything handed to them. But just remember, some of those people ended up as Enron execs, so just be satisfied that comeuppance happens. And people who don’t get are sometimes better off anyway. You never know.
But yeah, that does suck. Good luck to you at CMU. Keep your nose to the grindstone and give it your best. And remember to appreciate it because there may be someone out there who doesn’t have the same opportunities you have.
Ah yes, Haverford, aka “I couldn’t get into Swarthmore” ;).
Very nice place, actually
What I love is that in the same post in which he apologizes for writing so quickly and disregarding those basic tenets of grammar and punctuation - his writing still sucks! 