ethanrt

So I checked out that Wikipedia link, and...

"In the absence of any other information regarding the safe's combination, a combination lock may be opened by dialing every possible combination. Richard Feynman discovered that many combination locks allow some 'slop' in the settings of the dial, so that for a given safe it may be necessary only to try a subset of the combinations."

Yeah... him and everyone who's ever been a student in a school with, what are they called... lockers! I just don't even see how it's remotely possible for him to get credit for that :-p

unalove

Haha he talks about safe-cracking in more detail in one of his memoirs. I don't remember exactly what he did or why it was cool, but if Richard Feynman did it, it's got to be cool (says the person who, in high school, rented his Lectures on Physics audiocassettes from a library that was 45 minutes away and then had to find a cassette player for them)!

jack4640

He figured out how to do it in 4 hours, not the days that it should take to try every possible combination :-)

dchow08

Hmmm... back to the actual intention of the post.

Do you think that students at UChicago tend to be competitive with each other in terms of getting higher grades than others? I've heard cases from both sides, one from Libby Pearson when she visited my high school and one from my UChicago interviewer. Libby said that the students there are not competitive and like to collaborate with each other (e.g. form study groups). My interviewer said that there was some competition, but stressed that competition isn't necessarily a bad thing. The way he saw it, competition can keep you motivated to do the work. What do you think?

unalove

If students are competitive, they are competitive with themselves and are pushing themselves to do well because that's what they are used to doing and that's what has worked out well for them. (That's probably what your alumni interviewer was pushing towards). If you remain "competitive" insofar as you work hard in class and work hard to maintain high grades, your options are less limited.

However, I do not think that there is pressure to be competitive, and you don't have to be competitive to learn and have fun with the curriculum and get decently good grades. So some students care a lot about their grades (particularly the ones with set aspirations on business/law/med/grad school), and some students don't really care about what grades they end up getting. I'm of the latter set.

There is virtually no competition among students, and I don't know why that is. It's generally seen as extremely bad form to share personal information like grades and scores, just as it would be sort of improper to share information like household income and financial aid award. I think it's because students come to Chicago not expressly to get good grades, but rather to learn, and the students who so desperately want good grades end up choosing an institution where they feel they can get them more easily.

JHS

It may be important to distinguish between two kinds of competition. There's competition for grades, honors, etc. I don't get any sense of that at Chicago at all from my kids -- it's absent from their lives. (Both of them care a little about what grades they get, but it's not something they talk about with others, or even with me unless I force them to.) Then there's trying to say something smarter than the person next to you in your Hum class. I get the sense that there's LOTS of that. You could go to a class and think, "Whoa! Shark tank!", but that's different from grade-grubbing, and not at all inconsistent with cooperating a lot on everything (including classwork) outside of class.

dchow08

So, there's a lot of people trying to sound smarter than everyone else? This definitely wasn't my impression of the school as I know it.

glasses

I think it's less about sounding smarter and more about getting an originalish idea/argument to float.

unalove

For me, I'm just aware of my peers. It's not unusual for me to come out of class and think, "Dang, that person really did the readings carefully." I by no means feel uncomfortable about my level of learning/doing the readings though.

lasermouse9

I hope everyone at U of C is as intelligent and articulate as you are.

unalove

Awww.

I don't know about intelligent and articulate, but most people here are faster readers and better information-absorbers than me, which makes it harder for me to get the macro argument of a text. If class was all about who synthesized the reading the best on first glance, I'd be toast, but I feel like my in-class contributions kick into gear only when I mull over things for a while.

Learning differences ftw!

dchow08

I'm such a slow reader. Will that be very detrimental to my success in Chicago? I like to slowly mop up everything in my brain before I go on to something new.

unalove

Depends exactly how slow. In high school, I had a lot of reading to do, but it was never too much that I couldn't do all of it (most of my friends didn't do it at all), so when college came around, I had to rethink my ways a little bit. Some slips of advice:

1) The "mop-up" method, I find, works particularly well with literature. The important thing is not what's happening; it's the mechanics that make what's happening happening. That's when ye trusty underlining tool comes in super-handy. (Also, maybe just me, but I find reading literature really fun, even if I can't remember plots for the life of me).

2) Don't expect to understanding heavyweights like Marx and Kant on the first time around. Anybody who takes Self for sosc knows that about 150 pages of Durkheim has the rough exchange value of 20 pages of Marx. The readings on the heavyweights are often shorter to account for their density, and you can't expect yourself to get it on the first round. That's what class discussion is for. And office hours. And the essay.

3) In classes like sociology, political science, etc., where the reading assignments are pages and pages, the articles are usually set up in a very clear structure, allowing for easy skimming. Sociologists and political scientists and the like like to summarize their arguments-- a lot-- in different ways, so following along is not super-hard and not every detail is important if you're just looking for what the argument is, not evidence that supports it. I found that my sociology professor often gave better and clearer lectures on the readings than the readings did of explaining themselves.... so I found readings for that class largely, ahem, optional.

asiaknight

I don't know about how other people feel, but the Core sucks for math majors...Period. Wasting my time with all this Foucault and Aristotle, whose ideas seem like non-rigorous, ********, self-indulged ramblings compared to those of Gauss, Euler, Holder, Dirichlet, Galois, etc. Hum. has improved my writing, though.

unalove

I might not like exercising, but I feel better when I do it and I lose weight :-)