5 Little Known Tips for Getting In

Parents Forum
1181

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<p>Could it also possibly be due to your past self-admitted “aloof manner”, being highly disdainful of nerdy people, enjoying cultural norms which are often associated with groups which tend to be highly intolerant of and rejecting of nerdy folks, and possibly being affiliated with a sorority*?</p>

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<li>The last part is not necessarily limited to all nerds as MIT fraternities/sororities were very popular/widespread and non-nerdy folks like many college classmates rejected fraternities/sororities on non-nerdy grounds(Too establishment, elitist in non-academically meritocratic sense, bastion of bourgeois conservatism, etc). However, I know some nerd subcultures regard joining any fraternity/sorority organization other than ones which are out and proud to display their nerdiness with their non-mainstream norms as instantly destroying what nerd cred one may have had.<br></li>
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1182

<p>Sorry, I fell off my chair in astonishment at reading PG’s comment in #1170, "I’ve never encountered or felt any discrimination in my career, save one episode . . . "</p>

<p>I am glad that you have not faced actual discouragement or discrimination, PG. It is what a lot of us who are some number of years older than you are have been working for, in part. I prefer not to specify exactly how many years older I am.</p>

<p>The physics teacher at my mother’s high school would not permit her to take physics–no girls allowed in the class. Period. As I think about it, this too has had a profound effect on me.</p>

<p>In my own high school, one of the young women who was in the top 10 of the class after 2 years, and graduated in the top 10 of the class, dropped mathematics after geometry (which was a 10th grade course at our school). While the pattern of course enrollment by young women has changed substantially since then, at least through the completion of undergrad work, there are still many hurdles of discrimination to surmount further along. </p>

<p>Part of the reason that I am ambivalent about encouraging young women to read Meg Urry’s writing about women in science is that it is really discouraging, and I believe that part of it accurately describes present-day circumstances, even though Urry is 59 or so. As an undergrad, I think I might have been advantaged by not knowing about the obstacles that lay ahead–there were quite a few. </p>

<p>Counter to that, I should say that I have also encountered a number of men who have been terrifically supportive. Perhaps it is relevant that aside from my spouse, three of the men who are the most eminent and most supportive of me (in combination) have daughters and no sons. </p>

<p>My niece, who is an engineer with a major company, faces discrimination and attitudes that I thought had ended in the early 1960’s.</p>

<p>I have no hypothesis to offer as to why academia, at least in some of the STEM fields, should be worse than your field, PG, nor why working for one organization should be better or worse than working for another. I have a couple of half-baked theories, but none even worthy of the term “hypothesis.”</p>

1183

<p>Just remember the elite competition is fiercer today than even 10 years ago. Our own past experiences are now “old.” Reaching only alg 2, when so many kids have stepped far past that, is its own hurdle. </p>

<p>And the workplace today, despite some remaining inequities, is more used to a variety of women in leadership roles. Time will continue to evolve the situation, including how women influence the thinking and operation of departments- academic or business. Each of us has the potential to be a role model and guide.</p>

<p>adding: QM, I’m probably your age or so and can’t point to any discrimination or unpleasantness until I worked for some very difficult women. The sort of women who valued office politics over results. For a long while, I was determined never to work for a woman again, in my field, unless I had a pre-existing relationship with her. My mother and grandmother, similarly, did not have trouble finding male allies who empowered them. </p>

1184

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<p>Hm… One female engineer I know at a major firm who is in her 40’s said that the first time she encountered sexism was when her company was taken over by foreign company. The one place I’ve heard that outright sexism is still prevalent is in mathematical software forms like mathlab and in sysadmin-type jobs. I don’t know if such things happen at other software firms like google. One female sysadmin I know complained about sexism but said that when she went to economics grad school, she didn’t encounter any at all. However, in computer science I think the biggest barrier to women is the fact that it’s not as common for them to fool around with computers and programming as children and as teenagers. </p>

<p>Baby boomer women encountered the brunt of the discrimination and ended most of it. I’ve heard the stories of what my mother had to deal with. Those who are a half-a-generation younger had it much, much easier. </p>

<p>I’ve never actually witnessed any sexism in academia, actually, though I’m not in a male-dominated science subfield. I know MIT came out with a report on gender inequities among the faculty, and Pres. Vest said he was surprised that there were some. He wasn’t contesting it, but it was something subtle enough that it wasn’t noticeable to him. So there may be some subtle things going on at the top level. This discussion feels pretty dated, actually, if you are looking for things which are outright discouragement rather than some subtle effects. I mean, it’s been drilled into everyone’s heads that racism and sexism is the worst attribute one can have from birth. I remember one time in 4th grade when the teacher read a sentence about a doctor and asked a question, and a kid in the class answered using the pronoun “he”, showing that the kid assumed the doctor would be male. Everyone in the class went “oooh…” like he had just committed a grave error. So people are quite sensitive to such things, at least in my part of the world.</p>

<p>Ironically, one of the things that seems to hurt women was pointed out by LookingForward about Qmech’s writing. Saying “I think” when you are quite sure of yourself is something that undermines a woman’s authority. However, perhaps this rhetorical affect was something intentionally employed to soften her disagreements with others since the discussion was already acrimonious.</p>

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<p>I was at MIT during this time. There was a tinge of an unpleasant odor in the computer labs. However, it wasn’t that the students weren’t showering. It was that they didn’t steam clean the chairs, like, ever. The chairs smelled, not the people. Also, it wasn’t just CS majors who used the “computer labs.” This was at a time where everyone communicated by email or instant message (“zephyr”) but no one had smartphones yet. So the entire campus would descend on the top floor of the student center where there was a large collection of computers.</p>

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<p>"Sorry, I fell off my chair in astonishment at reading PG’s comment in #1170, "I’ve never encountered or felt any discrimination in my career, save one episode . . . "</p>

<p>I am glad that you have not faced actual discouragement or discrimination, PG. It is what a lot of us who are some number of years older than you are have been working for, in part. I prefer not to specify exactly how many years older I am."</p>

<p>I am still old enough that I remember being told by other people as a child, “Why, you’re smart enough to be a DOCTOR [the implication meaning as opposed to a nurse, because men are doctors and women are nurses].” </p>

<p>I absolutely 110% appreciate the efforts of those who came before me to make the workplace more open to women - so please do not think that it is unnoticed or unappreciated! I do worry that my daughter and her generation take some of it for granted. I’m still old enough to remember when some of the Ivies opened their doors to women, and I certainly know that the generation before me fought to get into medical school, law school, etc in an era where it was seen as pointless because women were just going to go and have babies anyway. I think I’m kind of on the cusp in the sense that I was aware of it in my youth, but by the time I got to college (early 80’s) it was accepted that a smart woman could of course major in what she wanted to, go to med school, law school, b-school, etc. </p>

<p>I also was in a corporate environment with a significant number of women in higher level positions, including 2 CEO’s as I mentioned before (don’t wish to specify any more as I don’t wish to name the company, but it’s a household name). The marketing and advertising worlds appear to be less sexist, and there are plenty of women in positions of power.</p>

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<p>My salary was set for10 years by a man who believed that if a man and a woman were doing the same job equally well, the man should be paid more. He said so to me, literally. Equal pay for equal work was already the law of the land.</p>

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<p>sevmom,</p>

<p>That does go a bit without saying as the very traits you describe above are often the stereotypical reasons why “non-Nerds” are by conventional wisdom deemed “fabulous team players”. </p>

<p>On the other hand, Nerdy folks who aren’t as inclined/willing to be glad-handing everyone, march to the beat of their own respective drums, don’t care to conform to fashion/etiquette norms they consider to be unreasonable or “pandering”, and would rather spend their leisure time in highly engaging intellectual discussions rather than attending parties where conversation topics hover around what they perceive as “boring trivia” and too many folks get drunk don’t usually tend to be stereotypically regarded as potentially fabulous team players. </p>

<p>And the ironic part is, this stereotyping can overlook non-nerds who are horrid team players and highly nerdy folks who exhibit good team player characteristics. </p>

<p>A good case in point is looking at the original founders of Apple computers. Ironically, it is Steve Wozniak<em>, the bona-fide techie of the 2 who is widely known for being kind and able to get along with nearly everyone whereas it was Steve Jobs</em>*, the essentially non-techie partner was widely known for his over-the-top temper tantrums and insisting on his own way to the point he ended up being forced out in the late '80s. </p>

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<li>Wozniak engineered the first Apple hardware upon which Steve Jobs could implement his conceptualization of marketing and aesthetic computer design for Apple. That and they joined in with Bill Gates & Microsoft in raiding Xerox’s Parc labs for ideas for their respective Windowed-based graphical user interface based operating systems which continued to be embodied in current commercial operating systems like Apple OSX and Microsoft Windows.<br></li>
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<p>** That’s not to say he had no techie chops as he shown he had quite a bit when he went to NeXT computers which germinated the seed for the BSD derivative-based Mac OSX. However, Jobs’ main contributions which made Apple what it has become was mainly in the conceptualizing of the marketing and aesthetics of the external hardware design and graphical user interfaces. Concepts while much more important than the underlying engineering meant in large corners of the Computer Techie community, Wozniak’s name would come up before Job’s. </p>

<p>Or moreso Bill Gates whose main claim to fame other than founding Microsoft was pioneering the concept of a software end user license separately marketed and sold from the computer hardware it was installed on. While that was very innovative for its time, it’s widely regarded as detrimental towards techie innovation among some in the techie community and the innovation is regarded mainly as one valuable/innovative in the marketing/Intellectual Property Law areas…not a technical one in itself. </p>

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<p>That’s unfortunate. I think you should present your department with a bill for lost wages and you should go on a big vacation or at least start staying at the Ritz whenever you have a conference.
I think what people experience 15 or even 10 years later can make be enormously different, not so much because the attitudes of the people coming up are different, but because the people at the senior level that harbor the worst attitudes have retired. </p>

<p>One woman who was an MIT undergrad around 1980 said that a few professors asked her whether her boyfriend did her homework. I can’t imagine anyone saying that sort of thing 15 years later when I got there. </p>

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<p>@sevmom I had Algebra 1 in first grade at a public junior high. In fact most of us who were on track for calculus in high school had gone to public not private schools before high school. It always seemed rather ironic to me.</p>

<p>I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve seen very little discrimination except in the salary I was paid, and even that would be hard to prove. Columbia’s M/F ratio was pretty close to 50/50 when I attended. I was the first woman to work for my first boss, but he was a lovely man. Kind and generous. </p>

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<p>To expand on my post, it may also be more than just the passage of time that may affect discrimination levels. Since the people at the higher levels of organizations are also the oldest and most entrenched with the old ideas, whoever has to interact with them the most probably encounters the most discrimination. So, for instance, if Qmech is a tenured prof in the 80’s, the old, sexist department head probably affects her more than it does Pizzagirl, who was an undergrad at that time and may be dealing with the a lot younger people. This is probably even more the case at a company rather than a university. At a university an undergrad may interact with a department head by taking a class or doing research, whereas in a company a first-year employee would be much less likely to interact with the CEO.</p>

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<p>It’s not necessarily quite so black and white as that. There are “nerds” and “non nerds” who fall all in the middle of those descriptions above, who are actually highly intelligent yet very social, well liked, fun, accomplished individuals who don’t get drunk every weekend, who are not disdainful of others who aren’t just like them, who can be team players or do better to work solo. </p>

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<p>The key issue is the presence or absence of social skills.If someone thinks that being polite or diplomatic is in some cases “pandering” then they are likely to be lacking in the understanding of basic social discourse.</p>

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<p>True. I was discussing the common stereotypes of nerds vs non-nerds to explain why the latter is often perceived as “fabulous team players” by conventional wisdom and those affected by it…including possibly adcoms and moreso…hiring managers. </p>

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<p>cobrat, You have remarked more than once that you feel there is disdain for “nerds” (like in post #1134), yet you often go on with disdain with stereotypes of “non nerds” , jocks, “pretty people.” , rich people, frat guys and sorority girls, “fake nerds”,etc. as well as the high school social hierarchy . Not sure that’s a whole lot different than what you accuse other people of doing.</p>

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<p>I also don’t see this talk as about the extremes, per se. Not the nerd (or other) who doesn’t wash, nor the “socially facile” who’s not competent. Most of us agree you can be deep into your work and not use if as an excuse for not getting along with others or purposely distancing them for some odd or suspect reasons. I think we’re past that and into perceived inequities for those who are, for right reasons, desirable. </p>

<p>To even suggest social skills can acceptably be seen as pandering or glad-handing, that boring trivia and drunkeneness is involved, is plain old odd. Maybe anyone with that mindset shouldn’t aim for a team setting. Maybe they should march to their own drummers on their own grassy fields. And maybe that takes us back to admissions. </p>

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<p>The issue is in many mainstream US high school cultures and to some extent, the world at large outside certain nerd safe havens like some hardcore engineering/tech firms, the mainstream social pyramid and larger US culture tends to overwhelmingly favor those who are perceived as “non-nerds” than those who are perceived as "nerds. </p>

<p>In the greater scheme of things, with the exception of those safe haven areas in academia and those nerd friendly firms, the larger world tends to be hostile or at least, dismissive of those who are perceived as “nerds”. </p>

<p>Granted, this has gotten much better in the last 20 years and being “nerdy” has gained an increasingly “cool” vibe in some niche corners of the larger US pop culture. However, whether one likes to admit it or not, it is the “non-nerd”…especially those who exhibit traits identified with non-nerds by conventional wisdom who tend to be regarded and welcomed by larger society…including some adults here on this very thread. </p>

<p>While I’ve only had a small taste of this in junior high as the very culture of my public magnet HS completely flipped the social pyramid* and being a “nerd” was the “in thing” there, my sympathies are with the overall underdog in the larger US mainstream culture/perceptions. :slight_smile: </p>

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<li>In HS, I actually felt bad for athlete classmates as some were unfairly perceived by some as being less intelligent. In that environment, my sympathies were with them. Especially considering the fact we all had to meet/exceed the exact same standards when taking that entrance exam.<br></li>
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<p>I know lots of kids deeply devoted to their work who, nonetheless, are charming in their own ways and interact well, make good roommates and enjoy various things . They don’t have to be sadly portrayed as underdogs, for heaven’s sake, in today’s techie world. As pointed out, even that is stereotyping.<br>
I daresay MIT probably has its share if highly successful kids who don’t need a defense. </p>

<p>QM, if anything, this present diversion into nerds as unable or unwilling, bored with others, underscores why some elite colleges seek some softness around the edges, so to say. Admissions, academic depts and in business. The defense of them as underdogs, I think, backfires.</p>

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<p>Give it up, cobrat. You routinely stereotype all kinds of people, esp rich kids, suburbanites, conventionally attractive people, and people who participate in Greek life. You assume they can’t be substantive and you routinely poke fun at them. </p>

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<p>I’ve been out of the loop for a few hours. Thanks, collegealum314 for the suggestion that I get to stay at the Ritz during all of the conferences I attend. :)</p>

<p>I don’t think it’s likely to happen. There were no witnesses to the conversation, I wasn’t wired (obviously), and the person who made the remark to me is dead. In addition to the remark I mentioned above, the same man said that he had to pay Y more, because Y had three kids. He further remarked that he used to have an argument “all the time” with one of his grad students, about paying men and women equally–the grad student (male) supported it. Unfortunately for everyone, the grad student is also dead now. So there’s basically nothing to go on at this point, in terms of my getting to stay at the Ritz.</p>

<p>There was also some “hidden” discrimination that had no actual impact on me, other than surprise when I learned of it. One of my most accomplished senior colleagues was against hiring women in the department, at all. However, I never heard of this from him, nor did I hear of it from anyone else in the university. I only became aware of his attitude many years later, when he told me that he had changed his mind. </p>