<p>QuantMech, you are awesome!</p>
<p>QM is our own da vinci.</p>
<p>writing professors think they need to be doing only one thing.</p>
<p>I just read a book called 12.21 by a guy named thomason who coauthored the rule of four. Very interesting book about what else - we are all going to die in 10 days.</p>
<p>Turns out the author went to Harvard college followed by Columbia med.</p>
<p>[Dustin</a> Thomason - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustin_Thomason]Dustin”>Dustin Thomason - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>OTOH, Ivy med schools are producing the best writers? The best non-fiction I have read in the last year is emperor of all maladies by a harvard med graduate, Siddhartha Mukherjee.</p>
<p>QM- I LOL’d.</p>
<p>** Are the elites ignoring the unconventionally brilliant?**</p>
<p>Should we not expect that the “unconventionally brilliant” would make adjustments for that?
Seems counter intuitive. </p>
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<p>Out of curiosity, what’s your working definition of elites? Is it exclusively HYPSMCC or expansive to include Top 30 universities and LACs? </p>
<p>If the latter, I’d argue that some of the elite are actually embracing “unconventional” students. Some examples I can think of are Reed, Swarthmore, Bryn Mayr, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, Berkeley…especially before the mid-'90s, Oberlin*, Hampshire, UMich, Rice, etc. </p>
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<li>Speaking as an alum, the prevailing campus culture at the time I attended was such that your “unconventionally brilliant” student would feel quite at home and the practical default type of student whereas the one who values economic success above all else would be regarded as the freaky one. Then again, a large part of that is that most “conventional” students under your working definition would self-select themselves out of applying to my LAC or others like it in the first place in preference for more mainstream colleges.</li>
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<p>You know, really, the pretentiousness of we’re-so-out-of-the-box gets really old - it’s like a variation of the whole U of Chicago Life of the Mind thing. I’ve known plenty of people at Oberlin who weren’t at all “quirky” - they were as mainstream as anybody else, and knew it was a good school and went from there. It seems like it’s really important for you to maintain this belief that Oberlin is the quirkiest of the quirkies; why is that?</p>
<p>I as a student in high school agree wholeheartedly with the article OP posted a link to. I will soon be posting a more complex and extended ranty opinion/analysis on this but now I don’t have time because I am studying for a test tomorrow because I need to get an A to get into a good college since if I don’t that must mean that I am a bad student, a bad person, and not worthy of getting a good education (sarcasm tone). Go figure.</p>
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<p>Because it had that reputation since the '60s and from my own experience as a student…the reputation had more than a grain of truth to it while I was there. </p>
<p>There’s no other campus I’ve visited/taken classes in where pursuing the conventional path as the OP put it would not only cause such a student to be regarded as odd, but often regarded dismissively as a “bourgeois capitalist tool”. Just relaying how it was commonly perceived and my own experiences there. </p>
<p>Incidentally, one of the recent ongoing discussions among older alums of my college was how its administration’s change to play more to USNWR rankings and compete with more conventional NE LACs and not be “too political” to attract higher stat students has caused Oberlin to “lose its way” or even “sell out”.</p>
<p>That’s not what I asked, though - I’m asking you why it’s so important to you that you be perceived as coming from a place that is so quirky / alternative, and wondering why you don’t see the irony of a culture where everybody apparently thinks the same way being touted as quirky and alternative. Because if your stories are to be believed, Oberlin’s super-conformist.</p>
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<p>In some ways, it was if you mean in the context of the campus bubble itself during the '90s and moreso earlier from what I heard. If your politics were of the radical-left type and/or you were a neo-hippie who rejects the conventional ideas of success as the conventional student defined by the OP, you’re fine. </p>
<p>If not, you may feel very lonely at best and sometimes mocked/denounced at worst. Some students who aren’t hip to the then current PC lingo or get dragged into “more leftier than thou” type ****ing contests also tended to get gunshy about voicing their opinions because PC policing classmates tended to react quite harshly not unlike metaphorically getting your head bitten off. </p>
<p>It’s something that almost always comes up as a conversation topic with Obie alums I’ve met and befriended whenever we recounted our college years. However, I have noticed that the degree of dogmatism of “more leftier than thou” type ****ing matches experiences tended to decrease in degree and frequency among younger alums.</p>
<p>Your posts do a disservice to Oberlin, which is a fine school.</p>
<p>None of those things I mentioned detract from Oberlin’s fine qualities such as its dedicated faculty, academic departments, and staff. </p>
<p>Especially considering all of the factors I mentioned were mainly driven by the critical mass of fellow students who were there when I attended and from what I’ve heard, before. </p>
<p>Even with such difficulties, one can still get a superb education and learning experience. Just posting that if a given student attended in my time period, they’d better like being around people who argue/live their politics and have a thick skin…especially if their political views are to the right of the Green party. </p>
<p>I have also mentioned that what I described doesn’t apply nearly as much nowadays as recent alums have mentioned the campus has really toned down since I graduated and grousing from older alums writing letters to the alum mag about the LAC “losing its way” by being “less political” and more obsessed with USNWR rankings.</p>
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Ya mean Emily Dickinson?? She’d be flattered for you to compare your writings to hers :)</p>
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<p>No, I think you’re just exceptionally sensitive to what you perceive as the critical mass of opinions around you, and you take what a handful of other people think, extrapolate it to the culture at large, and place great importance on it.</p>
<p>So cobrat went to Oberlin and Pizzagirl didn’t, but apparently Pizzagirl knows more about the culture of the campus at the time cobrat went there than cobrat does. Is that the takeaway from this thread? </p>
<p>If so, is anybody interested in my in-depth knowledge of the culture of Northwestern during the period that Pizzagirl claims she went there?</p>
<p>My impression is that Harvard does admit students with “unconventional brilliance,” whose talents may lie in the arts, for instance, and who do not have great stats in all areas or who have not served as class president, editor etc. My further impression is that these students are sort of sprinkled over the bowl of the class as a whole, as seasoning.</p>
<p>So called “lopsided” candidates who do attend will have to cope with distribution requirements at most of the elite schools (except Brown or Amherst), so a math and science-disabled writer or artist will still have to take “quantitative reasoning” and science classes. These distribution requirements can discourage some from even applying in the first place. Substituting intense advising for gen ed might help attract more unconventionals.</p>
<p>At larger universities, undergraduate artistic accomplishments may not be supported at the same level as graduate/PhD students, in terms of money and opportunities to show or perform. The arts initiative at Harvard may have helped make funding more possible when students organize these opportunities themselves.</p>
<p>I guess, in essence, I am saying that while the elites may be willing to admit more “unconventionally brilliant” students than people think, it is also true that many of those students are not applying, either because they misunderstand admissions and feel they would not get in, or because they have no desire to go to those schools in the first place.</p>
<p>p.s. and some do choose conservatory or art school, fully capable of providing breadth of education themselves while practicing the narrower focus that Vendler criticizes…</p>
<p>jym626, #34: Yes, I did mean Dickinson, sorry; it was not a subtle joke, just ignorance (although in the middle of the night, I thought, “Oh, oops!”).</p>
<p>If you read about Harvard’s very small creative writing program and the chances of getting into one of the writing workshops or having the opportunity to do a creative thesis, it’s not clear to me that unconventionally brilliant poets, for example, would choose to go there even if they could get in.</p>
<p>I think we may be confusing what the students/applicants want with what the adcoms want. (Never mind the faculty.) My “unconventionally brilliant” son went to UChicago as much because it was in a “major league city” (sports) as he did for the intellectual atmosphere. Chicago’s adcom, however, probably admitted him because of his unconventionally high test scores and other achievements in high school – not because of what he turned out to be!</p>
<p>I’m not sure that even in the era of the so-called “life of the mind” slogan the UChicago adcom was looking for anything other than the brightest and most capable students they could find. But applicants often self-selected to a considerable degree based on the reputation of the place: did they like the core, did they really want to go to a college with no athletic program (“school spirit” is sometimes equated with this), etc.</p>
<p>Reed has had a much more unconventional (quirky) student body like foreover (certainly when I attended in the 1960’s), but I suspect the adcom there always wanted the best and brightest applicants they could find, and this sometimes meant picking out the unconventional and extremely lopsided student (future PhD’s…hah!) over people like me (who came from suburban LA City schools, was a very good student with OK test scores, and something of a jock; but I ended up getting a PhD anyway!). But Reed has always been more on the margins of filling their first year classes with highly capable students, at least until they were able to gin up the applications, after which time they were able to reduce their attrition rate a lot. </p>
<p>Even Chicago had to work on increasing its applications in the last decade or so, in part because it wanted to expand the size of the College (undergraduate student body). However, I don’t think it started looking for a different type of student; it just wanted more who were highly capable and committed to their program. Same for Reed.</p>