<p>I go to an T-20 school and I enjoy it. Although people care about how they do I have not found people to be especially competitive, granted my school has a reputation for being less cut-throat than its peers. People are willing to help me and I am willing to help them. As for the staying up really late, yes I do stay up late a lot but it is completely my fault. I put school work and socializing way before sleep. If I wanted to sleep more I would just socialize less, but who wants to do that?</p>
<p>lol. you people really need to stop categorizing different schools and different people. For the most part, snobby, smart, geeky, jocky, stupid, lazy, ambitious, etc people are found at every single school. Yes, the snobby, smart, and/or ambitious people might be found more often at the elite schools, but its rarely the defining characteristic there. I’m at JHU, and yes there are some people who I would love to punch because they are soooo full of themselves, but then again, there are people who are amazing and we just hang around talking and laughing till 4AM before realizing we all have tests to worry about. lol. The same goes for my various friends at Princeton, harvard, Georgetown, NYU, UChicago, MIT, Stanford, etc. They love most of the people they are with, and the geeks tend to keep to themselves (because they don’t talk much anyways), and the snobs just snob around with each other because no one else (but some desperate wannabes) can stand them.</p>
<p>and I’m sure I can find just as many negatives about people not going to an elite school, but with different adjectives that are more often associated with a typical fratboy/fratgirl.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure “college life” is “college life”. There’s gonna be parties, snobs, drunkenness, intellectual-osity, sex, activism, pizza, roommate/floormmate hangout time, traditions, studying, going to class in your pajamas, partying again, bad teachers, good teachers, pizza again, natty lite/natty bo/keystone/etc., marijuana, cramming, chilling…you get the idea.</p>
<p>While every school has a distinctive “feel”, no Top 20 is just a “haven for competitive snobs” and most state schools are not just sorostitute land. In fact, often the reverse is quite true 
Colleges, I think, have more alike than they have in common, spoken by someone who has friends at every corner of the nation, well in the Top 20 and well out of it…</p>
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<li><p>Depends on the college. There are very very few competitive students at mine (Yale). This doesn’t mean that it’s not intense – kids study hard, party hard and engage in many extracurriculars all at the same time. I don’t think there’s major pressure to live such a lifestyle, just that most kids who get in actually want to.</p></li>
<li><p>I’ve spent some time at MIT, and honestly, the 3AM study group probably has a lot more to do with weird MIT schedules as opposed to competitiveness or workload. MIT is a strange, strange (but wonderful) place, and the people I know there actually live (for college students) healthy lifestyles, just, their 8 hours of sleep are between the hours of 5AM and 1PM. Classes there start late, and the culture is such that people tend to be night owls.</p></li>
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