Columbia or Duke?

admissionsgeek
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:12:55 +0000

that’s funny considering students today face more struggles to pay for, get through and find employment after college than your generation.

also i’d be wary in using old-fashioned even jokingly as the word is often code for white male and heternormative. old-fashioned is what glenn beck and others use to portend a world that preexists gender, racial, sexual and ethnic cleavages (as if they didn’t exist back then, ha). not only is it problematic for the most basic reasons (it refuses to believe that the world is complex), but it carries with it a lot of loaded sentiments of prejudice and discrimination. words have dirty histories, especially in the united states, and avoiding them entirely is fantasy. learning to negotiate around usage, understanding their history, and understanding how tone impacts what you say is the most important thing any 18yo can learn because they challenge our mono conception of values and allows us to account for multiplicity. (something i learned in college more outside of the classroom than within, and it is also why being in such a diverse school as columbia means you can’t help but confront questions about cleavages and how what you say means as much as what you do.)

perhaps this will just be a silly tangent to you, but i think you know quite a bit of this already, communication skills and other soft skills are perhaps not what gets you noticed in an application, but it is what often gets you the job and gets you promotions.