<p>It seems to me that its rather difficult to visit the Chicago campus without running across the slogan, “where fun comes to die.”</p>
<p>I’m sorry that you have found the environment unpleasantly oppressive, but I think that prospective students are clearly forewarned. I am very certain that my d. understood that aspect of Chicago before she ever decided to apply. </p>
<p>I’d note that my daughter only became interested in Chicago because a friend’s parents happened to invite her to accompany the friend on a college visit during January of her junior year in high school. Quite frankly, I think she fell in love with the architecture. </p>
<p>But if attendance at Chicago had ever been a realistic consideration, I think she would have thought long and hard about whether the intense academic environment would have been bearable. It’s hard to tell the difference between ennui and exhaustion. You sound like the type of person who might sign up for an arctic expedition, with a mind full of romantic ideas about high adventure – and then find yourself quite disappointed at the actual experience of slogging along for hours in sub-freezing winds. Hard work is seldom “fun”, and Chicago definitely has a reputation for piling on the work. </p>
<p>I’d note that part of the shared experience of an intense environment like Chicago’s is that everyone complains a lot. I didn’t attend Chicago, but I did go to law school – and I can assure you that law students spend all their time griping about how much they hate school and hate their professors and how miserable they are – and as soon as they graduate they morph into proud boosters of their alma mater – the more time passes, the more fond memories of their law school days emerge.</p>
<p>I agree with post #358. He gave his experience. DonnaL gave her son’s experience. Neither is more valid than the other.
Transferring is not something to be undertaken lightly. There may be a financial angle. There would certainly be an issue of meeting different sets of requirements.</p>
<p>I do think that there is an emphasis on “life of the mind” at UofC–at least among its advocates and the writing prompts are supposed to uncover those who would thrive in that atmosphere. That is because the core curriculum enables students in the same cohort to discuss class readings outside of class. There’s something to be said for that, and I, for one, love the idea. My S, however, took many classes with his friends and did discuss readings with them over meals. But he also enjoyed discussing his EC with another group of friends–an EC I would never have thought he would have gotten involved in. It brought out his creative side.
Both my Ss used the Common Application; their essays turned out very different both in content and voice, reflecting their different personalities and interests.</p>
<p>Whats so funny about northstar is that she thinks I haven’t figured out the next few steps of my life, or that somehow posting on CC prevents me from doing that. I also like that she’s shocked- shocked I say!!! that someone might take time out to criticize their school. Someone get the smelling salts.</p>
<p>No, I am not shocked that someone would criticize their school. I criticized my school a lot before and after I went there, and I still criticize some aspects of it.</p>
<p>I’m shocked – shocked – that someone who has graduated from a college is taking their free time to create a name here reflecting their hate of their college, and also is repeatedly posting their complaints about their college.</p>
<p>I’d think that someone who has graduated from college would have more interesting things to do with their time. If that person has spent 4 years in misery, I’d also think they’d be thrilled now to be away from that college, and would be doing their best to enjoy their current life instead of rehashing their unpleasant college experiences.</p>
<p>There’s the crux of it. I think there’s a world of difference between saying “this is qualitatively different, and it’s better for me / my interests and desires” and “this is qualitatively different, and it’s uniformly better for everyone and everyone should strive for this.” I see Chicago boosters as saying the former, not the latter. </p>
<p>Man, some of you really have inferiority complexes about what Chicago students allegedly say. Me, I’m happy that they have a place that they (generally) like (IhateUofC notwithstanding), and I’ve never felt that they lorded it over anyone else.</p>
<p>The student feels like sharing his experience might be of value to prospective applicants.
Didn’t know one had to have an approved raison d’etre to hang around CC. </p>
<p>This poster has a shocking 39 posts to his credit-- and assumptions are made that he is wasting his time on CC, rather than all the better things he should be doing…</p>
<p>Many posters come across to me as having a singular purpose on CC: to exalt their alma mater at every turn, to exalt the school their kid is attending at every turn, to promote their political agenda etc.</p>
<p>"The student feels like sharing his experience might be of value to prospective applicants.
Didn’t know one had to have an approved raison d’etre to hang around CC. "</p>
<p>I still find it odd that a person’s only purpose on CC appears to let people know how bad their alma mater is.</p>
<p>I can understand more people who come here to try to attract people to their alma mater or to where their kids attend school. They had a good experience, and others to have the same.</p>
<p>If, however, one had a bad experience with one’s alma mater it seems that most people would be focused more on enjoying their current life – a job or graduate school – than building an on-line personality that’s only about disparaging their alma mater.</p>
<p>It reminds me of people who spend their time telling others how horrible their ex was. Why center one’s life on one’s unhappy past when one can be creating a happy present?</p>
<p>“Me, I’m happy that they have a place that they (generally) like (IhateUofC notwithstanding), and I’ve never felt that they lorded it over anyone else.”</p>
<p>I feel the same way. It makes me happy when people find good fits even if that good fit is Yale. :)</p>
<p>I’m with broetchen. For students and parents who frequent these boards, it’s useful to read both positive and negative reviews of colleges. Posters should be able to voice unfavorable opinions about their schools without fearing they’ll be personally attacked. It’s also fine for posters to disagree, even vehemently, with particular reviews. But the ad hominem attacks being launched against UofC here cross the line, IMO. These kinds of insults suppress open communication on CC. Other posters may decide to just shut up rather than risk similar censure.</p>
<p>I don’t think that than an online personality that has less than 40 posts is centering one’s life around an unhappy past.</p>
<p>For all we know, the student may be doing all kinds of amazing things with his life.
His thoughts on his experience are just as valuable as those who are loving their time there. And frankly, probably more valuable, than those posters who relentlessly boost their favorite school no matter the topic.</p>
<p>What ad hominem attacks against IhateUofC, who has launched a heckuva lot of ad hominem attacks against me?</p>
<p>I have nothing against people who hate U of C. I didn’t go there and have never been there or applied to it. I do take offense if someone says that I am bossy or have an inflated ego by asking why they stayed at a school they hated, and why they created a CC name reflecting hate of their alma mater.</p>
<p>I would find it odd for a student or alum of any college to show up on CC only to tell everyone what a horrible place their alma mater is. What IhateUofC is doing is something I’ve never seen anyone else do here, and I wonder why the only thing that IhateUofC seems to care about is letting others know how bad his/her alma mater is.</p>
<p>If the poster were using their experience to help students figure whether to transfer or whether a school might be a good fit for them, I could understand. I don’t understand why it’s so important for IhateuofC to tell everyone that s/he hates UofC. What’s the point? </p>
<p>I hate lima beans, but I’m not going to name myself Ihatelimabeans and then post on recipe boards.</p>
<p>I think that you drew the conclusions you wanted to draw from the marketing, and ignored the parts you didn’t want to hear. You liked the “Life of the Mind” brochure and created a mental picture in line with what you imagined, with a somewhat romanticized view of the college life you wanted Chicago to be.</p>
<p>You chose to discard or ignore the information you didn’t like, like those “where fun comes to die” t-shirts – ha, ha, very funny, but you never took any of that stuff as being true. </p>
<p>This isn’t an attack on your thought process – what you did is very normal. It’s called confirmation bias, and is basically the way all humans respond to and process information that comes their way. You soak up the stuff that seems to confirm what you want to believe, you ignore or discount the rest.</p>
<p>So its fine for you to “let prospective students” know… but they know already. Certainly there are many students who are deterred from applying because of Chicago’s reputation of unrelenting work – see [url=<a href=“http://uofcslogans.blogspot.com/]WHERE”>http://uofcslogans.blogspot.com/]WHERE</a> FUN COMES TO DIE<a href=“%5Bi%5DUniversity%20of%20Chicago%20–%20When%20You%20Sleep,%20We%20Study;%20Resistance%20is%20Futile;%20Where%20the%20End%20of%20the%20World%20Began;%20Hell%20Does%20Freeze%20Over;%20The%20Level%20of%20Hell%20Dante%20Forgot%5B/i%5D”>/url</a></p>
<p>So it’s not really a marketing issue – it’s more that your subjective expectations didn’t mesh with your experience of the reality. But that’s a common experience everywhere – in colleges, in jobs, in marriages. People go into new situations expecting the best, and the world is a flawed place. </p>
<p>You’d probably help more students by tempering your comments somewhat – recognizing that the problem was not external (Chicago’s marketing brochures), but internal and subjective in a way that might be shared by other prospective students.</p>
<p>“You’d probably help more students by tempering your comments somewhat – recognizing that the problem was not external (Chicago’s marketing brochures), but internal and subjective in a way that might be shared by other prospective students.”</p>
<p>I agree with this. Explaining how you ended up graduating from a college that you hated could help other students avoid such a fate at any college.</p>
<p>For instance, you could tell students about things you didn’t consider when applying to U of C and accepting their offer, and about things you didn’t consider when you stayed there instead of tranferring despite your misery.</p>
<p>Are there lessons that you learned by enduring that misery that you can apply to other aspects of your life? </p>
<p>Discussing these kind of things could keep other students from making similar mistakes.</p>
<p>IhateUofC has been labeled a malcontent. It has been suggested that he is “unpleasantly arrogant.” There’s been speculation that he only attended U of C because he couldn’t get into a higher ranked school. In my book, those are personal attacks. </p>
<p>Look, I’m not saying IhateUofC has behaved like a little gentleman on this thread. He has not. But I think he was pushed into a corner.</p>
<p>I don’t want to get into a ****ing contest with you or anyone else, northstarmom. Your contributions to this board are valuable. But I do think the level of civility around here has taken a tumble recently. So many angry posters (not you). JMO.</p>
<p>Saying he’s a malcontent isn’t flaming him. It’s the truth. Definition of malcontent: “a discontented person: a : one who bears a grudge from a sense of grievance or thwarted ambition.”</p>
<p>I don’t think that speculating about why he’s so unhappy about U of Chicago is flaming him either. It really is odd for someone to build their CC identity around hating the school that they attend.</p>
<p>I thought it was odd that one person in my Harvard class has been very vocal to classmates about hating Harvard and blaming it for his not attaining his dream career. Then, I read in his autobiography and saw that he now is taking responsibility for being lazy at Harvard, and therefore not attaining what he had dreamed of.</p>
<p>I had long wondered about why decades after graduating and after attaining enviable success in the field that he did enter, he still was telling others that Harvard ruined his life. In his case, it appears that he was blaming Harvard because he didn’t want to blame himself.</p>
<p>I’m wondering whether IhateUofC is doing something similar: turning his rage and disappointment against U of C instead of taking responsibility for the decisions he made in his own life.</p>
<p>Actually, I think all students would benefit from getting away from a simplistic love vs. hate dichotomy. I don’t think its necessarily a bad thing for a student to stick things out at a college where he or she is not particularly happy – in fact, I could argue the opposite, that Americans tend to place too much emphasis on short-term “happiness” to their detriment in pursuing various goals. Example: is the kid who takes on massive debt in order to attend their dream school, where indeed they are happy – really better off in the long run than the student who settles for the public U. with the full ride scholarship, where perhaps they felt socially alienated by a party atmosphere – but graduated with honors and emerged debt-free? </p>
<p>I think that all students – and parents – would benefit from more nuance and less absolutism. Despite the screen name, the “hate” that was felt toward Chicago could not have been too intense, because somewhere along the line the student weight options and figured that it was better to stay and bear it than leave. So it is far more likely that the poster had very mixed emotions – along with ups and downs along the way. </p>
<p>No college is going to match up 100% with the expectations of its applicants, and experiences are highly individualized. Two students with different majors may never take the same classes with the same professors, perhaps never sit in the same classrooms. Dorm and roommate assignments can make all the difference in the world. All any one student can offer is their subjective experience, which might have been better or worse if they had happened to pursue a different major, started their experience on a different floor or wing of their dorm, not contracted mono during their sophomore year, never met the girl or boyfriend who (a) dumped them, (b) became their life soulmate.</p>
<p>There are characteristics of Chicago that seem to be borne out and are uniformly shared. For example, the winters are very cold. No one would dispute that. But on an individual level, the response to cold could be very different. If a kid graduated and moved to Phoenix, declaring that they hated snow and that they never wanted to live in a cold place again – those feelings would be valid, but certainly not universal. So its useful to talk about specifics, not so useful to project individual responses and feelings onto others.</p>
<p>Wow- I take a few hours to go to a college basketball game (Rah Rah!!) and the thread explodes!</p>
<p>I think it is important to share the negatives about particular schools. I would NOT expect a recent college graduate to choose a screen name announcing a hatred of his or her school. Whatever.</p>
<p>I know I get slammed when I try to (respectfully) point out some of the negatives of my son’s school (my daughter’s school had no negatives ). Students (and parents) who have selected a “dream school” do not seem receptive to hearing about the downsides. In the case of the Ivy my son attends, there are some definite downsides. In fact, one main reason he almost transferred to Chicago was because he felt a lack of intellectual passion that he thought he would find at Chicago. Maybe that would not have been the case! He also felt there were a few “errors” in the marketing of the school he attends. I try to point these out on CC, but usually wind up p1$$ing people off. He stayed and created the environment for himself that he wanted. He wanted a more traditional college experience than he thought Chicago would offer and it all worked out. He is very appreciative of the strengths of his school and, at this point (he is a senior) most of the criticisms are mine. I think IHateUofC could be very helpful on these forums, but I would suggest a change of names.</p>
<p>There are schools I criticize- SMU is one of them. I don’t “hate” it, but for most students, I could come up with a better choice. The school is thriving, though, so for many students it is a wonderful place. </p>
<p>I really don’t understand why the topic of UChicago gets people so wrapped around the axle. It is what it is. I can not begin to tell you the odd things that occurred there during my 3 years on campus. We had one famous professor who wouldn’t set foot in the law school because a very liberal anti-war columnist had been admitted and was a student. The professor returned to his teaching duties in the law school when the columnist graduated! To me (a state school grad), the UChicago undergraduates appeared to have dropped in from some other planet. It’s gotten a lot more “normal”. It wasn’t so much back in the 70s. I really got an appreciation for the place during my son’s college search and through the people I have met here on CC who have kids there. It is awesome, but it is NOT for everyone. Neither is Vanderbilt. Neither is Liberty. It all comes back to…FIT.</p>
). Students (and parents) who have selected a “dream school” do not seem receptive to hearing about the downsides. In the case of the Ivy my son attends, there are some definite downsides. In fact, one main reason he almost transferred to Chicago was because he felt a lack of intellectual passion that he thought he would find at Chicago. Maybe that would not have been the case! He also felt there were a few “errors” in the marketing of the school he attends. I try to point these out on CC, but usually wind up p1$$ing people off. He stayed and created the environment for himself that he wanted. He wanted a more traditional college experience than he thought Chicago would offer and it all worked out. He is very appreciative of the strengths of his school and, at this point (he is a senior) most of the criticisms are mine. I think IHateUofC could be very helpful on these forums, but I would suggest a change of names.</p>