<p>PG - what impresses you most about them?</p>
<p>I am trying to think if anyone I know would consider the Mona Lisa the greatest painting in the world and coming up totally blank. So, I guess this, too, has to do with your immediate social group. I am not going to experiment by asking people in the street. ; )</p>
<p>*I am trying to think if anyone I know would consider the Mona Lisa the greatest painting in the world and coming up totally blank. *</p>
<p>It’s very likely the most famous, or competitive with very few other paintings for most famous, at least within the group consisting of educated and semi-educated Westerners and honorary Westerners.* For most people “most famous” has a tendency to morph into “best” if they’re just thinking about something in a casual way. (Coke! McDonalds! New York City! Einstein! The Eiffel Tower! Harvard!)** </p>
<p>*meaning people who value, aspire to, pay attention to, etc. Western culture - not really meant as any kind of putdown, just can’t think of a better phrase.</p>
<p>**No, Makenna, I have absolutely no evidence for that statement. Just pulled it out of my backside.</p>
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<p>Exactly. And college is only four years of one’s life, determined when you are merely a teenager in high school. I wouldn’t judge anyone nor do I think they should judge me according to a single piece of data.</p>
<p>What impresses me about the service academies? The fact that these are the very folks who are serving our country and putting their lives on the line to defend me and mine while I sit here in my comfy little suburban enclave? (Was that a trick question?)</p>
<p>Harvard: heard of it.
Stanford: heard of it.
Yale - “Good heavens! A Yale man!”: heard of it.
Princeton - “Princeton can use a guy like Joel.”: heard of it.</p>
<p>Love Story: never heard of it.</p>
<p>I think Starry Night is the most amazing painting I’ve ever seen, but that’s purely subjective.</p>
<p>If I had it to do all over again, I’d go to Oxford. I like the British system and the town is just amazing.</p>
<p>I agree that those who go to the service academies are the ones who impress me the most. The few kids I’ve known who have gone to Annapolis have been so well rounded and such rigorous thinkers I have been impressed with them, even as teens.</p>
<p>Hah=vahd? eh. It’s okay. I’m just not a fan of Boston at all, for some reason.</p>
<p>^^In my rural community the state flagship is much more highly regarded than any HYP and when someone’s kid gets admitted you’d better be appropriately impressed and awestruck because it is really really big deal. It is a major life changing event, sometimes for the whole family.</p>
<p>I’ve been hanging with a local farmer (retired, gentleman type) who is back home after a career on the west coast. I always understood he had gone to the state flagship. Just recently it was revealed he also has a degree from H. In the context of a discussion of how he disappointed his parents’ ambitions for him by his failure in state politics (thus had to go out west to earn a living lol) and the potential national political career was the only reason that H degree made any sense in his parents’ mind. His father actually told him that was why they were paying for it.</p>
<p>adding: I generally prefer van gough to da vinci but as poetgrl points out… subjective. And my tastes have definitely changed as I’ve aged and learned a bit more. Maybe someday I will have a tiny bit of artistic taste. I can only hope. </p>
<p>Did he reveal the Harvard bit in confidence?</p>
<p>H never mentions his grad degree down here. Just his state U degree and only in the context of basketball. </p>
<p>Nobody has even asked me. Not even one time. Okay. One time because I was wearing a tshirt for Notre Dame, where I did not attend… But the sweatshirt fits perfectly. I got it at a garage sale one day when I was freezing cold and far from home. </p>
<p><< a discipline with a very rigid mindset like engineering or medicine.>></p>
<p>Ouch. I would say the better engineering programs encourage their students to be creative problem solvers.</p>
<p>"^^In my rural community the state flagship is much more highly regarded than any HYP and when someone’s kid gets admitted you’d better be appropriately impressed and awestruck because it is really really big deal. It is a major life changing event, sometimes for the whole family."</p>
<p>Right. Which is why Makenna’s whole proposition that “the moment someone says Harvard, it’s a conversation-stopper and everyone oohs and aaahhhhs” is so full of nonsense. Different parts of the country value or are impressed by different universities. </p>
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<p>Before I left for HBS, my staff gave me a tee-shirt that said, “Harvard, the Michigan of the east.” They thought I was stepping down.</p>
<p>@1moremom @keepittoyourself Yeah, I’d have said that engineering and medicine are both highly evidence-based disciplines and the programs that promote dogmatic fact treatment of pull-it-out-of-your-backside opinions would be more those in the Victim Studies departments.</p>
<p>responding to poetgrl #148</p>
<p>Well he didn’t ask me to keep it a secret, but I think it was understood I wouldn’t be spreading it around. It was after a country party (where no one has to go far to get home) so we’d had several bottles of wine and were all relieving our youths and how we ended up where we were and it was in the context of a whole lot of other things going on in his extended family and explaining all the back story of his family (a very old one, many of whose members have welcomed us into their community, for which we are very grateful) Last week his wife came over to tell me a bunch of stuff about the community from decades ago so I would be up to speed on all the implications of a recent scandal. H and I don’t ever ask a question about anything. We don’t dare. : )</p>
<p>Out here, no one has asked me if/where I went to college either. Sometimes they ask if I was a teacher. </p>
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<p>They may be evidence-based, but there seems to be something about the ‘engineering mindset’ that cannot handle ambiguity. Seriously. For example, a lot of fundamentalists are engineers, as are many creationist ‘scientists’. The Israeli government even wondered if there is something about the way engineers think that makes them more prone to terrorism.Here’s some reading</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/why-are-so-many-would-be-terrorists-engineers-1.263214”>http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/why-are-so-many-would-be-terrorists-engineers-1.263214</a></p>
<p>poetgrl: I bought some flagship tee shirts to wear at home, working in the yard, painting, etc. So far no one has asked if I went to flagship, but do assume I’m supporting the correct team. Which, of course, is the important thing. : ) I am all about fitting in. Sometimes I even look up the scores.</p>
<p>@keepittoyourself That is an interesting article, thanks. I’ve also noticed from time to time that a seemingly disproportionate number of “terrorists,” “militants,” what-have-you are identified as engineers in news reports, and wondered about that. I don’t think the Ha’aretz article comes close to answering the question but the correlation is interesting. I tried to look around on the Birzeit University website (that being the only university in the Palestinian territories that I know offhand, so being the most well-known it must therefore be the best) to see if there was a listing of the comparative enrollment in its various programs (is the engineering program the largest?), but couldn’t find any numbers.</p>
<p>The guy who won the Nobel peace prize today is an engineer.</p>
<p>Plus the colors are good, which is one nice thing, alh.</p>
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<p>Guess that tee-shirt wouldn’t have even been printed if it had said, “Princeton, the Michigan of the east.” It had to say “Harvard” to have the impact it was meant to have – that is, so people would “get it” and think it cute or amusing at all. Any other school just would have drawn a blank stare or a “huh?”
That all I’ve been saying: it’s about impact. That the joke was that someone thought you were “stepping down” (if really so), just proves that there had to be an answer to the question, “stepping down from what?” And what school did they pick to make their point so that everyone who saw that tee shirt would “get it”? There’s only one.</p>
<p>Thank you for adding to the evidence.</p>