I really hope this isn't true about Chicago.

unalove
Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:20:52 +0000

I posted this on the other thread:



I think the singling out of the U of C for criticism in the OP is the real problem for me. A few things I’ll say at the bat:

1) I agree that intellectual know-how and people skills don’t always work together, and at times the people skills will trump the actual knowledge. Sometimes, though, it won’t.

2) I have been in a work environment over the summer where I felt that the secretary (who probably has no college degree, or perhaps a junior college degree) was doing a better job graduates of super-elite schools. What made the difference? While the super-elite grads obviously had the intellectual advantage, they did not have the personal interaction skills. I think you can find graduates of ANY college ANYWHERE who are more brain than they are handshake, and, as such, don’t necessarily make the best employees. If I were the boss at this office, I would have fired the super-elite grads for not being people-friendly enough and I would have kept ones who barely passed through college.

3) U of C students and other students who have liberal arts degrees have not been training to write resumes, but rather five-page papers on Plato or solve problems on quantum physics. While I think the skills employed in both are very transferable (be clear, concise, logical, and speak to your audience), perhaps some will tend to “overintellectualize” or “overanalyze” in an interview. Just because Plato has been bludgeoned to death in hum class, or the problem set requires a lot of background information doesn’t mean the reason you want X job should be bludgeoned to death in an interview.

4) I’m a little bit unclear what the subsidiary take-home message is here. Certainly one message is that brains won’t get you everything, but is another message that all U of C students are socially inept and not ready for real-world skills? That part of the argument simply doesn’t hold, because U of C students go into fields that require people skills and teamwork all the time (i.e. business, teaching, lawyering, doctors, etc.), and considering I hang out with them all day, I can testify that the majority have the people skills down. I would tend to agree that some have a bit of a problem talking to the “layman,” but I think that’s something that is an issue across all of the elite colleges and is probably a function of the economic background of the person before they graduated from the college rather than the college itself.