<p>Mini…if you went from 115th to 1st to Oxford, then you are the quintessential poster boy for The Sons From Space. (TSFS)</p>
<p>I’ve always believed that boys get a huge hit of testosterone at age 17 or so and when they do–look out. The laser focus comes on and they are ready to rock up to any challenge. What a great story.</p>
<p>I thought mini meant he went from 115th at Stuy to the top of his class at Williams.</p>
<p>You got it. I wasn’t first in Purple Heaven, but reasonably close. (That’s what got me sent to Oxford). And the work was much easier, and less of it. (I was NOT close to first in my class at Oxford, but there the work was even easier, although there was an awful lot of unfinished writing. No “finished products” were required - they accepted the fact that students weren’t writing for academic publication, and so there was little in the way of the cult of footnotes, etc.)</p>
<p>I got into Eph Country off the waiting list.</p>
<p>I didn’t get smarter when I hit Ephville. I did learn how to write better. I used many more mind-altering substances, and became more creative. I didn’t find a huge number of likeminded students, though there were many talented ones, and many more with the grace that came of upper class “breeding”. (That might be different today, which for me would have been too bad, because, looking back at it, it was a major, even pivotal, part of my education, even if it made me uncomfortable). And I found subjects to be passionate about, even if I was confused a good part of the time.</p>
<p>Alchemy, your prose is fine. You’re smart enough to find out from the professors ahead of time what style of citations you’ll need to use. Most kids even with substandard high school educations catch on pretty quickly. Lots of kids who should be well prepared coast and don’t do nearly as well. The only schools where I thought the rigor of the curriculum was scary were MIT and Caltech, but even there, the less prepared kids do catch up for the most part, to some extent because I think kids from lousy high school often are stronger potential students than those raised with silver spoons in their mouths.</p>
<p>“Similarly, a school with profs who don’t produce as much top research – like Harvey Mudd – might have a curriculum that’s much more rigorous (in the sense of both challenging and mathematically rigorous) than many top departments whose professors clearly sit higher on the academic totem pole.”</p>
<p>True, Mudd is not a research institution. It does, however, produce probably some of the most research for any undergraduate program around. Last year Mudd engineers had their names on roughly two dozen patents (pending). Many are individually published and all will add to the tens of thousands of pages of clinic reports produced annually by the school.</p>