In my day, Stanford’s culture was ‘modest’ (about personal accomplishments). Students also tended to have a couple intellectual passions (often obsessions) that really drove them. My daughter’s like this, and she’ll start there in the fall, so maybe it’s still true.
As a gross generalization, like Duke, NU, and Vandy, Stanford’s more like a small version of a big state school (fraternities/sororities, big time sports), as opposed to a beefed-up LAC. In that way, Stanford may offer Ivy-caliber students a more ‘typical’ US college experience rather than a pseudo-Oxbridge.
To maintain balance between STEM and liberal arts with relatively few students, Stanford’s programs (including professional schools) tend to be small, though still top rated. They also make a big deal about being interdisciplinary.
At the less pre-professional Ivies, openly aspiring to go into ibanking, finance, law, medicine, etc wasn’t the thing to do. While many end up going that route, it wasn’t something most openly discussed/bragged about from their earliest undergrad years as opposed to students/alums I’ve observed from the more pre-professionally oriented Ivies/peer elites.
No. Just some random undergraduate who rudely told my visiting Prof friend to “move aside”. Was going to dress him down for his rudeness, but my Prof friend motioned for me to stop saying 'he’s not worth it".
Incidentally, Ted Cruz was part of the same graduating class as the in-law who attended P. And she confirms many other accounts that he tended to rub many the wrong way during their undergrad years.
@cobrat – pray tell, when was the last time you visited all these campuses, or your friends/relatives? How much time have you spent at each one of them in the last five years? By my reckoning, you went to college at least a decade or so ago. Your impressions are old. As someone who has spent a lot of time on the Brown campus in the last few years, I know that from my own experience your descriptions aren’t valid. Brown was a quirky place in the 1970s. Not so much anymore.
"Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Dartmouth seem to have far less pre-professional inclinations among students than Cornell, Columbia, MIT, Caltech, UPenn.
Especially the exceedingly widespread obsession among Columbia, UPenn, Cornell, and MIT students over Wall street/ibanking/finance careers, law, medicine which dwarfed those I’ve seen at Harvard, Princeton, etc"
Finance, law and pre-med are still popular, but in recent years, the new sheriff in town is increasingly Technology. Now I am seeing strong CS, math, engineering, and stats students who are only interested in Tech related fields and are not interested in even considering Goldman Sachs or similar companies.
Also I would put Harvard & Princeton in with Columbia, Penn, Cornell, & MIT as schools where a significant % of students take professional jobs when they graduate. In my mind Yale, Brown & Dartmouth do seem to be more liberal-arts focused and less pre-professional than the others.
Of the 20-something kids I’ve helped send to Brown over the last 5 years (ish), not one was “quirky” in the usual sense. All were driven, disciplined, pre-professional types–applied math majors, debaters, etc. Nary a unicyclist or juggler in the lot.
@marvin100 That’s interesting. Because of their relationship with RISD, there seemed to be lots of artsy kids there.
I’d consider myself to be somewhat ‘quirky’ - I’m into organic gardening, reading, liberal arts education, and drawing.
Then again, I don’t know anyone there. I’m just sharing my impression from my visit and info about myself.
From the dozens of Brown alums and friends I’ve known…including many HS classmates, only a tiny handful didn’t fit the genteel version of the artsy radical progressive quirky type in some way. This includes recent graduates and current students.
There’s also a pattern of Brown alums/applicants applying to colleges which are similar such as Vassar, Oberlin, etc.
Incidentally, I’ve also seen many close friendships between alums/students of Brown, Vassar, and Oberlin…including dating/married couples because the similarities are enough to form one area of commonality.
And of course, I should acknowledge there a few students who are the exception as well.
Most college classmates would consider yours truly to be one as I’m nowhere near as quirky and definitely nowhere near as radical progressive politically as most of my undergrad classmates when we attended.
And there could be some minor shifts in campus culture in the interim. For instance, I’d probably fit in much better at the Oberlin after ~2003* than when I attended or moreso…in the early '90s and before.
Seems alums who graduated on this date and afterwards were far less radical and willing to identify as Green/Democrats politically. Parties which would have been considered by most Oberlin classmates of my time and before as being "too conservative/right wing" for them.
I found Cornell to be very cut throat. Everyone questioned their smarts because most of the colleges are NY funded state colleges. Also, most have their sights set on Harvard, Princeton and Yale graduate schools thinking Cornell isn’t good enough on their resumes.
I agree that only someone who has actually attended all of these schools could possibly say with precision exactly how they differ from one another.
I would also suggest that if you want quirky kids, you can find them at just about any school. Ditto every other category of descriptor you can think of. Schools try to admit a fairly well-rounded group of students. They don’t go “oh, we’re supposed to be the quirky school, so we’d better not admit anyone who hasn’t cosplayed Shugo Chara at ComicCon!”
In the end, I think the Ivies are going to resemble each other more than any of them will resemble your average state school.
I started a thread asking people to describe their kids in a few words. My belief is that if we parents describe our kids accurately others reading the descriptions should tell them apart. I guess it’d be harder to describe your school than your kid.
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I would also suggest that if you want quirky kids, you can find them at just about any school.
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I agree - one of the reasons it was so hard for my son to turn down Harvard was that he spent the entire weekend with kids who watch sci-fi movies and played board games. He had a great time. But there’s no question that kids like him were thicker on the ground at Carnegie Mellon - and they also offered a lot more courses in the CS department.
