<p>I too was enjoying the conversation on the thread, and I’ve been thinking about sanjenferrer’s comments quite a bit in the last few days. I tutor underprivileged kids from Chicago’s South Side and from time to time, when they’re not bouncing off the walls or getting in each other’s faces, some of them do some really smart AND really intellectual things. They absorb. They think. Some of them fess up to even liking it. If a third grader from Englewood can impress me, I’m sure a Northwestern kid can too! :-P</p>
<p>When conversations like these come up, I often think about me and the reason I chose this school and my brother and the reason he chose his school. We make a great comparison, because throughout high school, we had nearly identical grades and scores and had similar extracurricular involvement. As smart as he is, though and as smart as his friends in high school were (one is now a Rhodes scholar and the other is a Marshall scholar), he made it clear that he did NOT want to be in an academic/nerd environment, but he DID want to be around smart kids. He found a school that fit his needs pretty well.</p>
<p>I, on the other hand, felt like I could benefit from a self-consciously academic community, based on who my friends in high school were (largely the outcast crowd and the intellectual crowd) and what kinds of people I wanted to meet more of. I should point out too (as giantredlobster pointed out) that I have a real spectrum of friends and acquaintances here. I don’t think any one “personality” dominates this school, but what tends to be the biggest uniter is that these kids like to learn and are in a community where learning has such an emphasis.</p>
<p>I also meant to add that there is a difference between “intellectual” and “academic.” I think of “intellectual” as somebody who pursues knowledge on their own time and is well acquainted with music, art, sciences, literature, movies, etc. I have friends who are particularly adept at say, comparing Kafka to Bruce Springsteen, but they are not quite as devoted to schoolwork as I was. Chicago would not be the right place for them, but they’ve found places for themselves at schools like Oberlin, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, and Carleton. Some of them decided to make their undergraduate education pre-professional and are studying business, journalism, and education at other schools that are not known to be “intellectual.”</p>