Thoughts about Statistics, Misconceptions, and Stupidity in Admissions

unalove
Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:47:30 +0000

Nice, very nice. I like reading posts like this from somebody other than me (or JHS, who has two kids who have gone through this process and are both at Chicago).

I think about how, if at all, Chicago has changed me all the time, and whether I could be changed if I went a different route (say I didn’t feel like I was able to pay for tuition or I didn’t get in). I’ve come to the conclusion that I could pretty easily find other experiences that would be equally influential (anything from working in retail to Peace Corps to going to community college), but probably few that are influential in the particular way that Chicago has been influential to me.

In other words, it’s not easy to find a forum for combining lots of smart, capable, intellectually supercharged and good-looking 18-22 year olds and setting them in the oven to bake for four years I did my best to provide a list of schools that also do that on the intellectual level in this link:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/612879-if-not-chicago-then.html

The only thing I’d disagree with the OP on is the assertion that quality in teaching is nil at research universities. One of the best teachers I ever had has taught at both LAC’s and universities (prefers u’s) and some of my best teachers were-- gasp!-- graduate students who are working on their dissertations and teaching classes in their field of expertise. In most ways, the teaching quality here has been superior to the teaching quality at my high school.

I think part of the reason Chicago tends to have excellent teachers is that teaching and learning is very much a two-way street here. If you’re the kind of student who wants to sit in the back of a lecture hall and escape the moment the class is over, you probably won’t come to Chicago. If you as a prof want nothing to do with undergraduates, let alone teach them in a small class, there are a lot of better places to work than here.