<p>To add to Brinestorm’s list: </p>
<p>Some interesting statistics about Calls of 2006 (don’t ask me how Tedd O’Neill got them:))</p>
<p>51% of you are women, 49% of you, men.
32% were editors of high school publications.
45% of you were members of varsity sports teams in high school
59% of you participated in community service.
23% of you were participants in high school or community theatrical productions.
32% of you think you were sent the wrong admissions letter.
3% of you are still on Harvard’s waiting list.
58% went back to your high schools last week and were asked either whether you didn’t get into college or had dropped out already.
90% slept until noon every day in September and your parents asked, repeatedly, when you were supposed to be in Chicago.
18% of you have had friends ask you, “UIC? Or U of C?” The one on the west side or the one on the south side?
2% thought you applied to UIC
61% of you think you will be taught by 73 Nobel-prize winners.
36% think the weather really won’t be so bad.
12% are already contemplating a name change - Chucky will soon be Charles, Shelley will be Morgan.
47% started to read Proust, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Gibbon’s History, The Tale of Genji this summer.
89% gave up less than half way through.
20% have younger siblings who can’t wait until they can use your room, your stereo, your CD’s, your clothes, the extra car - those same siblings you wrote about last year whom you once so loathed but then realized how much you loved them, just in time for the admissions essay (is the pendulum now about to swing in the other direction?)
10% still really think you can actually study business in the College.
8% think that, once you get here, despite the core, you really won’t ever have to take another math or science class in your life.
27% have told your friends that it doesn’t really mean anything that Antonin Scalia and John Ashcroft have U of C connections.
23% have thought about what kind of car they could have had if they had gone to community college instead of Chicago and have calculated the yearly income on four times the yearly cost of an education at Chicago if invested wisely.
89% have already started to tell their friends at other colleges how much harder you all work than they do.
20% have, in a wild flight of fancy, imagined that they would move to Chicago and live in an orange, pink, yellow and purple dorm.</p>
<p>source: <a href=“College Admissions at the University of Chicago”>College Admissions at the University of Chicago; ; convocation speech-class of 2006.</p>