Trip report: Bates, Bowdoin & Colby

mini
Tue, 25 Jul 2006 21:41:36 +0000

'I am quite suspicious, personally, of stereotypes of schools as cutthroat - having never seen it myself in some very competitive schools. Doesn’t mean that kids don’t suffer depression/stress etc. But due to competitiveness from other kids? I question it."

Well, I don’t. If you take a school with a very large number of entering premeds, and they know in advance that only 30% of those entering are ever going to get a recommendation from the screening committee, and that courses are designed to weed a large number of students out, and that these very same weeded out students would have become fine doctors had they gone to a midlevel state university, don’t you think that might occasionally lead to a little tinge of meanness in the overall competition?