<p>“The “work hard/party hard” idea is a myth. The more you party the less you work. You can’t really do both “hard”, if “hard” means spending a lot of time at it. Only a moron would choose a college because of the parties.”</p>
<p>i think they mean working your ass off sunday - wed/thurs, then going crazy on the weekend. if you work really hard, you definetly need some down time, and some people choose to do this by getting wasted. from the schools ive visted, the big public schools had more parties, but the small private school kids partied much harder because they worked harder</p>
<p>Working hard is not an excuse for getting wasted every weekend. A hardworking, private school drunk is just as pathetic. Alcoholism at college is so expected, accepted, and tolerated that universities are afraid to crack down because they will lose enrollment.</p>
<p>work hard/party hard is not a myth. its just that there are very few top notch schools that can pull it off. Many ivy league kids besides the schools noted as exceptions have large masses of antisocial kids. They lock themselves in their rooms and do algebra equations during their free time. Although nobody wants to admit this, having a social personality is a asset in the workplace. It can help you climb the social ladder and make connections (not to mention helps get a gf/bf).</p>
<p>Certain schools like Vanderbilt, Washington and Lee, and UVA are aberrations. They breed a student body that can handle rigorous academics and still party as hard as the elite party schools. </p>
<p>Work Hard/Party Hard means study intensely monday to thursday, being highly efficient, taking good notes, and doing well on tests. While on the weekends having a great time hitting the bars/club hard. Drinking is usually involved (although not required) along with dancing and meeting members of the opposite sex.</p>
<p>I agree with the OP, that having a balance is crucial. And its clear that those who work and party hard have reached the perfect ideal. They realize the importance of maintaining a good GPA and going to top notch graduate schools enabling them to land the best jobs. They are well balanced socially and intellectually. Further, they realize college will only happen once and they want to make most of their time here.</p>
<p>Alcoholism is a disease. Most studies have shown that heavy college drinkers are less likely to become alcoholics than their non-college peers and few become alcoholics at all. It’s a four year right of passage than most put aside when they join the working world. For many it is also a damn good time and you can party without drinking heavily all the time. Some prefer other forms of mind alteration–or none at all.</p>
<p>ummm penn is known for alcohol and pton is known for parties. how is darmouth higher than pton? lol</p>
<p>“ivies dont know how to party”
if u say parties are only parties if they have cheap ass poor-folk beer crap, then i guess so. beer is for the poor. pton has quality alcohol with quality parties. if ur going to any party that is mainly poor-mans beer then thats lame</p>
<p>orangeisland83-
Your ability to put a positive spin on a terrible habit, along with your social personality, might land you a job drawing cartoons for a tobacco company. </p>
<p>Binge drinking, any substance abuse, places you in danger in many ways.
It is a waste of time, money and energy. It can be tragic. Even one beer is not healthy.</p>
<p>Binge drinking is often a factor in academic problems, date rape, accidents, and vandalism. Even the most selective college has more than its share of drunken losers and I would urge new students to avoid them. Nobody should be that desperate for friendship. </p>
<p>You might be able to request special housing with other students who don’t want the social pressures to drink, smoke, or use drugs. Students who live in “wellness” housing have higher gpas. High school females may already wonder whether most males are fools. Spending one evening at a frat party with a room full of inebriated jerks will remove all doubt.</p>
<p>Brewerys and liquor companies are making fools of college students, making huge profits from their partially wasted lives. College administrations do not have the backbone to reinforce drinking laws. Then they wonder why graduation rates are not higher.</p>
<p>If you think that disaster can’t strike you, you are mistaken. I read an article in the local paper this morning about a male student at the University of Rochester who was arrested for first degree rape. He met a girl at a frat party, they went up to his room to watch a movie, she “fell asleep while kissing him” and she woke up naked. A few years ago, an MIT student from a nearby town died of acute alcohol poisoning. This winter, a college student in upstate NY failed to show up for a varsity soccer game on a Saturday. He had fallen over the railing of a bridge while walking home alone from a bar and drowned.</p>
<p>There will be temptations and pressures at college but you do not have to succomb to them.</p>
<p>People who know how to socialize and hoist a few tend to do a lot better in business than their cloistered nerd counterparts. They hire the nerds to crunch the numbers and work all night while they do the entertaining and client development. That’s my experience with 30 years of work in a competitive high income field.</p>
<p>Barrons - but if Harvard is full of nerds (who go through your process), then how do they always end up at the top of the businss world? Not to mention that MIT is arguably the nerdiest place on earth… yet if you took all of the companies that they’ve started, they would be top 20 in the world as an economy… and last time i checked, the CEOs of Citigroup, Chairman of the NYSE, Ford all graduated from MIT… yup… nerds are computing machines who cannot socialize.</p>
<p>I fail to see what is wrong with being a good student and drinking/partying. </p>
<p>Either a) you’re attempting to control the way others act and at that point, worry about yourself or </p>
<p>b) you’ve never done the work hard routinue or don’t know those who have. You’re not qualified as a parent or a student who doesn’t go out to comment on the subject.</p>
<p>Schools like Penn, UVA, etc. prove that you can both work and play hard. If you become an alcoholic then yeah, you shouldn’t play so hard.</p>
<p>collegehelp–partying does not always equal disaster, and a few random horror stories (while horrible, yes) do not even come close to tons of stories of very very successful and happy people who do party (and even <em>gasp</em> drink alcohol)…i mean come on, you mentioned something that happened a few years ago as one of your examples. </p>
<p>true, some people take it too far (all your stories were examples of this) but its not fair to make generalizations, and to condemn orangeisland83 for making perfectly valid points (“Your ability to put a positive spin on a terrible habit, along with your social personality, might land you a job drawing cartoons for a tobacco company.” – now thats just rude.)</p>
<p>one other thing, irock1ce: you said “but if Harvard is full of nerds (who go through your process), then how do they always end up at the top of the businss world?” which is a valid point, but not completely true. there are TONS of extremely successful/smart/famous people who did NOT graduate from ivies. and i know people who graduated from harvard who are NOT successful BECAUSE they have no social skills (just for example i had a science teacher who was a harvard grad but didnt even know how to communicate with her students because she was so socially inept and self-conscious… i felt bad for her but she does prove my point).</p>
<p>anyway, everyone needs to stop making “holier-than-thou” generalizations.</p>
<p>I 100% agree with the poster and his list. </p>
<p>Parties arent everything but honestly it does help form community and get many people to get to know each other. Chicago and Hopkins are the worst, I could never go to those two.</p>
<p>Collegehelp, since you’re judging drinking so harshly, can I safely assume that you’ve been drunk before and therefore have the right to so negatively judge all of us who do partake in drinking? I respect people who don’t drink, so how about you give us some respect? The situations you cited were all extreme cases of people abusing alcohol. If you can handle it in moderation, I guarantee you won’t fall off bridges and drown, wake up naked or die of alcohol poisoning. It’s all about self-control. Deeming people “drunken losers” is just as bad as people making fun of you for being a prudish jerk :).</p>
<p>As you know Harvard prides itself in taking the cream of the crop and often very well connected students. I consider that a great advantage. They should do much better than only tying some midwest state school.</p>
<p>Dear anti-party school person (a.k.a. loser)-
Excuse me, but college is all about casual sex. And let’s be honest, what is casual sex without drunkenness? Really, college is just one big drunken orgy. Sorry you missed the class on having fun in high school. </p>
<pre><code> Good luck at the University of Lame-Ville.
</code></pre>
<p>Firstly to the skank, college is not about casual sex. If you want to go to a college for casual sex, go find a whorehouse, that’s the best place to learn casual sex. In addition, i’m sure you’ll find a few fat bastards who will actually be good at ****ing there. :)</p>
<p>Anyway, i think drinking, partying, and sex at colleges is perfectly appropriate. As long as one is responsible and doesn’t go over board.</p>