Very interesting recent comments of a UChicago student

2Devils
Sun, 21 Jan 2024 18:35:36 +0000

marlowe1:

You can embrace the suck, because against all odds, you have earned the opportunity to feel like an idiot in the presence of some of the brightest minds on the planet. You won’t be the best! You will feel good if you can hold on to the middle of the pack, because the pack is excellent.

Per the students we know there, this is accurate. “Ass-kicked” means 2-3 Bs, though, and they DO feel as though its hard(after having all As in HS ) , but it’s not like the average is Cs.
The feeling that everyone is so smart and you have to work hard and are surrounded by brilliant profs and peers is not unique to UC. It definitely describes other super-elite schools as well, specifically the ones my kids attend(Penn, Duke). Very similar descriptions are used by the schools themselves, particularly in “preparing “ the parents to deal with the negative texts and calls that commonly come in October of Freshman yr at both. Uchicago reportedly has similar sentiments shared on parent pages/parent programming. There is a culture of talk-about-the-misery among a subset of elites, which seems to be more prevalent in subset of majors, and UC culture seems to embrace that feeling. I actually think embracing the mindset of getting one’s a$$ kicked and creating an expectation of such is much more healthy than not talking about it and pretending everyone is ok while silently suffering. The latter campus culture happens too, and doesn’t help IMO. Kudos to that poster for being real!