<p>Geez louise…you make me go through all that nonsense for a pitiful answer like that?!? I hereby remove you from my hypothetical world.</p>
<p>Good. I don’t like psychic adcoms anyway. :p</p>
<p>I’m bored so I’ll answer this directly: Top PhD grad schools in technical areas (sci-eng plus econ, math, and business) will almost always prefer the brilliant student – especially if there are reliable letters of recommendation and other indications (say winning the Putnam) which support the claim of brilliance. Indeed, in many cases PhD programs will prefer the “brilliant” kid with worse grades over the hard-working kid with straight A’s who’s well-rounded.</p>
<p>The top schools are looking for those who will bust the curve with high ability and hard work. They care a lot less about the “ordinary success” story. If the “brilliant” kid slacks off or cracks, they figure it won’t reflect badly on them. But at least they will have a lottery ticket on a possible future Big Brain or Nobel laureate.</p>
<p>Of course, the hard worker might turn out to do great things as well. But there’s a high correlation between brilliance and academic success in the highly mathematical/technical fields. At the end of the day, the kinds of successes where someone does poorly in school then does great later in life are more to be found in business than academia. And academics want to produce brilliant academics, no matter what else they may say for public consumption. A Warren Buffet doesn’t burnish a department’s reputation. A Feynman does.</p>
<p>Brilliance without effort and creativity will of course not lead very far, but in general, hard work without brilliance will face a rougher climb to the very top.</p>
<p>I’d tend to agree with “Not Quite Old.” The brilliant will often be preferred for academic posts in general, and grad school specifically. At the same time, real pluggers do make a real difference in some fields of academia (the more experimental areas); it’s just that theoreticians are seen as a higher breed of academic than experimentalists.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that this is the way things ought to be - it’s just the way things are. I mean, as one of my physics profs likes to point out, very few theoreticians have made a big difference in the development of, say, physics, while many experimentalists have made huge impacts. The few theoreticians there are mostly depended very heavily on the results of experimentalists. Still, within the ivory tower of academia, you’re just considered cooler if you’re an theorist… Meh, life just ain’t fair.</p>
<p>What endero4 said… It ain’t fair. It ain’t nice. It might not even be sensible. It’s just the way it works.</p>
<p>Just remember: All that stuff about well-roundedness and balance that got you into college? It doesn’t mean diddly when applying for most PhDs.</p>
<p>I would definitely go with the brilliant student. A less intelligent hard worker will only be able to reach a certain level. The brilliant student has the potential to do much more. Even if I had the opportunity to select a “more rounded” student, I would still opt for the brilliant student.</p>
<p>For the people who say the adcoms can’t tell, beware, this is what the LORs are for. I’ve been told by my program that they don’t place bets on what kind of student and researcher an applicant might be. A lot of schools ask their recommenders to rate applicants relative to all the other students they have encountered in their careers. I’ve seen questions specifically about raw intelligence. </p>
<p>I would take the harder working student. This is because in grad school you do most of the learning on your own and have to do a lot of your own grunt work. If something doesn’t work in the lab, you sit there and tweak it until it does. You build your own equipment, design your own software and systems. Someone who is just intelligent may be quicker to pick up on concepts, but it doesn’t show that they learned how to think, to analyze, or to teach themselves. There is always going to be some limit to what they know. A harder working student who is persistent has had more experience with problem-solving, is probably more creative, more willing to collaborate, know about more resources. These are all things that are highly valued in grad school, especially for engineering students. Remember, grad school is about your capability of thinking up and conducting original research and conveying those ideas to other people in a decent amount of time. I think a harder working student is simply more prepared to do so than someone who is just plain smart. I know a lot of very intelligent people who can’t handle the first time they can’t understand something right away. That’s basically death in grad school where you have to motivate yourself.</p>
<p>Yes, but potentially, the more intelligent would be able to do that independent work more easily and with less hand-holding than the less intelligent student because the less intelligent student may struggle with the material. Grad school research is no joke, and if a student is working that hard to get through undergrad, it’s entirely possible he/she will never make it through grad. I’ve heard those comments from professors, so I know it’s considered. I think it’s entirely reasonable to pick the smarter candidate.</p>
<p>BTW, I disagree with the 90/10 split, at least when it comes to grad school. Especially if we’re taling tier 1 and 2 schools, I think everyone has to have a minimum intelligence level (which is pretty high to begin with) and then add incredible effort on top of it. Sort of a 90/90, if you will. Hence the reason 50% of PhD students don’t finish.</p>
<p>It’s not necessarily true that the smart person will need less hand-holding. At top tier schools, there’s no hand-holding for anyone, so I still think that the harder working student will be able to be more independent. For example, I don’t believe that a person who never asks questions even knows how to ask the right questions. I also see smart people fail all the time because they don’t really know what it means to work “hard” and still haven’t learned how to study. Lots of smart people don’t work hard and settle for less than they could achieve b/c they convince themselves that given the right situation (ie. grad school where you have to be independent, etc.), they will just naturally stand out. But there is a lot more “doing” than “knowing” that goes on in grad school vs. undergrad. Grad schools don’t want people who never challenge themselves, or find challenges for themselves. This, of course, does not apply to the 8-year-old supergenius that was identified when he was 4 and has been training ever since to be the youngest Ph.D. ever. The reason why a lot of people don’t get their PhD is b/c they simply don’t finish their thesis. Some people just can’t handle a project like that or make the commitment, and it doesn’t have anything to do with how intelligent they are. I think that harder working people have a stronger sense of commitment than just smart people, b/c smart people think that they will be in demand anyways but may not believe they have to prove it.</p>
<p>On the other hand, it depends on what GPA both people are getting. If they are both only getting 3.5, then I’d take the harder working person. If they both have 4.0, I might take the smart person.</p>
<p>“Only” a 3.5, huh?</p>
<p>“At top tier schools, there’s no hand-holding for anyone, so I still think that the harder working student will be able to be more independent.”</p>
<p>Just because hand-holding is not available does not mean the less smart person will not need it. That’s why I said that the less smart person may be less likely to make it through grad school. I still honestly think that if undergrad is that much of a struggle, grad school will kill ya. And just because a smart person has never had to work ard for grades doesn’t mean they can’t. Lots of us were really, really bored in high school and didn’t exactly get challenged in undergrad, either. I did extra work just to seek the challenge, so I would say it’s possible to do so (and smart people should do it, as we’ve seen all over this board), but many really smart people would excel in the grad school atmosphere where they haven’t necessarily before.</p>
<p>My problem with this hypothetical situation is that I think it’s possible to be very, very smart and dedicated and hard-working without being brilliant-with-a-capital-B. </p>
<p>I mean, about whom are we talking? The kid at the top of his class at HYPSM, the one who took grad classes starting freshman year and has patents and publications out the nose? Are we talking about the top 1% of the college-going population, or are we talking about the top 0.01%?</p>
<p>"The other student is not so bright and worked his ass off to get the same grades. "</p>
<p>This is the part of the hypothetical situation I’m focusing on. I still think that if you have to work THAT HARD in undergrad just to maintain a decent average, you’re probably not competitive. I mean, if undergrad kicks your butt, grad school will kill you.</p>
<p>I’d go with the hard working one. </p>
<p>I’ve seen some very smart people who not apply themselves fail. Aristotle said “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” And Thomas Edison said “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”</p>
<p>Quoting: “I still think that if you have to work THAT HARD in undergrad just to maintain a decent average, you’re probably not competitive. I mean, if undergrad kicks your butt, grad school will kill you.” </p>
<p>I think I was not clear about my response. The key thing in my opinion is that the type of work in undergrad and grad school is different. A lot of undergrad work is still useless, busy work, like high school. For example, I am extremely good at churning out a 60 pg lab report in 24 hours for a class in a style that I know my professor likes. When I started grad school, I had absolutely no idea how good I would be at designing an original experiment, working out all the bugs, getting meaningful results, and writing it up for peer review. Now, having already proven to myself that I can suck it up there’s no way I would let the tiny fact that I’m exhausted hold me back after coming so far. If I hadn’t developed that kind of determination, grad school might kill me. If I didn’t understand that there’s always someone else willing to work harder, I might get depressed. If I hadn’t already learned how to tackle big problems, I might be scared about a 3 yr long thesis project. So far, I don’t spend anywhere near the amount of time “working” as I did in undergrad. The focus of the work is different and I study things in more depth and it’s a lot more fulfilling anyways. Plus, it’s worth a lot to know that the reason why some people will succeed and other’s won’t is simply because some people were willing to work hard.</p>
<p>This is long, but I feel pretty strongly about this. I’m not saying the “smart” person won’t be able to work hard, but they better have something else in their application that indicates that they can be committed to something. It’s not worth anything to have done everything but the thesis.</p>
<p>It’s not that “naturally talented” people are lazy or don’t work hard. There’s just no point in staying up all night to studying for an exam that they’re already prepared for. They’re usually the nerdy kind of people who spend their spare time doing research opportunities and getting a head start on everyone else, so it’s not like they’re having fun. It’s not only how hard you work that matters, but how efficiently you work. Understanding something is better than just mechanically studying for tests. It won’t do you much good to study longer if you’re just mindlessly memorizing things. If you’re passionate about something, the talent will often follow. You don’t want to be working hard at something you hate.</p>
<p>In the very unlikely situation that the two students have <em>identical</em> paper credentials (GRE scores, GPA, letters of recommendation, etc.), there is no way to tell one is more intelligent than the other short of knowing them personally or obtaining additional information from other sources. Keep in mind that school transcripts for example do not tell how many hours a student had to work to get an ‘A’ in class! In practice though, letters of recommendation, publication/research credentials, interviews, and personal SOP’s usually provide valuable information beyond the conventional “did well in class” that help Grad Schools assess whether the applicant is likely to succeed or not as a PhD student. In that sense, I highly recommend reading Section 3 (especially 3.3-3.6) of the document found at the following link:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf[/url]”>http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf</a></p>
<p>Although the document above focuses on applying to CS PhD programs, it contains information that I believe are useful for applicants in other fields as well. I warn you though that some of conclusions that are drawn from the text are perhaps contrary to what one would consider “conventional wisdom”.</p>
<p>bruno, you (the adcom) are a psychic in this <em>hypothetical</em> situation, duh.</p>
<p>I would take the more intelligent person. We’ve seen the maximum of the hard-working person’s potential, but the intelligent person who has not yet been challenged enough to work hard could be really great. I don’t think I’d give him a scholarship or anything, but I’d be more likely to pull for him in adcom than someone who just works really hard. It’s advanced study- let the hard-working person go get a job and continue working hard, and the intelligent person explore the limits of what they can do.</p>
<p>Well grad school is where you do research, and it takes more than intelligence to get through it. I did biology olympiad in thailand. There, people were able to remember a whole textbook just to get through the competitive tests. They’re brilliant testtakers. They like biology and they do very well. I knew this people who got some touch with research and gave up right away. They can’t stand learning that there’re stuff they don’t know. They don’t like to be criticized with what they do. They don’t want to work on problems when experiments don’t work out. Some of the ****tiest research project came out of this people (well, they had to fulfill requirements).</p>
<p>If you score very well in tests, get stellar transcript and academic honor, you get reputation/recognition. Similar applies to the biol olympiad ppl that I met, they get reputation right away for passing tests or knowing something. But you don’t get that type of thing when you struggle through grad schools. </p>
<p>Believe it that grad school and research really take struggle. And experiments/research projects don’t come right out of someone’s head. It takes practice, efforts, preserverance, fortitude, etc.</p>