Be all that you can be

[randy_byers]

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been wrestling with Ross Douthat's NYTimes column about Sarah Palin, meritocracy, and democracy. His most recent post on the topic, "The Importance of Being Ivy League", riffs on Douthat's implication that Obama's Ivy League law degree makes him part of the elite, whereas Palin's homely college experience makes her just plain folk. Somewhere in the comments somebody pointed out that "Ivy League" is a misleading phrase for referring to elite schools, and they mention Reed College, MIT, CalTech, Berkeley, Michigan, and Duke as non-Ivy-League schools that would qualify. That made me think about how I had actually applied to some of those elite schools.



I was a pretty topnotch high school student, but sort of in that grey zone of not-quite-great. I don't remember for sure, but there were at least twenty people in my 400-person graduating class who ranked higher than me academically based on grades and test scores. Still, I was good enough that I applied to Stanford and Pomona (or maybe it was Claremont, I forget) as well as the University of Oregon Honors College. Stanford flat out denied me, specifically citing my lack of extra-curricular leadership and community activity. (My favorite teacher, Mr. Ball, who had written a letter of recommendation, wrote them a scathing letter which meant a lot to my bruised ego at the time. In retrospect, however, I decided they were completely right to deny me.) Pomona (or Claremont) put me on a waiting list of some kind -- essentially "stand by" until other students made their decisions about whether to accept offers. I decided to just go to the U of O instead.

After my junior year in the UO Honors College, I dropped out, partly because I couldn't face the thesis requirement for graduating from the HC. (I had planned to write a piece of fiction to satisfy the requirement, but as I mentioned in another recent post, I was completely blocked on fiction at that point.) Eventually I decided to go back to school in Portland, and I briefly flirted with applying to Reed. However, I would have had to go there two years to earn a degree, so I opted for Portland State University instead, which allowed me to graduate in one year.

The point of all this is that if I had been more driven and ambitious, I could probably have gone to a fairly elite school, but in the end I think Stanford's judgment of my record was correct. I am an underachiever. I am unambitious. I am uninterested in making a big impression on the world, or at least in making the effort required to do so. In some ways, dropping out of the UO Honors College is the most damning piece of evidence. I didn't have the drive to succeed even at that level.

Those elite schools are about creating leaders -- not just political, but scientific, educational, journalistic, administrative, judicial, what have you. Which is not to say that if you don't go to an elite school, you can't be a leader and can't make a mark. It does mean, I think, that you have to want to be a leader or a big shot in order to go to an elite school. You have to be ambitious, as well as smart and accomplished. That was what I didn't have, and adult life is evidence of the person I was coming out of high school. I've done just fine, even better than most, but nothing spectacular and still susceptible to dropping the ball when the going gets challenging.

It's probably worth saying too that just because you make it into an elite school doesn't mean that you're going to be a big shot. My high school friend Becky (who was undoubtedly one of the people in my class with a higher academic ranking) made it into Stanford, and she was part of the reason I ultimately realized that I was very fortunate not to get accepted. She hated the competitiveness and jockeying for position at Stanford. I'm sure it would have completely shredded me. Likewise my classmate (and later friend), Brig, who made it into Claremont but transferred to the UO after a year. I sometimes wonder about how some my other brighter classmates have done. I recently discovered via Google that one of them is a Physics professor at Carnegie Mellon, but I haven't had much luck tracking down the others. I know, I know, I should just join Facebook and cut to the chase. Bah.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Interesting, as this is not true in the UK. Most of my Oxbridge and Imperial friends aren't driven leaders, though of course if they were they'd never have joined a SF society, and I'd not have hung out with them. British selection 20 years ago was based on academic scores, and the interview and interests sections on the form was just to make sure you weren't completely asocial.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Well, who knows, maybe Stanford was actually letting me down gently by not telling me that my scores weren't up to snuff. As I say, it's not as though I was top of the class.

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

Interesting thoughts. The correlation between college and eventual career success is something that appears to me to be very hard to predict, although like you suggest the more elite schools do seem to enroll a greater percentage of ambitious people.

Your story has some similarities to my own, except that my drop-out/transfer came when I was working on my Masters. Georgia Southern was the only college I applied to as an undergrad (partly because my great-aunt had worked there as a librarian in the '40s). It was known then primarily as a party school which produced alot of teachers, but experienced huge growth during my time there mostly due to re-starting their long dormant football program which went on to win 4 I-AA National Championships in its first eight years.

Last year I saw an alumni magazine from the University of Georgia (the flagship institution in the state) and the alumni updates they published didn't seem all that different from what the Georgia Southern alumni magazine was releasing. A decade ago you would have noticed a big difference, but since then we've started to attract alot more students who would have gone to UGA in the past. In fact my SAT scores from 1985 wouldn't be good enough to get into GSU now :)

Duke was one of the graduate schools I applied to for my Masters in History. I didn't get accepted and they didn't give me a reason. I did get a Graduate Assistantship at Auburn, but during my second quarter there my grandmother died and I had a falling out with my mother and I realized that up to that point that I had been drifting through academia without a real desire to be a professor although that was where I was headed. Like you, I became blocked on writing and dropped out. A couple of years later I got a part-time job at a library and realized this was the kind of place I wanted to work at.

I really enjoyed my undergrad experience at Georgia Southern, but I'm not sure that would have happened at a bigger, more competitive place like UGA. And I didn't find a niche for myself at Auburn, although I loved the Library Science program at the University of South Carolina. Maybe its also time for me to track down some of my old classmates and see how they are doing :)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is interesting stuff. Of course graduate school represents a whole different level of ambition. I work at the University of Washington, and I've come to see graduate school as a kind of elaborate hazing. If you can survive it, you are admitted to the secret society of masters. I've had at least one good friend go through a nervous breakdown as part of the process.

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

I agree with you about the hazing view, although there is probably a bit more to graduate school than that :) And I certainly felt like I was on the way to a nervous breakdown before I dropped out at Auburn.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess you get to read a few interesting books while you have your nervous breakdown.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

This contrasts interesting with my experiences. I went to what counts as an elite university by Australian standards, one of the Sandstone Universities, and what it meant to be an elite institution is very different here. I think that sense of jockying for position and being positioned as a future leader applies a few courses, such as Law, and it certainly applied to student politics, but for most of the campus the difference between being 'elite' and not was more in terms of being more theoretical and academic and research oriented and (at least thinking of themselves as) more intellectually demanding. In almost all cases selection was purely based on academic results, and I've never heard of extra-curricular activity at the high school level being considered relevant to student selection. Though the university did care about its reputation for extra-curricular activity by its students, and was very supportive of student life in general (especially things like student theatre), it didn't select students that way at all as far as I can tell, and student ambition was certainly not a factor - in fact, I think they rather liked bright but unambitious students who would be likely to go into research rather than the commercial world -- and that certainly describes quite a few of my friends, lovely people with a vibrant intellectual life but who'd rather be happy and intellectually stimulated than wealthy.

Interestingly, in the one case in which non-academic factors definitely were considered in student selection, they unintentionally selected against ambition -- the medicine faculty changed to incorporating interviews and personality tests and such, and initially this was very much skewed towards students with good social skills, empathy, a social conscience, etc. They realised the flaw in the plan after a few years -- this selected heavily for students likely to become good general practitioners, and against students likely to become surgeons, pathologists, etc. They allow a few academically brilliant cold fish or megalomaniacs through now, having realised their utility.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Thanks. If I had heard of the Sandstone Universities before, it was only in passing. I note that the Wikipedia article says that, "Australian Government survey data of university graduates has indicated in the past that students who enter Sandstone Universities come from higher income families, and that graduates largely have higher paid occupations or positions of influence, prompting claims of elitism and social division." There are no doubt some class issues in all this that would add nuance to the discussion, although the Coates post I linked to is also wrestling with (American) racial issues.

I think it's probably true here as well that certain courses of study, especially Law, are seen as paths to political or other leadership careers. I'm reminded of another guy I knew who graduated from the UO a couple of years after I moved to Seattle. He came up here one summer and played the bohemian with me, then he suddenly disappeared. I ran into him a couple of years later, and he told me with a sheepish look that he'd sold out. He'd gone to Law School. Of course, he told me this at a Nina Hagen show, and he said he was also active in trying to promote the recording industry in Seattle, such as it was at the height of the grunge explosion. That's putting your ambition to good use!