Same thing with Google: I always figured that I wouldn't want to work at any place that cared where I went to college. But then I applied anyway, as an experiment, got in, and it turned out I loved it.
If I had to give some unsolicited advice (yeah, modulo luck and all that), I'd say to live your life the way that makes you happy, but if it happens to make some elite institution happy too, why not give it a try? There are some very real benefits to a college like Amherst or an employer like Google. While they're not worth making yourself miserable over, they can be a pretty nice perk if your interests lay in that direction anyway.
Also, I've found that what high-caliber institutions really want are people whose passions make them come alive. For exactly the reasons the article mentioned. There are lots of sheep that want to get into Google for the six-figure salaries and 3 meals a day and resume boost. There are comparatively fewer who want to get in because it's like being a kid in a data-mining candy shop. Organizations want the latter kind, who're usually the ones with the clearest ideas of what they want to get out of life.
And if they don't, fuck 'em.
It occurs to me that this is a good way to run a startup too. Figure out what your core competency is and do that. But on the fringes, keep exploring other opportunities and see what may come of them.
However, anecdotal experience later made me question the reality of that, and suspect admissions officers are still overly impressed by teens who sleep four hours a night and have 10 or 12 relatively shallow extracurriculars that require little more than the ability to manage lots of busywork and multitasking.
Which of course is what most of the corporate workforce has become - lots of 'managers' schedules'. Coincidence?
If you let the professors pick the kids, you'd get very few "leaders" coming out of the elite schools and lots of eggheads and tinkerers. Knowing this, the schools use recent grads and professional bureaucrats whose job is to carry out mandates handed down, not by faculty, but by the trustees, who have a broader, and more worldly perspective on who should be admitted.
In this day and age where we consider everything a learnable skill, from ice hockey (Gladwell) to math (Asian culture) to seduction (Neil Strauss et al), why are eggheads and tinkerers seemingly considered unteachable in the ways of leadership (real leadership, as espoused in the article)?
You can inspire somebody like that to change, but it's a lot more work than taking somebody who's already seeking it on their own.
schools use recent grads and professional bureaucrats whose job is to carry out mandates handed down, not by faculty, but by the trustees, who have a broader, and more worldly perspective on who should be admitted.
Admitted according to what criteria? I'm genuinely curious.
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In my experience, for the most part success in pre-collegiate academia is overwhelmingly contingent on your willingness to follow directions and do a lot of busy work. There are exceptions of course, like a challenging math class or thought-provoking history class, but these are, as I said, the exception not the rule.
Most kids don't give a shit about learning - they care about getting good grades. And from what I'm reading in this speech, this is also an issue in Ivy League schools. This seems like a negative feedback loop. Maybe something needs to change?
Also, you say that we'd get very few "leaders" if we let professors pick the kids. Well the majority of these leaders, many of them from Ivy League schools, are dogmatic, stick-to-the-talking-points idiots, incapable of or unwilling to produce original thought. I think just what we need are more tinkerers.
Anyway, I was always under the impression it was primarily professors who sat on admission boards. But then again I never bought any of those "how to get into college" books.
You clearly don't have much experience with NCOs.
In any army in the world, call an NCO 'sir', and they'll respond: "Don't call me sir; I work for a living."
('Sir' is usually reserved for officers, and in UK & Commonwealth countries, Warrant Officers Class 1 & 2)
I sat on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the committee was read what they call the "brag" in admissions lingo, the list of the student’s extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12.
...and then there was the advertisement box. My blood was starting to boil because I have a serious philosophical problem with having to do the "right" kinds of extracurricular things to impress an admissions board to get into college. OK, it's sour grapes, but that is a college I'm not interested in attending (ditto for Google).
Then the kicker:
So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, "excellent sheep."
Amen! The world needs plenty of excellent sheep, but I'm not interested in being one of them.