PH.D. in Yo.U

If you are looking for Yale posts, I suggest you read the intro to this post which is here and here. 

Thank you for your insightful thoughts and questions regarding my most recent education post.  My favorite nervous prefrosh E wrote: “Before you scared the bejeezus out of me concerning Yale. Now you scared the bejeezus out of me in general. Where can I get a REAL education?"  

       

This question and others like it from fellow knowledge-lovers who are frustrated with what one reader described as “recycled thought, recycled theses, and recycled teaching,” deserve a very thoughtful answer, and I spent much of this week turning over possibilities in my mind.          

But an answer came to me, as most exciting answers so often do, as a complete surprise and while I was focused on something else entirely- namely finishing a 50 page chapter summary for my editor.

 

Let me just say that writing is a bitch. You stare at a blank page completely convinced you have absolutely nothing to say, or even if you do kinda have a vague idea of what you’d like to say, crafting those blobs of thought into a cohesive narrative seems about as likely as your being able to sculpt a life sized replica of the David out of peanut butter before lunchtime.           

So in the face of no ideas, no outlines, and no hope, you just have to forge ahead anyway by convincing yourself that something good will happen eventually. Believing in yourself is a clichéd mantra, but a popular one because it is such an essential prerequisite for having the balls and audacity to turn passion into product.

 

And therein lies one of my main problems with the ‘idea’ of higher education. We seem to think that we need to do well on the SATs, we need to get good grades, we need to graduate from college in order to be PREPARED. But the truth is, you’re already prepared. You were born with a unique set of abilities and interests and with a completely revolutionary perspective. You, as you are right now, are capable of unrecycled revolutionary thoughts simply because you are the only you there ever has been or will be.

But traditional education thrives on enforcing the belief that you are not enough. How can you expect to accomplish anything if you don’t know algebra? If you don’t read Dostoyevsky? If you can’t speak 2 languages? If you don’t have a college degree? Until you do all of those things, you are still only in the prerequisite part of your life, acquiring the skill points necessary to qualify you as a person who is worthy of doing something real.

Frankly, that's bull...           

I’m not saying that learning isn’t the brightest pigment in your creative palate- learning is profoundly powerful. But even if you spend 50 years amassing millions of shades of information colors, compared to Wikipedia you will still only be a Crayola 10 pack.  And you’ll be so self conscious about what you still don’t have, you’ll never take the plunge and just start scribbling with what you’ve got.                        

 

Ask any four year old fingerpainter about their “creative process” and they will look at you cockeyed. They’re just painting. They have not yet been told how ignorant they are in the face of college-education requirements, so they’re free to follow their own truths.           

“But oh how woefully uneducated they are! Heathens! What they really need is to sit still, listen and repeat!”

We listen and repeat and listen and repeat in different subjects and formats for the better part of 17 years. We fill in bubbles with number two pencils and try to prove we aren’t idiots. But no matter how many bubbles we get ‘right’ we feel like failures in the face of the impossible expectation of being human Wikipedias. We’ll never be ready. But guess what?

 

You have always been ready.

 

And any educational system or institution which focuses on how much you don’t know, instead of nurturing what you intuitively know, is a sham. Haven’t your best teachers been the ones who encourage and engage you with knowledge which, for whatever reason, enriches you? Feels relevant for you? It's not about the subject, it's about how you feel about the subject. And you won't always be able to rationalize why you are drawn to what you are drawn to- your creative unconscious is a vast and thrillingly complicated place and you need to trust in hunches and passions- you'll end up doing something exciting everyday instead of trying to force yourself to be interested in something that seems 'important' but doesn't have meaning for you. 

You are the only expert in yourself. Start listening. 

And this isn’t self indulgent self-help baby stuff. You are an extremely difficult subject- infinitely harder than college classes. Going to Yale was technically tough, but strategically it couldn't have been simpler: just take the tests, do the reading, follow the rules.

What makes writing or painting or inventing so hard is that there is no syllabus for the intricate caverns of your own brain. There’s no expert, no textbook, no study-guide for the midterm. All there is is you, and when you’ve spent 17 years focusing on how much you don’t know, it’s hard to have faith in what you do. It’s hard to have faith in a process which you can’t read about in a book because nobody has ever done it before. It’s completely uncharted territory, and the only way you’re going to figure out how to do it is to do it.

So now you know why I started out talking about self confidence. I was an A student all my life who went to a top college, but having the confidence to follow rules is completely the opposite of believing in your own unique vision.

The ingenious idiocy of persisting in exploring your ideas instead of memorizing others' is not taught in schools because it undermines their authority- the notion that a child could produce something marvelous by following through on their inspiration might make SAT prep courses completely obscolete.

And I'm not saying it's all a waste of time, but remember that tasks which are safe and predictable will never be anything but safe and predictable, while the completely terrifyingly unknowable challenges have the potential to change the world.

So although I don't think I'm going to change the world with my little teen memoir, I do feel like I've learned an enormous amount about myself and my creative process by forcing myself to write even when I don't have a good idea, even when I feel untalented, even when it seems like it'll never sound right, and even when I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, because showing up and having faith in the face of self-doubt is the only prerequisite for creating something new and worthwhile.

 

There are a billion things you don't know, but you'll only discover something truly unique if you trust in yourself. And the best way, the only way to start, is to just decide you're going to do it without questioning yourself about how unprepared you seem. Everyone feels unprepared. If they don't, then they aren't taking any risks. And risks are the only way that crazy amazing ideas become crazy amazing realities. 

So to answer the original question, "REAL education" is not something you can purchase or download or memorize, it is an active personal journey. It can be supplemented and illuminated by school, but the only way you're going to have the balls to think you can write a sonata or cure a disease or find a unifying theory of the universe is to challenge yourself as often as you can.

Give yourself every opportunity to surprise yourself.

Because everything else you can just find on Wikipedia.

thoughts questions comments?

much love,

(formerly-Hurricane-now-tropical-storm) Hannah

Education Revelation

Gosh... I never meant to "scare the bejeezus" out of a prefrosh days before camp Yale with my anti Ivy-Mythology rant. Sorry kid- you're gunna be fine.

I want to clarify something- Yale got the brunt of my ire because of what I feel is an undeserved overly-lofty status in the collective cultural conscious, and because it's the only college I went to so therefore the only one I know enough about to write long whining diatribes, and because I fancy myself an Ivyconoclast. But Yale isn't hell, or else I would have left.

Yale is simply a symptom of a larger educational epidemic...

The roots of compulsory and linearly ranked (graded) education are sordid and surprising, and I wanted to share some of my research:

In the early 1800s the King of Prussia decided he wanted a KICK ASS army. The kind of army that would do and believe whatever the hell they were told no matter how absurd. So he sent guys with guns to steal kids from their parents and forced them to go to the first official nationalized public school, where they were completely indoctrinated, lectured with unflinchingly rigid royally-approved curriculum, and were not allowed to even ask a question unless they first asked if they had permission to ask a question. This is the origin of raising your hand folks. (...I always knew that prissy bitch Ms. Cook was a fascist...)

Then the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION in America comes along, and Horace Mann, the father of compulsory American public schooling, takes a trip over to Germany to study this tip top child-molding system. He brings it back to make sure there are sufficient cogs for the new American Industrial machine. Check out this creeptastic quote about his goals for indoctrinating, I mean educating, the masses:

"Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron; but children are wax. Strength expended upon the latter may be effectual, which would make no impression upon the former."

Public education was made compulsory on a national level, but its private investors and most influential molders like Ford Rockefeller and Carnegie were never intending to help kids achieve the American Dream. These guys needed bodies to work in factories. John D. Rockefeller, THE FOUNDER OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, said "I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers."

Traditional education was always intended to suppress individual creativity in favor of the collective good. And I'm pretty sure that's called socialism. 

But even after the Robber Barons kicked the bucket, this anti-child agenda held fast. Benjamin Bloom of the famed 'Bloom's Taxonomy,' which has arguably played a bigger role in shaping education than any other document, claimed outright that “The purpose of education is to change the thoughts feelings and actions of students.”

And there, in a nutshell, is the history of why you should be suspicious of traditional education.

But that isn't even close to the most interesting part. THIS is the BEST part:

In order to inspire obedience and competition amongst students, and to save time and money, holistic written evaluations were scrapped in favor of linearly ranked evaluation.  And those impersonal, maddeningly un-calibrated and mind-numbing grades, 4.0, ABCD, grades...WERE INVENTED AT YALE.

Grades. Came. From Yale.

http://books.google.com/books?id=R1QH0db2xGsC&pg=PA4&dq=%22It+was+not+until+1785+that+an+american+college%22&ei=8PK1SOb7ApW0yQSN6fTLAQ&sig=ACfU3U2ltFA7HC8x_r2-OjiaN9gO5IFLXg

(Not to be outdone, Harvard decides to use 100 points instead of four...)

Of course in order to impress these institutions, all the feeder schools began shaping their evaluation system to comply with these rankings. Grades trickled down from Yale to thousands of highschools and middleschools and beyond, tantalizing and torturing the brains of millions of kids for the past hundred years with their uncreative unproductive and unhelpful brand of labeling.

Holy Shit. When I first read this I fell off my couch and lay there basking in the horrifying possibility that I was a pawn in some sick cosmic cycle of elitism... I had spent 16 years perfecting a system to impress the very institution which invented the system?! WHAAAT?

I was horrified. I was furious. I was shocked that I hadn't looked into this sooner... everyone just follows the system without stopping to question its merits or relevance. Nobody tells you that the whole damn thing was concocted as a way to bludgeon your individuality to death with a cleaver and then pump your deflated corpse full of creamy sweet conformist filling.

But then after my blood boiled over I started to feel vindicated for having suspected something was fishy since the very beginning... school was a drag. I was good at it but it never made my soul sing, and I was sure there was more to life than being a good parrot. I was proud of myself for never giving in. And I decided to spread the word.

Consider it spread. 

Several very insightful commenters noted that if you try hard you can find inspiring teachers and great people at Yale, and they are absolutely totally right. In fact that's true of most places you'll find yourself educational or no.

But it just seems to me that for all the hype, for all the bullshit of applying, for all the time and for 40 grand a year for four years, your brain should be orgasmically stimulated. Call me a demanding customer, but that's the way I see it.

College is a product without a better business bureau to police it, and the most infuriating thing is that even if you don't want to buy it, it has made itself a necessity in many job circles. And with inflation, the jobs that used to go to college grads now require masters degrees, and the MA positions are only PH.D worthy, etc.

So work the system and get the most you can, but know that it's just that, a system, not an answer.

Be an Autodidact. Follow your passions. Thoughts?

Best,

HnnH

(Cuz you can take the 'A's and shove them up your SS.)

reYALEity check: comment extravaganza

Since my Yale posting garnered an unprecedented amount of comments, I've decided to distill a little 'best of,' because I thought my responses were clever, and I want you guys to see them, and I know the only people who read entire comment chains are… well me and my father.

If you don't care about this topic enough for a second helping then 1) who the hell are you? 2) piss off and 3) I love you I need you I swear I didnt mean it, check back tomorrow for a fun Edinburgh Fringe Festival post.

Here's my point from the previous post distilled:
Yale is nothing special. Gucci sunglasses shade your eyes whilst shouting “Hey you! Guess what? I’m fucking loaded!” but they don’t work better than the crappy plastic ones at the gas station.

Inquisitive Oliver, reasoning that there must be something about Yale that justifies its mythical status in his and the collective mind, like maybe a magical Hogwartsesque stone that sneezes gold and grants career wishes, is my first commenter:

OLIVER LI: Besides name, do you believe there is anything outstanding about Yale that sets it apart from other schools?

ME: Well Oliver, in short, NO.

In long, Yale has a hugeass library and gym and attracts a lot of famous people. Everyone from the president of China to the director of the biggest budget porn movie of all time visited during my time at Yale and I shook hands with fucking Paul McCartney at my graduation. But that doesn't mean, and I cannot emphasize this enough, that those famous people give a good goddamn about you or your education.

Then I was pleasantly surprised to receive... a rebuttal! I have always dreamed of being part of a community of insightful writers who hurl witty insults at one another over fancy cocktails and even wrote as much in my blogger profile but never imagined anybody would care enough to respond to my bitter blatherings. Anonymous defends Yale:

ANONYMOUS: Wow, really? Yale was the best thing that happened to me…I felt safe, surrounded by beauty every day, and in love with every person and conversation I had…

ME: In love with every person and conversation you had?... what kind of happy pills are you on, and where can I get some?

Maybe the roving drunken bums, the plethora of horrendously boring intro classes, and the soul-sucking icefest that was October through March in New Haven were figments of my imagination. It wouldn't be the first time I thunk myself into a funk, and of course everyone is entitled to their opinion no matter how suspiciously saccharine I think it might be... (you giddy grinning freak)

ANONYMOUS: And the teachers -- really, you didn't find anyone who sat down and took the time to figure out how best you learned?

ME: I would certainly never claim that every single teacher at Yale is a twat, but for me at least, out of the 37ish classes I took I had:

• 2 amazing teachers
• 4 good teachers
• 9 teachers who were amusing simply in their utter fucking craziness (including the guy who got fired for faking his PhD, the guy who called the Mexicans in my class 'shifty bean lovers,' the raging uber feminist who permanently replaced the term 'man' in her personal lexicon with 'penis wielder' and the digital video professor who showed us the epic film he made featuring him, naked on a hospital bed, shaving his entire body while he wept and then jacked off into the pile of collected hair clippings. Seriously. WTF.)
• 6 totally vanilla blah teachers
• 10 teachers who were the temporary bane of my existence due to their incompetence and
  
• 6 teachers who, if I were stuck on a desert island with, I would delay every rescue plan just for the opportunity and excuse to tie them to a tree while warthogs and fireants ravaged their flesh as I forced them to listen to their own horrendously awful lectures for hour after cerebral mutilating hour before I gave them the choice between completing every reading essay quiz and test on their own syllabus or having a wild monkey feast on their eyeballs to which they would undoubtedly choose the latter.

So while this doesn't amount to a torturous education, what I'm saying is that Yale isn't utopia. I expected, in my prefrosh naivety, for most classes to be fucking stellar illuminating experience. That's what Yale told me.

ANONYMOUS: I had more than one lecturer or young professor reach out and engage me, and e-mail me to get coffee and talk about my paper, or just life. I am certain this would not have happened anywhere else -- definitely not in a state school with enormous classes and possibly not at other Ivies…

ME: Now this really gets my proverbial goat. I have to assume you are being hyperbolic. Right? I'm glad you had close teacher relationships, as did I, but it's that kind of blatant elitism that puts a mindfuck on kids going into application hell. "Well shit" they think "no teacher will ever want to talk to me if I don't go to Yale!" I have to believe, based on simply knowing more than a few people who are not Yalies, that meaningful and profound educational relationships have developed in the not-so-hallowed halls of universities all over the country, even *gasp!* in a state school or two.

But perhaps out of stubbornness or a desperate need to justify their sometimes unfounded and usually unbridled Yale Bulldog pride, Anonymous returns:

ANONYMOUS: another thing - I never could have afforded another non-ivy liberal arts school, like wesleyan, because those schools mostly have limited financial aid.

ME: Awesome. I'm jealous. My financial aid was fine, but I am now solidly in the hole. Plus, if I had chosen to go to Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Ithaca, Con College, or Wes, I would have been paid a few grand a semester just to attend. That's right- THEY WOULD HAVE PAID ME.

So while the Yale package isn't shit it certainly isn't the top, especially for a university which is SO FUCKING WELL ENDOWED they could give the Hubble telescope a golden shower of Ivy League excellence.

And then, much to my titillation, I get my first troll!

CRIMSON: Yale = Harvard rejects

Hilarious. You truly have a saber wit.

A few hours later, in a faux-nonchalant attempt to prove his Harvard diploma actually does make him special and important, Crimson returns with some more stunning feats of brilliance…

CRIMSON: If I could make a neutral observation, you should put more time in your writings, so they are more coherent, and be a bit more balanced….

ME: First of all, I think you need a dictionary. Your observation is not “neutral” if you introduce yourself by condemning 15,000 people you’ve never met as rejects in the face of your Crimson godliness.

CRIMSON: And I think your blog suffers from organisation and it stinks of a student who was slightly wronged by Yale.

ME: Well you’re right there bucko, I was “slightly wronged” by Yale. I think every negative review stems from this sense of wronging, from feeling that something didn’t live up to its own hype, wasted your time and money, or pissed you off enough that you want to make sure other people don’t go in with the same high expectations. That’s what a real review is. If I were going to pad my review with all pros instead of cons I would be the fucking Princeton Review who (if you couldn’t tell by the title) has been lavishing Ivy League balls with big wet tongue kisses since its inception.

As to the claim that I’m incoherent, your point is actually well taken and I agree I may need to edit and streamline a bit more. However, the blog is called a “mess of motley musings” and not “an alphabetized spreadsheet of doctoral theses” so what the hell did you really expect?

ANONYMOUS #2: I find all this very intriguing and it has opened my eyes. I am currently about to be a senior in high school choosing universities, and having a really hard time!...Any advice?

I am thrilled to discover another Anonymous has put in their 2 cents before I get a chance to answer and it's a pretty good post albeit pithy.

ANONYMOUS #3: "education" is overrated. If you're going to a university for "intellectual stimulation", chances are you won't find it, regardless of where you go. Choose whichever school gives you the most money. If you have a full ride to a state school, go for it. I wish I had.

There are some exceptions: if you plan on going into a field where reputation/connections will make/break your careeer (investment banking at UPenn), or where you're learning a physical skill (singing, dance at Juilliard), it might be worth it to spend the extra bucks.

ME: I think ANONYMOUS 3 has made an excellent point, and one which is probably difficult to hear for those who are drowning in application propaganda. As Americans in the age of the internet we’re all looking for instant gratification, the quick fix, and a snazzy college name seems like the fast track to inspiration-nation, but the truth is that if you want to do something truly original with your life you’re probably not going to find a lot of support at ‘top’ colleges.

What you will find in college are lots of course requirements and homework which seems maddeningly similar to the bullshit timewasting you had to put up with in highschool in the name of getting into college. And if that doesn't piss you off, then your spirit has been completely broken just like traditional education always intended for it to be. Don't get me wrong, college is not all a time waste; you will find some great teachers, but you will find great teachers anywhere. My favorite teacher of all time never got her masters in education and would not have even been allowed as an associate assistant professor at Yale letalone a tenured one.

College is not the best or the only way to learn. Do you like music? Well the Beatles couldn’t read music notation so fuck music theory, kids. Like money? Richard Branson rebel billionaire didn’t even graduate highschool. I’m not saying school isn’t important, but I’m saying that it’s not as important as it seems right now, and in this spectacular age of plenty you’ll be able to learn everything you need to by being pugnacious and passionate and having access to freakin' Wikipedia- no Ivies required.

“But people who go to top schools make more money, right?!!” Actually, all the studies that claim this are laughably biased because they don’t take into consideration the fact that even if Harvard lets in 1000 brilliant kids and then does nothing but play pattycake with them for four years, Harvard will still get credit when the kids go on to major corporate ass-kicking whether or not they had anything to do with it.

One of my favorite studies which addresses this flaw is by Al Krueger and proves that people who go to ‘top’ schools make JUST AS MUCH money as people who got into those schools and turned them down, implying that it’s NOT the school that makes the success story. ‘Top’ schools identify people who are go-getters and those people will be success stories whether or not they choose attend.

In the grand scheme of things, if you’re a smart hardworking creative person, IT WILL MAKE NO DIFFERENCE what school you went to. Have faith in yourself.

So what to do? Figure out what you might be interested in and sit in on lots of classes to see what actually excites you instead of what sounds really prestigious. Use your detective skills and look around campus- are there people who you would want to spend time with? Are there opportunities which will satisfy and nurture you intellectually and creatively? Are students encouraged to explore and devise unique curriculum?

If yes, then that’s the right school no matter what it’s called. You are fucking awesome, and you need an Ivy diploma to prove it as much as you need your SAT score to get you laid.

So that’s my rant for the afternoon- I am so looking forward to more comments if you’re feeling curious or furious or just plain silly. And if I ribbed you a bit in this post... it's all in good fun.

Xox
H

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein

YALE. Prefrosh: read if you dare to actually be an informed person.

So I see that someone in Norway has visited my blog, and I'm assuming it's due to my recent advertisement on the college admit board websites, and not my huge Norwegian fanbase. And up until now I haven't done a lot of college reminiscing because I assumed all the people who know me are sick and tired of hearing me whine, but i feel like I owe it to N.Weejee (hope you don't mind that's your new nickname) and to other kids who are lost in that hurricane of horrible called the college admissions process to give you what you came for:

Yale.... YALE yale. Is a place. just like any other place. And the fact that those four little letters have made you visit a blog of a person you've never met and who has zero net legitimacy (though I appreciate your faith) shows a spec of how powerful a name can be. And I'm not going to tell you it's not a name that opens doors- it's this little invisible tattoo that you can shine a special IvyLeague certification light on if your intelligence is ever in doubt. People who are looking to hire you will raise their eyebrow. Maybe even both. "hoho" they will think to themselves "this person is not a retard. Or if he is, he is an EXTREMELY well connected motherfucking retard and I want in on that." And maybe you'll get the job.

If you want to conquer the financial world it's probably helpful to have gone to Yale. But please think of it as just what i described- a badge, a hoop to jump through, an obstacle course, and nothing more. Yale is not the utopia it makes itself out to be kids, it simply isn't, and if you have any little nibbling doubts when you start going on campus tours and realize that they are all the fucking same, and that every place has a *stellar* social life and *super* diversity and *amazing* classes with *passionate* teachers then you should listen to me when I say: college is a business. A branding. You are paying 40 grand a year to go to a hyped up summercamp where instead of relaxing you have to do all sorts of bullshit busywork.

So great- we always knew most of school was a waste of our time. Almost no institution has the budget to give you a teacher who has time to really learn your interests innate abilities talents flaws and unique information assimilation style, so instead of having an apprenticeship system, instead of really figuring out how your brain works and giving you the tools to rock it, they make you take lots of tests that are all calibrated exactly the same even though every person in the room is completely different, and if you do well, then you get a gold star or something. Good job kid, you've done what you are told, even if it is boring and unproductive and uncreative, and therefore you get all sorts of high numbers. High numbers are better than low numbers, and because the system is not designed to treat people as individuals, they have to rank you all, low to high, so even though your unique selfhood might as well be a big piece of flaming shit for all the bureaucracy cares, at least you're the poop on top.

And you bath there at the top of your highschool- you get honors and whatnot, you get elected to positions with little or no opportunity for real change, but you get to put them on your resume. And then one day, you are baptized into the cruel cruel reality that now you must leave this safe place where you are on top and compete blindly with millions of other poops who are just as, if not unfuckingbelievably more talented than you in every way. And even if they are not, some of them can afford to buy the types of services they provide in Westchester- $30,000 for guaranteed Ivy League admission (or your money back). The system isn't flawed, it's fucked, and it's no longer about learning, it's about earning.

Yale has a 28 billion dollar endowment. 28 billion dollars. And still, they couldn't find the funding to keep my junior year room from flooding with toilet water. Thrice. When the plumber came up to fix it after 2 days of my screaming on the phone, he laughed and shook his head, "every year for 9 years I keep tellin' em to fix this room or it'll flood in the fall." Whaaaaaaat? Nobody complains because it's Yale. If you don't like it, go to a state school. You're only here for 4 years and the shittiness of the facilities becomes a laugh, a test, we bond in squalor and everyone thinks it's pretty funny after a while- then they don't petition to fix it because if they had to deal with it for a year why can't you? And you will, little freshman, you will.

I came to yale expecting a utopia and found New Haven which is literally a fake gothic pouch of pretentiousness wrapped in ghetto. Want to witness the brutal effects of forced gentrification? The thrills of living with a community of people who hate themselves so much they study all day to keep the voices quiet surrounded by a community of people who hate them so much they hold you up with knives and guns? Come to New Haven.

One thing I will say for New Haven, the food, for a depressed urban hellhole, is actually quite impressive. That's the food in NH, not at Yale, where the food is provided by the same people who have the biggest prison food contract in the country. We're eating prison food and believe me, you can taste it. Going in and coming out.

"But the professors! FAMOUS people teach at yale!" Ya, famous people live in Hollywood too but that doesn't mean you should go there expecting to become enlightened. Yale professors are required to teach, unlike at other colleges where they can hold up in their offices doing research and banging grad students. Yale likes to advertise this as some wild benefit, but in reality it means you have disgruntled people who are forced to teach to keep tenure when all they really want to do is, well anything but teach. They dust off a 30 year old syllabus and stand up and a podium twice a week and read from a script they wrote back when they still had hair and you sit there wanting to stab yourself in the eye with a fork for not realizing the whole charade sooner.

I am a fair judge and I will give Yale one thing: shopping period is really great, 2 weeks to do whateverthefuck you want and visit all sorts of classes to figure out what kind you should take. Great. Great in theory, but if you want to take anything that actually seems cool with a teacher who is actually not an incompetent jurassic hack, you need to SUIT UP on the first day of class. You have to get there early, shmooze, and do possibly all of the following things in some combination:
be friends with the department head
be friends with the teacher
be a senior majoring in the class major writing a paper about exactly the topic covered
be really fucking lucky

For some of the best classes I ever shopped there were roughly 250 people gunning for 12 spots. And those 250 people, as I mentioned before, are the top golden poos in all their regions, sometimes in their entire countries, so you are constantly having to assert the fact that you're the best, even when you've gotten into Yale. And you might be. But you know what?

nobody cares.

The advisership system is, in general, a fucking joke- a new person every year who is so busy you could have changed gender and species before coming in to ask them to sign your schedule for a second time, and they wouldn't notice. And this is the average kids, this is my experience, I'm not saying there isn't a single competent adviser, but I'm saying that IF YOU, LIKE ME expected to show up to the golden gates of an Ivy where people would be skipping through Shakespearean meadows reciting quadratic equations, skimming over the vast pond of philosophical ponderances sampling the fruits of the literatti trees, you are living in a fantasy and it's time to snap out of it. You'll only be hurt by your optimism.

Schools are businesses. I should know- I worked for yale in the admissions office all 4 years. And I learned that there are parts of the official tour that are banned. That the map instructions they give you to get here take you a loooong circuitous way through cottage grad student housing, instead of the fast way straight through the ghetto. We spend millions of dollars a year on outreach and admissions packaging because we, like cigarettes, are going to convince you that we are going to make you super cool, super sexy, super fantastic, even if we're lying straight to your face.

So if you've gotten to the end of this post you're either my father, or someone who feels intrigued by hearing someone tell them that the strange feelings they're feeling about this 'big decision' are well founded. Ask me questions. Please ask me what you want to know about working in admissions, about being a yalie, because these are the things I wish someone had told me. Yale is not utopia, it's not a dump either. I'm not saying that I didnt appreciate my educaiton- I'm not going to sit here and bitch about having gone to a place where all I was expected to do all day is learn. Learning is great.

But you can learn where people care about your brain and your uniqueness. You can learn at a place where not everyone wants to slit their wrists because the pressure to be the best is so overwhelming and the competition so impossibly steep. YOU CAN LEARN AT A PLACE THAT IS THE BEST FOR YOU. Everyone goes around saying yale is one of the best. The best at what? The best at advertising. There is no objective best, and the fact that people think that way just shows how deep rooted the linearly ranked system is. If you want to be your GPA, if you don't have a personality or any desire to be anything other than top poop, then Yale is the best for you. But if not, then yale is just another school, a school in a bad neighborhood with lots of benefits and lots of flaws, and you need to strip away the name and actually look at the facts. I didn't do that. I saw Yale- and i was sold instantly. And sometimes I wish I could have looked at all the schools totally unbiased, without the names... Yale would not have ended up being even near my first choice. It wasn't the best for me.

But again- I'm not saying it's not the best for you, I'm just suggesting that if you get into 5 schools including Yale, Yale should not automatically win just because it's Yale. Do some thinking and soul searching, and decide what you are willing to sacrifice for a name brand. It might be your integrity. your social life. your educational satisfaction. your time. your money...

Please ask me questions- I'm always excited to share what I wish I had known.

Also- college is important, but here is a list of people who didn't graduate from a college:

Shakespeare
Darwin
Bill Gates
Aristotle
George Washington
Jesus


Think about it. College isn't magic- it's an expensive holding tank.
And I, for one, didn't learn anything SO AMAZING in college that I couldn't have learned with a library card and a big helping of dedication and curiosity. Make it fun. Make it worth your while. Make it about what you want instead of what you want people to think about you, because living your life in designer jeans, worrying about what people think all day long, simply isn't very productive, and if you're a smartie IV hopeful, you'll know I'm right.

xo
H