A brief preface: as my undergraduate education draws to a close (a terrifying clause if there ever was one) one of my various winter break projects has been to set down in writing some of my thoughts about the experience. This is mostly as a way to help myself work through what has grown into a complicated relationship with the university, but I hope would-be members of the class of 2016 find these posts (and find them useful) as they prepare to make their decision in a few months.
This was originally going to be one piece, but I’m discovering that I have a great deal more to say than I expected, so I’m breaking it up into sections. These are essais in the spirit of Montaigne:1 digressive, a bit confused, and probably more revealing about their author than they are about their ostensible subjects. (Like Michel, I also reserve the right to revise these essays aggressively while insisting that they remain untouched.) Nevertheless I hope it will be a worthwhile exercise.
In a feat unusual for recruiting publications, every claim the Columbia literature makes about the sort of people who come here is true. There was an accomplished ballroom dancer in my LitHum class; I was once invited to a birthday party with no fewer than three princes in attendance; my old roommate had a bit of a scheduling panic at the beginning of last summer because she’d won so many scholarships she found herself required to attend three receptions simultaneously on opposite sides of the country. That guy you do your problem sets with turns out to be a NIPS reviewer; the girl sitting behind you in lecture has a column in Forbes; some kid in your Chinese class has been all over TechCrunch for the last week; the ditzy cheerleader in your seminar is proficient in several ancient languages. And so on.
Of course there are exceptions: barely-competent essayists, prospective economists who can’t wrap their minds around differential calculus and (my personal hell) computer scientists who cannot write a well-formed proof. Such cases are usually brushed away with an insistence that they’re just good at something else, which I am willing to grant for students in University Writing and Principles of Economics but not in graduate cryptography courses. Even at a school like this, there are enough spots set aside for athletes, legacies and donors’ children that one is guaranteed a certain number of duds.2
There’s a broader issue: we purport to assemble the most interesting student body possible, but the usual inputs to the admissions process—SAT scores, personal statements, lists of prizes—are only weakly correlated with interestingness, itself an ill-defined concept. I like to think that Columbia does a better job of picking than most (or more precisely, their criteria for interestingness are closest to mine—the school’s location selects for maturity and the curriculum against monomania3) but we are no closer to solving the selection problem than anybody else.4 In general, the four years of high school are not enough to separate the prodigious from the merely precocious; as much as we are reassured constantly by the school and by society that we are the best and the brightest, most of us deserve the comparative rather than the superlative: brighter than average, perhaps, but also well-groomed and lucky.
All of which is a long way of saying that, while the company of the egregiously accomplished is useful if you’re the sort of person who collects influential friends the way one collects exotic insects or postage stamps, these students are not, for the most part, the ones who define your experience at Columbia.
The good news is that very smart, very interesting people are sufficiently dense within the remainder that one doesn’t have to look very far for company. Most of my closest friends in college lived on the sixth floor of John Jay with me freshman year, and many of the defining memories of my Columbia experience surround ruinously long dinners with this group spent discussing the philosophy of history, the appropriate way to introduce a dictator, or the four-coloring problem.
Then again, density is just density. One can only make so many friends; being surrounded by smart people one doesn’t know is only useful insofar as it makes for good campus theater in the form of public spats between student groups and celebrities.5 Intelligent students can be found with only slightly more effort at any school of reasonable size, and I have little doubt that it is possible to have just as intellectually satisfying an experience within the CUNY system as at Columbia. Much as we like to flaunt our impressive student body, exceptional students are probably the least exceptional thing any university can offer.
donors’ children I’ve interacted with are indistinguishable from the rest of the student body. It’s really just the football team that I have a problem with.
we have fewer honest-to-goodness prodigies than, say, Princeton, is that the sort of single-minded focus which usually accompanies early talent is totally incompatible with both our setting and the course of study. If all you want in life is a Fields medal, the Core is a distraction and the city doubly so. I like this arrangement: prodigies tend to be rather boring.
essay questions, Dartmouth’s peer recommendations (indicative not of how much people like you, but of how clever your friends are) and compulsory interviews.
CIRCA/Ahmadinejad dinner party and the Ann Coulter “fisting” incident.
See? That liberal education is already paying off. ↩
“Athletes, legacies, donors” is a formula; in truth all the legacies and ↩
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