I’ll start with the ending: three Mondays ago, after 2 years of work in a lab and several recent months of panic and suffering quiet perseverance, I turned in my thesis. It arrived at the biochem office 51 minutes after the deadline.
This was after I wrote an abstract in 10 minutes (4:30pm), an entire chapter of results in 5 hours (11:00am), made two figures overnight (12:00am-9am) off of data collected from experiments 2 days before. If had gotten to the office 9 minutes later, the doors would have closed and locked away any hope I would have had of graduating with honors. Fortunately I made it in time.
William Deresiewicz, an English professor at Yale, is disappointed. Really disappointed. In you. Why? Because thanks to your cleverness and ruthless ambition, Ivy League schools are turning into glorified professional academies:
When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business…The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
["The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" via The American Scholar]
…and dens of nepotism:
It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America.
That’s not the worst part of going to Yale. You’ll also become a robot…
The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring…will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.
…and lose your intellectual drive. Or maybe you didn’t have any to start with.
I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia…But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself.
The Pre-Med
You live in perpetual fear. As far as you are concerned, the noble pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, as something enjoyable, ended thousands of years ago when Hippocrates invented the medical profession. You’re really stressed out. In fact, nobody is more stressed out than you, not even other pre-meds. Or meds. But you like the feeling, and that’s why you talk about it non-stop. You can be found at 4am several days before any exam, procrastinating by calculating your GPA, then trying to memorize obscure concepts that your TFs told you would be on the final. They were only kidding. They are out to get you. The only joy you will know this semester will be the 5 minutes after you finish your last final and before you realize that you’re taking the MCAT next month. That, and the conjugal bliss you will enjoy in 10-15 years with your wife and family, in between malpractice suits.
The Idealist
You love learning. Or rather, you love telling yourself that you’re learning. You think that just because you’ve done all the readings and transcribed and color-coded every single word of lecture, the teaching fellows won’t fuck you over on the final. You will spend the evenings of finals week reading through your notes with a satisfied smile on your face, wondering why the guy sitting at the other table (see above) keeps cursing and pounding his head with his fists. You’ll go into the exam room with the gentle flutter of butterflies in your stomach, and exit with the serene joy that only knowledge can bring. One day you’ll make a wonderful professor in cultural studies or Irish mythology. Until the government revokes your funding and spends it on real academic pursuits like weapons research or burning oatmeal to power SUVs. Then you will become a high school teacher. And die a spinster.
Ever ask yourself, I wonder where major-record-label classical concerts are taking place in the world? Does Deutsche Grammophon have more concerts in central U.S. than EMI does? (They don’t.) What about central Europe? Just check out my CS171 final project: “Where’s the music?” (If you’ve never asked yourself these questions before, well, now you don’t have to!)
A few technical details about the project if you’re curious. (more…)
In an earlier entry I linked to a Hans Rosling talk at the TED conference, which turns out to be an entire website / conference devoted to showcasing the most charismatic people in every field imaginable.
Today I came across this talk by David Bolinsky, on the process it took to make the “Inner Life of the Cell” animation for Harvard. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, please click on that link and check it out — they show this to pretty much every science student here, multiple times if you study biology. That’s how cool it is.
Here is Bolinsky’s talk, embedded for your convenience:
