In Which Bradel Rants about College and Maybe Offends People · 3:45am Aug 19th, 2015
So y'all know I'm an academic, I assume. For anybody who might not know, I'm currently working on a Ph.D. in statistics and I'm hoping to parlay that into a tenure track job at a research university. This wasn't always what I wanted, but it's been what I wanted ever since I realized how much I enjoy that kind of work.
Also, I should be doing research right now instead of typing this. Please don't tell my advisor.
Anyway, apparently there's been a tempest in a teapot over some new Alpha Phi sorority recruiting video from the University of Alabama. People feel it objectifies women, and Alpha Phi has recently pulled it down. Obviously you can still find copies, though—and I'll provide one here because I figure some of the people reading this blog might enjoy getting to watch nubile coeds shamelessly cavort.
Ya know, I don't really see what the fuss was, though. I mean, they wore swimsuits for part of it? And they seemed to go out of their way to reinforce American stereotypes of feminine beauty, to some extent. But from the little I've read, this recruitment video isn't a whole lot different from many others used by sororities around the country. I'm assuming fraternity recruitment videos will probably be similar—but with less glitter and bubbles, more car chases and explosions.
All that is a little off-topic for why I decided to do up a blog, though. Y'see, the thing that really jumps out at me in this video is... how little resemblance it bears to my own college experience.
Now, I've had suspicions for more than a decade that I did high school wrong. I thought you were supposed to go to high school and learn shit. After I'd been there for a few years, and learned the shit out of that shit, though, somebody pointed out that I was probably supposed to be learning socialization skills rather than academics. By which I mean, I was supposed to be going on dates with girls, learning how to get along with people I didn't really like, all sorts of stuff they didn't actually teach in classes. I could conjugate French into the subjunctive mood like a boss, but I didn't know how I was supposed to interact with an actual boss.[1]
Tonight I'm coming to the realization that, while my college experience might not be wrong per se, it's probably very different from the experience a lot of other people have. Somehow this seems to have slipped past me for about a decade and a half.
Apparently, there's a whole sociocultural side to the "college experience". You leave home and live on your own (or with roommates your own age) for probably the first time. You make lots of new friends. You party in ways you weren't allowed to before, and learn all sorts of fancy life lessons through experimentation. There's a whole genre of movies devoted to this sort of thing, from "Animal House", to "Revenge of the Nerds", to "Pitch Perfect".[3]
You know what college movies I always related to? "With Honors", which is about grad students; "Wonder Boys", which is about a faculty member (and his editor, and his crazy undergraduate protege); and "Real Genius" which is the party movie for people who think lasers are a toy and elective dental surgery makes for a good joke.
Where am I going with all this? Well, a couple weeks back Bad Horse posted a blog, "On the value of higher education". I think we somewhat disagreed on said value, but I also think we shared a commonality in that we both look to have approached college from a standpoint of "I'm here to learn things." And I just now realized how uncommon that might actually be.
So-called "Greek societies" have always kind of wigged me out. Why would someone go to college and join one of those? They never seemed like they added to the college experience, to me. If anything, they seemed like they must detract, because how the heck are you supposed to study if you keep having these frat party things going on? I don't think I realized that—by being at college for the same reason the faculty were there, rather than the reason other students were there—I was doing something uncommon.
I'm public about being an academic, but I'm also public about being a practicing Catholic. With that said, though, a big part of my concept of religion has always been tied up with something I'll call the Human Project. How can we make ourselves better as a species? How can we become more compassionate, how can we understand the universe better, how can we survive and propagate despite potentially catastrophic threats to life on Earth? It's probably why I find post-apocalyptic fiction so fascinating.
To me, colleges and universities are like cathedrals to human understanding. Sure, not everything that happens there is sacred (c.f. literary modernism, certain subdisciplines in the social sciences)—but a lot of academia is, to me, fundamentally directed toward the Human Project. And that's a thing I want to be part of. I want to help other people understand their world better, and I want to contribute to our collective ability to understand through my own thinking. That's always been what I wanted from college.
My father has told me that he used to read comics and dream of growing up to become some sort of superhero scientist. Maybe that's the bug that bit me, too—though through science fiction more than comics, probably. To me, the idea of people coming to college[4] as something like academic tourists, looking for life experiences with a little hint of learning, seems really bizarre. That's just not what I assume people want. I think that negatively colors my attitude toward students, and I'm actually happy to have recognized because it helps me see the filthy, anti-intellectual miscreants less-interested students in my classes in a more forgiving light. And probably makes my job of convincing them that statistics is cool and useful a little bit easier (since condescension usually goes over like a sack of bricks).[5]
Still, the idea of focusing on extracurriculars rather than curriculars kind of blows my mind.
So, because I like trying to be participative rather than just ranting myself to death, what do you guys think? If you've been to college, how did you approach it? Were you there for the life experiences, or for the learning, or for some personal balance of the two? If you haven't been to college, how do you view it? I like hearing what other people think, because then it makes it easier for me to think like them in the future, so help me out here, guys!
[1] In fact, I've always kind of sucked at dealing with superiors in non-academic situations, because I've never had a very good handle on the notion of being threatened by other people. I like efficiency and good ideas, and I don't really care where they come from. I don't necessarily subscribe to Crocker's rules (because I'm not a heartless robot), but when work is being done, they make a lot of sense to me.[2]
[2] Basically, I think this guy makes a lot of good points.
[3] To be fair, I like all of these movies. Though I like "Nerds in Paradise" better than the original, and I probably like "Pitch Perfect" best of all three because I'm kind of crazy about musicals.
[4] See? I don't even say "going to college" anymore. People don't "go" there, people "come" there, because that's where I live.
[5] I actually get pretty good teaching reviews. Most of my students like me, and think I make statistics interesting and engaging. I'm saying this purely because I want to convince you that I'm not quite as big of an asshole as I sound.
I'm 14, and I see college pretty much the same way you do. I mean, I appreciate the value of beginning separation from your parents, learning to live alone, etc, etc, but that's a matter of life skills. And I'm looking forward to being among (mostly) smart, determined people, because my high school is full of anti-intellectual, dim-domed people. But the main thing is the learning, and how it'll help me help.
What I want to see is a frat do exactly the same video from the male perspective.
It'll never happen. The Legions of Perpetual Outrage would hammer them to death. Still, I can dream. That's not forbidden. (yet)
3330584
I realized I didn't mention this, but yeah, part of me being surprised to notice this tonight stems from the fact that I never really felt the need for any of that stuff. I had pretty permissive parents, and I didn't have a whole lot of urge to do anything they wouldn't let me do. Maybe try marijuana, but I still haven't done that. I'm about the most stuffed-shirt member of my own family.
Oh God, I'm Alex P. Keaton, aren't I?
I went away to university and basically had no extra-curricular life, because all my actual friends were already online friends, so my social life changed by exactly 0%. It's not that I didn't get along with people, I was just everyone's acquaintance. I acted in high school, but I joined that late so my age peers were in a class ahead of me and I only interacted with them when I was in a play. I hung out with the debate kids at lunch, but their out-of-school social life was the debate team--I was not invited. I haven't talked to anyone from high school since I graduated. On the other hand, I'm married to one of the online friends I made in that same time frame, and we're all still in the same IRC channel. Their couches are less convenient to crash on, though, since they're scattered throughout the Anglosphere.
Earlier in my high school career, I actively hated the people who were apparently not at high school to learn things, but it's an open question about how much of that was rooted in jealousy over their low anxiety levels. Unfortunately, I had to figure out that what I had was an anxiety problem the hard way, by flaming out at university. With nothing actually tying me to the schools, I flamed out silently. It wasn't until I was in a position to observe how my anxiety is triggered that I was able to take steps that helped me out long term.
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I have a pair of old hippie parents. They both smoke weed (my mother's sister is also a registered medical grower), they both have irresponsible drinking stories, my dad has considered opinions on comparative hallucinogens (mescaline is cleaner and more enjoyable than LSD, apparently). They started letting me have sips of wine when I was quite small. As a high schooler, I was routinely poured my own glass of wine at family events, etc.
And so... there was never any point in going to a party to get drunk. I have never bothered to smoke marijuana. I've tried mushrooms because dad brought them on a fishing trip (he was way too cautious with the dose, because I was still quite overweight on that trip. All I saw was a very slight version of the effect you get when you press on your closed eyes.)
I've ended up so much more straight-laced than my parents. Apparently permissive parenting does this reliably, with the right kind of child.
Hmm,
As in all things - balance.
College is more than learning what is being taught in the classroom. I had a good family, and a not-horrible High School experience, but I always felt...constrained, weighed down by weights of expectation and history and clicks and where you are supposed to fit into all of those things.
College was a revelation. I could escape the gravity off all those things. I could be - myself. I could be myself and find other people that were cool with that self, and at the same time discovered that nobody else gave a shit. Which was awesome. I grew so much as a person my first two years in college. This involved a good deal of goofing off, some parties, and the occasional foray into drunken stupidity.
I can safely say that what I learned outside of the classroom, about myself, about others, and about the world has been more useful to me than my degree. That's not to say I didn't take my education seriously. I did, and I learned a great deal that taught me what I needed to know for my profession and the world in general.
The key is balance, I witnessed several people who failed out, because they got to far into the social scene. I saw others who barely skated by and probably took very little from their classes. On the other end of the spectrum, at least for me personally, if all you took from college is what you found in the classroom that seems like a tragedy.
I was never involved in the greek scene, but I knew a few people who were. Like everything else, it seems populated by the whole spectrum of personality types. The most giving, altruistic person I know (who now spends her time getting wells dug in India and Africa) was heavily involved in her sorority. Some were assholes, some were apathetic, some cared for their education, some didn't. Sinners and saints just like every other sub section of society.
The video isn't what an average college experience is about. It's an advertisement for a sorority that says "no uglies and no fatties and no minorities", essentially, and also illustrates that it is definitely not an academic-focused sorority. Sororities and frats are... not related to anything else in college. With a few exceptions focused on academics (and sometimes minority groups), they're for people who miss high school because being popular meant more than getting good grades, to be totally honest about it (and often putting down a frat on a resume is a bad idea; it leads to the resume being discarded more often than to nepotism).
That said:
...followed by:
...equals:
And yes, I'm in academia myself when I emote that. Stopped short of the PhD mid-flow (technically, I'm still in the PhD program) because of chronic pain; have an M.S. at present and love teaching.
No response is needed here to this, but: there aren't a lot of things you need a PhD in stats for, and most of those things aren't things people who can get the PhD in stats actually want to do. Tenure track is like doubling down on the PhD research, those jobs are hard as hell to actually get in the US or UK in the current market even if you really do want one, and unless you are deeply, deeply enamored by research—which is maybe 3% of the people who think they are deeply, deeply enamored by research—it's not what you'd like best.
Meant as a friend. *(hugs)* Best of luck on whatever path you take. But consider it very carefully, as there truly is more to life.
Sadly I can't provide a full opinion on this as I'm starting grade eleven of high school, but I do find a lot of your points making sense even without being in that community.
I plan to go to college or a specialty school for sound work (recording and what not) and I don't know if your in America (I'm assuming America) or Canada ,but from what I know the college experience in Canada is way different than the U.S.
I'd love to be able go and play Football, but with what I want to do that's not an option, I guess you could say I'm in-between the going for actual learning and for what it provides non-academically.
But seriously I have no idea what I'm talking baout so I'll shut up now xD
3330624
I keep forgetting you went to UNM! Dah!
'course I didn't go there as an undergrad, though most of my friends did. I went to the University of Oklahoma, which is basically a football program with an affiliated vo-tech, so Greek societies were a very big thing. (So were people standing in public spaces telling us about how Jesus despised education and we needed to drop out of school if we didn't want to go to hell.)
But yeah, UNM really sequesters its fraternities and sororities. I don't think I'd have even known where they were if the stats department weren't located really close to the
ghettosection of campus where they keep 'em all.3330602
I think it's a Rush Week ad for the sorority, to try to get them new pledges. This seems to be a pretty cutthroat business. I've got another video on that topic which you might enjoy:
But 3330627 is basically right, it's not just a sorority ad, it's an ad for one of the "popular girls" sororities, which is a whole 'nother level of disconnect from my perception of college than your average not-crazy Greek society.
(As for the stats stuff, I've got a pretty fair idea of the difference between the work you do with a PhD and the work you do without one, and although I'm good at the non-PhD work, I think it'd probably drive me crazy in the end. I like being able to do new work. And yeah, I know it's possible I may not wind up going academic track, but that's definitely my direction for the moment. If I wind up doing something else, it's not the end of the world. But teaching/research sounds pretty sweet to me, and the stuff I'm working on (model selection methods and Bayesian non-parametric theory) is just cool stuff.)
3330658
Sounds good. I'm all about the Bayes (was once in a clinical psych PhD program, right about when the paradigm was shifting to Bayesian).
I don't think people realize how many people go to school, and how few of them are actually there to do anything that can be considered "learning."
I find nothing shocking in this video not because it doesn't represent college culture, but because it basically is college culture now.
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I think in hindsight, if I were going to offer any advice, it'd be to listen to what 3330613 is saying, even if it doesn't jive with exactly what you think you'll want. More people seem to regret coming out of high school / college without the socialization experience than without the education, or at least it seems like that's what I've seen. I think that's true of a lot of my friends, who approached college roughly the same way I did.
I think it's fair to say there have been times I've regretted not focusing more on the social side in college, too—though at this point I think I'm pretty content with the choices I've made. They put me at a bit of a disadvantage romantic-relationship-wise, but even that's not too bad except for the fact that I'd like to have kids and my Overton-window-of-dating is getting to the point where a lot of people I'd be going out with are on the fertility downslope. Anyway, I've started to take it as a general life lesson that I'm weird and people shouldn't do what I do because I seem to be the only one who winds up happy doing it. Then again, it sounds like 3330609 and I may have a lot more in common than I'd previously realized.
I'm a bit of an odd duck when it comes to college. A very odd duck. Like, a platypus.
I started community college when I was 16 (and not in high school because I was home schooled,) and continued to mostly go to commuter schools part time until I was about 22. For me college was about learning things... but fun things. I gobbled up all the Social Science and Humanities classes they'd let me fit in my schedule, because that's what I did for fun. I was also there to socialize, but mostly with other geeks who also couldn't wait to take Mythology or Dr. Yourk's Statistics class. Then I went home and messed around on the internet, or played tabletop games with my non-college friends.
I only ever took one full time semester at a four year University, and that was the only one that wasn't within driving distance, and it was a strange thing for me. I was already 20, and already dating James, and transferred from my job at B. Dalton to the Barnes & Noble that was near the school. I didn't live on campus (I got a room with my mom's cousin) and generally felt out of the loop when it came to college stuff. I loved my classes (that was my semester at Hogwarts: Latin, Stats for Social Sciences, Anthropology of Art, and Anthropology of Magic and Witchcraft) but I had no idea how to college, and wanted to be back home with James.
So all I know about actual college comes from other people or movies. I'm not very helpful for understanding how other people do it.
However, I really just spoke up to say: OMGWonder Boys! I saw that movies when I was 18 and it is one of my favorite movies of all time and made me want to be a writer because I wanted to be and/or sleep with every character in that movie, even the gay ones. And I will forever love all of the actors in it for that movie first and foremost, because who really gives a shit about Iron Man or Spider-Man or Fargo or whatever? They were in Wonder Boys.
Okay, fangirling complete.
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I did a grad-level I/O psych program for a year.
I think maybe I need to talk
towith you more...3330687
But that's fine too.
Or just listen to me more.
I've got about 32 hours of college credit from my local community college.
I am not in the blog's demo :P
I'm coming from a different culture with a different system of university education and underlying assumptions, so it's hard to me to comment in depth, here.
But what I can say is that you have an incredibly Twilight Sparkle way of thinking about college, Bradel.
3330658 Not only a popular kids sorority, but one at Alabama. Greek Life at Bama and a few other schools down south is essentially the last remnant of the antebellum southern aristocracy. This is like three levels of disconnects from your college experience, at a minimum.
3330683 More in common, yes... here's one: when you were talking about lurking on the edge of the circle in Quills on Saturday, it gave me one of those lopsided sad smiles of recognition. The reason I wasn't in Quills on Friday was because I looked in and couldn't quite face breaking into an active table at that point and chickened out. Do you know why I was in that circle on Saturday? Because I beat the circle to the table. Archonix had been there, I sat down and said hi because I recognized the name, and then a panel ended and the whole rest of the group came to me. I didn't have to break the ice, the ice got broken for me. I could easily have repeated my performance of 2014, where I basically only interacted with anybody because Sunchaser, bless him, reached out to me over FimFiction and invited me to the authors' dinner at Tir na Nog.
On a certain level, I am acting the entire time I'm in a social situation. Any with-it-ness or gregariousness I may project is a sham!
But it's a facade that usually keeps me more relaxed and puts me in better contact with people who are cool and make me happy, so I keep working on it.
Also I got like two sentences written while I was there. Totally useless, productivity-wise.
High school is extremely poorly designed, generally speaking, to teach socialization. In fact, I'd argue that almost no classes in school teach such things.
The irony is, these are extremely learnable skills. I went from "socially awkward shy guy" to much closer to what I am today in the space of about a year because I took a speech class, joined toastmasters, and spent a week at the Naval Academy, where the sailors FORCED me to dance with girls.
TWICE.
And after the second time, I found a third girl to dance with on my own.
I have never gone to a dance again, ever, but I think that experience changed my mind about some kinds of social interaction.
I then promptly spent the next year not picking up on girls having a crush on me, but, you know, baby steps.
But frankly, if they wanted to teach you useful skills in high school, they'd make speech class mandatory and make you give lots of presentations until the awkward is beaten out of you. There are other skills - like working in teams - that they can teach you as well.
Interestingly, with regard to bosseS: I've never actually had a boss I've disliked. I hated working at Energ2, but I never disliked my bosses. I did think that the company was being run poorly, but that was more of a macro issue. And I liked my boss at Lionbridge, though he was much more of a supervisor type - he was mostly there to make sure that everything was working and we had adequete resources and nothing bad was going on, and ironically, because we were contractors working by the hour, he was making sure both that we weren't working unpaid overtime (because that would eat into the company's bottom line - better to hire more contractors or pay us more for overtime!) AND that we weren't working outside our pay grade (because, again, that would eat into the company's bottom line). It gave me a very interesting appreciation for contract work.
That's because you're the good kind of Catholic, the kind who, when the zombie apocalypse, gets to turn undead and hold all the holy water for us.
Not that it would burn the rest of us, mind you. It just kind of itches.
When I came to that conclusion my senior year of college - that I had been fundamentally wrong my whole life about how other people actually were, that other people were not like me - I sank into what was probably my only ever episode of depression.
I wanted this from the time I was a little kid.
I never heard many complaints from anyone I went over with a sack of bricksBeing condescending is a way of displaying social dominance which tends to make people resent you or feel stupid, or possibly both, neither of which are probably very condusive to learning.I went to Vanderbilt and hung out with the Gaming Society and the people who wrote the school parody newspaper.
Honestly, the greatest mystery is how I didn't end up writing anything until 2013.
To be fair, Vanderbilt University probably isn't a normal university in any meaningful way. Socialization was important there, but for a lot of the people I hung out with, school was very important too. They weren't there to socialize, but socialization was a part of their life.
There was only one person I hung out with who was in the Greek scene, and the rest of us looked down on him a little, I think. He was younger than the rest of us by a couple years, and he was the guy who made the bad life choices, like getting drunk, walking back across campus, making it up 13 flights of stairs, then falling down in the hallway outside of his bedroom and breaking his forehead open.
But we weren't distainful, it just... wasn't our thing. Even though most of my friends did drink, they didn't do stuff like that. I guess that was the difference, really.
I'm exactly the same way. My parents never cared if I drank or smoked or did pot or did drugs. Alcohol was available at my friends' houses, and my mom would always offer to pick me up if I ever got drunk or high or whatever.
And I never, ever did.
Totally uninterested, in fact.
My parents also kept candy around the house so that I could have it whenever, and thus it was never very special to me, on the premise that if they pretended like it was a rare treat, then I'd really want it, but if it was just kind of there, I would care less.
And right now, we have ice cream in our freezer.
And we consume it... sometimes.
I'm not sure if my family's ideas about these things are right, or if we're just a bunch of crazy people.
My parents also wanted me to get a girlfriend (or a boyfriend - I got the "It's okay to be gay" talk after not demonstrating interest in girls who had crushes on me, because I didn't realize they had crushes on me. Naturally my parents didn't tell me, either. The worst was me figuring out literally a decade after the fact that a girl actually asked me on a date in high school and I said no and didn't even realize she was asking me on a date.)
3330613
I never had that problem. I always was myself. And I have to wonder if, maybe, that might be the difference for me - when you never had any problem being YOU, why would college be any different?
3330627
This... is something I never really thought about before tonight, but I this triggered a weird (and entirely unrelated to the video) revelation, related to an interesting psychometric observation.
You know studies seem to indicate that pretty people are more intelligent on average?
Back when I was in Vanderbilt, two of my friends would play a game (which never quite sat right with me) where they would count every time they drove onto campus.
Their count was how many cute girls they saw before they saw an ugly one.
They would fairly regularly get back to their rooms while they were still counting, and would always hit double digits.
And most of the guys there weren't unattractive either.
Vanderbilt had no way of knowing how attractive most people were. Not everyone had an in-person interview before going there. And yet, the people on campus were mostly at worst average, with only a tiny number of below-average people.
It is a weird thing to think about.
Bah! What fun is there in hanging out with normal people?
I remember some video starring one of the guys from KISS with exactly that message. It stuck with me for some reason.
I'm European[1] so my experience is a bit... different. The general attitude towards students during my education was this:
Primary School: Aww... aren't you guys cute. Now shut up and study.
Secondary School: Shut up and study.
University: SHUT UP AND STUDY.
It doesn't mean kids do, of course, but the general attitude is that you are in school for one reason and one reason only. Socialization and so on are for you to do on your own time, or would be if you had any of your own time to begin with. But you don't. So shut up and study.
As a result there's still a lot of partying going on[2] and not a lot of studying but nobody publicly condones this and no marketing campaign would think to mention it[3]. I think that young people kept in close proximity and away from parental supervision will, generally, live with a certain amount of, ah, joie de vivre to be diplomatic. However, in America this is emphasized as the point of going to university. This, I think, is destructive because it will amplify this natural tendency to grotesque extremes as it clearly has done.
Further, if you think about it, using your college years to party and blow off classes seems like a particularly daft idea in the 'States given the horrifying tuition fees you guys charge and the usurious terms of modern student loans.
[1] I sip my espresso menacingly at you, American imperialist scum!
[2] Allegedly. I wouldn't know.
[3] One year our marketing campaign was an image of a scowling professor and the tagline "So. You think you are smart enough, do you?" Amazing, really, that we have 50 000 students, isn't it?
3330829
Well, speaking in the name of stupid ugly people everywhere, could you tell Genetics that it's a bastard for us?
I can't really comment, as I have never even been to a college campus, let alone actually attended one. (UnwashedMasses4lyfe!) I recall very much that I learned very little, functionally, in High School, save for the fact that more money really does afford you a better education, even in the public school system. Honestly, I think the only courses I actually learned anything in was Art History, and Drafting. Certainly they were nearly the only classes I enjoyed. Okay I liked physics too, but I was rubbish at the whole calculus part of it. It frustrated my teacher to no end, as I was just about the only student in the room actually engaged with the topics, but the minute the algebra wanders in I was toast. (It was kind of like that in Drafting. I was engaged, and even fairly good at it, but the teacher had the dead look of any teacher who taught a class people took for an easy A. I think I actually taught myself 75% of that class.)
Anyway, the point I was trying to make, before I went full ADD here, is that it sometimes seems like our own education system itself can't quite figure out this whole "learning" thing, and I wonder if that skews how people view Uni.
Isn't that the opposite of what statistics is about?
3330658
Care to share some of your research? There's a small chance I'd actually understand it. I've actually spent the last few days filling up a notebook trying to find the right way to merge HMMs generated from multiple biased subsets of a single population. I've somehow ended up on the wiki page for Schramm–Loewner evolution...
You can get thrown out of college for not maintaining your GPA. You can't get thrown out for not going to parties. The basis of the institution remains clear. If people in society want to repurpose it for their own ends, I suppose it's their right; just as it's their right to use a pile of toilet paper as a dinner napkin.
Greek societies are something I never really understood until long after I finished college (an experience which was quite a bit like yours, minus some serious studying and plus a lot of video games, and minus OU and plus Oklahoma State). My take on them is that they're a way to attach yourself to a network of social contacts that stretches far and wide across the country, with members at every level of society. Think of it as plugging yourself into a good ol' boy network that will be useful in innumerable ways later on in life.
3330794 It's kind of scary how much that describes my experience. There are people who I never managed to introduce myself to and speak with this year purely because they were at a full table in Quills and Sofas and I have no real clue for how to go about walking up and butting in. I probably only had the good experience I did this year because the Price of Loyalty guys reached out and pulled me in as a prereader about a month or two before the con and that gave me an in of sorts. I wouldn't have been at the author's dinner if they hadn't encouraged me to tag along, for example, and wouldn't have had nearly as many group meals.
I went into college with your expectations, honestly. Especially since my first semester away from home ended with me off my meds and never leaving my dorm room due to a shame spiral involving not going to class because I hadn't gone to class. I commuted after that.
But yeah, most extracurriculars just didn't interest me that much. A few, yes, but I treated them more like high school clubs than a way of life; a pleasant bit of socialization and relaxation, a sort of dessert to complement the nutritious academia.
I'm in university right now. Third year, actually. But I'm in Australia, so there is probably quite a bit of difference between how it's run over here and how it's run in the States.
When I first arrived at Uni, I existed in the study study study mindset that had seen me through high school. I attended every lecture. I went to all my tutorials. I spent a crapload of time at Uni, and most of it studying.
Second year, I went through a personal crisis, where my original motivation to study (to be the best!) showed itself to be unrealistic and unhealthy. Because of that, I turned my attention to other things.
Don't get me wrong, I kept up my study! But I also tried out some of the university clubs and made more of an effort to be sociable, which was made easy by the fact that most of the people I befriended in first year turned out to be social butterflies.
Third year, where I'm at right now, has been the most social year for me. I'm a council member for one of the clubs, I'm starting up a creative writing and poetry club (CWAP: Where we talk CWAP all day!), and I'm constantly meeting and interacting with new people. (And thanks to this constant exposure, my social anxiety has gradually lessened. Hooray!)
So, what's the take away?
Personally, I'm here to learn. Not just within my field of study (Chem Eng and Solid State Physics), but within any other field that catches my eye. I have access to the most information I probably will ever have access to in my life. Why not make the most of it?
I think this holds true for a lot of others on campus. There are a quite a few people who do way more partying than they do studying, and there are a lot of people who blow off lectures, but we don't have any frat or sorority houses or anything like that. So the lifestyle is more . . . I'm tempted to say balanced?
Sure, balanced.
Food is expensive here. Alcohol costs an arm and a leg. Transport ain't cheap, and neither is housing.
And, to top it all off, our Uni debts accumulate into the monster which is known as HECS, which you only need to pay off once you have a job. Knowing you have that son-of-a-bitch looming over you, you want to be able to get a job. Getting a job means being sociable and smart, which means balancing socialising and studying . . . and so it goes.
tl;dr: We don't have those kinds of groups in Western Australia. Most students seem to balance study and socialising fairly well.
Note: Most of the people I interact with (engineers, physicists, med students and commerce kids) are usually pretty studious, either because they enjoy their field of study or because OH GOD THEY WANT TO BE EMPLOYABLE.
Hope that sheds some light on the situation in Perth
Are... Are they not?
Shit. I may have to inform my parole officer of a few things... 
3330794
3331147
Yeah, my first pony convention (BABScon 2014) felt a lot like what you both describe. I think the only reason I did a good job avoiding it at BronyCon this year is that I was so well prepared for it in advance. Seriously, I've been seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist lately (I live in Southern California, this is de rigeur), and we spent a good amount of time focusing on how I was going to approach BronyCon before I left because BABScon was a mini nightmare for me (even though I got to meet lots of people I really liked there).
I got to talk to both of you, not for long enough, enjoyed it, and want to do more of it. So if it's any help, at future cons we might be at I totally give you guys permission to come up to me and break into whatever conversations I might be having so we can talk more.
3331178
3331184
Thank you guys (and others, but I'm working my way up through the comments) for making me feel like this whole "going to college to learn stuff" thing is pretty normal. I was honestly starting to get worried.
I think 3330747 is right—this video is so many steps removed from my idea of college that it wigged me out, but it's almost as many steps removed from everybody's idea of college. Crazy southern aristocrats and their crazy pretty-girl societies.
3331102 Had a friend of mine get that. First year at KSU, got really into FRP gaming, GPA went into the hole and out the door he went. The Air Force picked him up though, and he's making more money than I do now. I came *really* close a few times. One semester I tried to pull 21 hours, wound up getting *six* at the end, and three of them were low enough I considered retaking the class.
3331310 "...Seriously, I've been seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist lately..." There's a regional joke in there somewhere.
New York: So, vat does your mother think of that?
Hawaii: So, dude? What does your surfing instructor say?
So Cal: So, like have you asked your Guru about that yet?
Iowa: So, what does Father Stone say?
Middle CA: So, have you run that by your financial analyst yet?
North CA: Jeeze, doesn't it ever stop raining?
3331072 I think I managed to get through college without developing study *or* social skills. Six years for a degree, a year for graduate studies (until they found out how I was taking grad courses without paying the grad school), a year looking for employment, and then to the job I'm at now. I still have about the same eight friends from our college D&D sessions, and we play every Saturday online.
I went to College after my stint in the Military was over. It wasn't a joy of learning, nor a desire for social interaction with my fellow students. The degree was just one more mission to accomplish. It was a box to check on the way to getting a decent job.
I got a job in my field after a few years of trying. It turns out that the academics from school need to stay there. They're just not applicable to boots on the ground work.
3331072
We don't talk to Genetics, that just encourages it to keep acting out. We just quietly pretend it doesn't exist in the hopes that it will go away without embarassing us further.
In all fairness, people who go to college to party tend to be much more visible than those who go to college to study. Only 11 universities have greater than 50% of their male student bodies in fraternities, for instance.
3331317
I went to Vanderbilt, which is, along with Duke, one of the two foremost colleges for Southern aristocrats. Girls who went there to get rich husbands were said to be getting their M.R.S. degrees, and were widely looked down on by the student body, male and female. I think that sort of thing is largely the domain of the pretenders rather than the organically rich; if you're actually rich, you're expected to be a Vanderbilt - which is to say, be able to ruthlessly buy all the railroads and drag every cent out of your customers.
Another weird thing was that they had speech classes at Vanderbilt for Southern people to lose their Southern accents because having a Southern accent was associated with being a poor rube. Despite the overwhelmingly large number of people pulled from the South, strong Southern accents were a rarity there.
WARNING: CONTROVERSIAL OPINIONS INCOMING.
True story: My father made me get a BA (short for Bugger-All) because he wanted me to be just like him. A few months before I graduated, he died.
As a result of that wasted time, I'm six years behind on building a career, and I only qualify for working-class jobs. If I could go back and do it all again... I wouldn't.
College might be good if you take a trade or a science, but even then, there are cheaper, more efficient alternatives these days. The entrepreneur, James Altucher, talks about this here. I quote:
But what about the social aspect? Well...
You didn't. If a teenager wants to learn social skills, he should hang around with people a generation older than him, so he'll learn to behave like an adult. The idea that teenagers should socialize only with each other is part of the reason why most people now act like teenagers until they're thirty-five or so. By the sound of things, you got more useful stuff out of high school than I did.
I don't know about anyone else, but I learned more about life in the world from a year working at a gas station in a bad neighborhood than the six years it took to get my four-year degree. College is not Real Life.
3331534
Not with me. I think I agree with every single thing you said, and I've been saying some of them myself for years (like the lack of value in going to college for a lot of people).
The "learning to behave like adults" thing I hadn't thought of, though (especially since I'm an only child) it seems pretty relevant to how I turned out.
There's a third option alongside "going to college to learn" and "going to college to socialize", and that's "going to college for the paperwork".
See, the problem is that nobody in a position to hire you will believe you when you assert that you can do the things necessary for a job that requires a degree in computer engineering unless you actually have such a degree from an accredited institution. Sure you could explain Huffman coding off the top of your head or write an example unbiased renderer in a few minutes, but you won't get a chance to talk to anyone who would be able to tell the difference because your resumé will bounce right off the door.
So, I went to college to 'learn' a bunch of stuff I already knew so that it could be officially recognized that I knew it. While I won't deny that I did in fact learn plenty of things that I didn't know, was perhaps relieved of a certain amount of hubris, and came out of it with at least one friend who I still keep up with, that was essentially the attitude I went in with.
Then, of course, after college, ponies happened, and I spent a couple years being faintly jealous of the people a few years younger than me who were deciding to go to art school.
3331433
This year, it does.
3331534
That's because they were doing what we scientists call "lying". I promise you, nobody in HR checks for initiative. They check the degrees, and they sort the stack by final degree and by what school that degree came from. I've been in many meetings going thru resumes, in different companies, and even the resumes that pass HR are always sorted by degree and college.
College is Real Life for people who play the college game so that they get an internship at Goldman-Sachs, or become McKinsey consultants. They will never go to a gas station in a bad part of town. Someone might scratch their BMWs.
One thing I've noticed since getting a Jaguar is that, though the dealer keeps selling new Jaguars--many more new Jaguars than old ones--I hardly ever see them on the streets, and I have never, ever seen a recent-model Jaguar in a public parking lot. I think that people who can blow $100K on car don't go to the same places as people who can't, ever.
3330589 If they wore white dresses, bikinis, and other trappings of the stereotypical standard of feminine beauty in America, it would be both awesome and hilarious. In practice, they just try to find as many ways to say "we have beer and hang out with hot girls" as possible without admitting to violating any laws.
3330829 Bosses are easy to get along with if you can see the workplace from their point of view - which is often about being able to report that there aren't any problems. There are problems, but nothing your boss's boss needs to know about: that's the realistic ideal situation. So as long as you're doing your job and not causing any new issues to occur you're generally fine.
And now for my completely different perspective: I was in fraternity in college. Those of you who still remember my old username are one step closer to figuring out which one. It did me a lot of good, because without it I wouldn't have had a home at college.
Fraternity means brotherhood, and we took that part seriously. The rituals of the fraternity process were designed some time ago by very smart people to artificially create that relationship, in all it glory and gore. We trusted each other as much as we trusted our biological brothers. We shared things. We got into fights. We bailed each other out. (sometimes literally) We move each other's car when needed. We introduced each other to new people. We played, we drank, we pushed each other socially and academically, we cleaned up each other's messes, and we tried to not burn down the house (with limited success.)
It was not an accident: the rush process advertises the character of each chapter - and each chapter has a character. If the main trait of a house is "pot smoking" rush will push smokers toward that house, and push non-smokers away. If the main trait is "class" or "honor" or "affluence" or "a propensity for fisticuffs" then rush will let that out even if you try to hide it, but no chapter with at least three functioning brain cells between them hides their character. They'll hide their crimes (pot and underage drinking), but then again so does everyone else.
The pledge process (which takes weeks) is designed to get the new brothers to trust the chapter, and to get the chapter to trust the new brothers. There's a lot of secrets shared amongst the brothers, and a lot of secrets kept from others, but that's all a giant actually-effective trust-building exercise. The process creates a bond of a particular sort, that (if done correctly) creates a trust-based organization.
And then your brothers try to help you. Mostly socially: by pushing shy brothers to come out of their shells, or by pulling brothers back who go a little hard at life. Having parties every week meant that you couldn't ignore them and that you got good at throwing them. Sometimes academically, either by reminding you to get back to work or actually helping with the work if you happen to share a major and/or class.
You always had someone to talk to, and ultimately could talk to them about anything you had the courage to admit to yourself. That became hugely important for more than one of us during my time in the house.
This all assumes the chapter in question isn't corrupted: which happens depressingly often when you see what a good house can do. Mostly that means hazing (which replaces trust with fear) but occasionally it means a house entirely populated with people who don't take a balanced approach to college (too little socialization and the house becomes pointless; too much socialization and you get a lot of dropouts)
Anyways: this sorority video seems harmless to me, because they're just trying to make clear exactly who they want to be a part of their sisterhood. They do a good job of it, in my opinion. While I'd be very much surprised if anyone here is tempted to try joining, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with what they're doing, and a lot of good can come of it.
On the other hand, had you tried to have a social life, you could have been like me, and tried and failed. You are not a slim, beautiful woman.
I spent a lot of time at parties as an undergrad. I pledged a fraternity as a grad student--yes, it's against the rules; that "lying" thing came in handy again--while taking 6 graduate-level courses. Our unofficial motto was, "Sex, drugs, and rock & roll". It was a bit misleading--we didn't play rock & roll. Yet somehow I got through, I don't know, a few hundred nights spent in dingy bars or basements with drunken co-eds, without ever attaining the, ahem, desired results. Several women even tried to seduce me, sometimes going so far as to crawl into bed with me, hide in my closet and refuse to leave, drag me back to their apartment, or get me drunk and then start talking about sex and giggling. They were good-looking women, too, and I desperately wanted the same thing they did. But as with most species, the male must do a mating dance, and I didn't know the steps.
Were we learning how to socialize? I don't think so, unless drawing penises on somebody's face while he's asleep counts as socialization. Half the time the music was too loud to talk. When we could talk, the conversations were boring. The things that others found entertaining were basically the college equivalent of the featured box. I went through pledging, meetings, and fraternity events in order to go to the parties, but the pledging and the meetings were more enjoyable for me than the parties.
If I were to meet a woman at one of these parties that I could actually like outside of a party, it would be pretty hard to tell. There was one, but she moved away the week after I met her.
TL;DR: I spent a great deal of time at the bar / fraternity party scene, and it was not fun for me, and the "casual sex" your parents were so worried you'd find is not so easy to get for most men. (Possibly as many as 1/4 of American men never have sex in their entire lives.) It is not a numbers game. It is not a matter of learning pickup routines. What those women want more than anything in a man is high energy, enthusiasm, wit, a little recklessness, and a cheerful attitude. You've either got it or you don't. I don't. Later on I compensated for this by bodybuilding, which was effective, but hella time-consuming and damaging to my joints. (The rules are reversed when you're muscular: being quiet and reserved suddenly becomes attractive instead of repelling.)
3330829
How do you do that?
3332650
You get invited.
The Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy (and probably West Point, too, though I don't know for sure) have a summer recruitment thing between your junior and senior year of high school. They invite you out to the academy and you spend a week living in the student housing with fellow potential recruits, waking up every morning to do PT (one morning, it was run by the Seals, and was way harder), did a bunch of physical testing to see if we met the physical requirements (I outran almost all of the sailors in the mile run
), went to things which were basically "this is what sort of stuff they teach at the academy", talked to actual Navy professors (and an Air Force professor who was on exchange there), saw some of their computer stuff and programs (the satellite tracking thing was particularly amusing, because it had the "true" identity of all the satellites on it (though not the full details, obviously), and they noted how you can tell whether a satellite is a spy satellite by its orbital characteristics), ect.
It was interesting and informative. More or less, it is a recruitment thing, but it isn't JUST meant to recruit - it is also meant to give you a taste of what it is like there, so you know whether or not it is actually something you'd really be interested in. There's no point in going through the motions if you're not actually interested, and it is cheaper for them to put you up for a week and have you find out you're not interested then than have you actually enter the Academy and be a morale problem.
I liked it, but I didn't want to live it, but it was a worthwhile use of a week to learn that, and I learned a bunch of other interesting things and saw a different angle on the Navy than I likely would have ever seen otherwise. Lots of things stick out in my mind, but one thing I particularly remember was them talking about how many people wanted to be pilots, and how few were actually chosen, but one of the professors told us as an aside that pilots were becoming obsolete anyway, because people and planes are expensive while cruise missiles were cheap and didn't put any lives at risk, and thus were much more cost effective and better for morale.
He also told us not to tell that to the pilots.
3332704 I've known two former Navy pilots, and they both had terrible hearing. Too much engine noise.
I'm currently in college, but I'm on mobile, so I'll be quick.
I'm a firm believer in the Law of Averages. Don't spend all of your time partying, nor spend every waking moment with a textbook against your face. Yes, I'm there to learn, but I'm not just there to learn.
Make a few friends, close ones, build your network with a select few that will want to keep in touch with you long after the campus scene is done. Enjoy yourself: go bowling, watch movies, play rec soccer, have fun.
Study well and study hard. Don't cram, it's ineffective and you'll stress yourself out. Take good notes, have study sessions with others in your courses, and learn the material to learn it, not forget it when the diploma is in your hand.
Above all else, find the balance that works for you.
I went to:
UC Irvine 'cause it was the closest college--every house I've ever lived in, every school I've ever gone to, every job I've ever held, they've all been within a ten mile radius of the hospital where I was born, so another southern California boy here!--and I had no idea what I wanted to do when I got there. But they let you be "undeclared" through your whole freshman year, so I figured I'd look around--I'd done Advanced Placement Physics, Calculus, English, History & Latin in high school, so I held a fairly wide field of interests.
As soon as I arrived on campus, though, the counselor said, "See that AP credit? That's your freshman year right there. Congratulations! You're a sophomore. Now what's your major going to be?"
"Latin!" I blurted out, and six years later, I had an M.A. in it. They don't usually give M.A.'s in Classics as UCI, but after I'd been in the Ph.D. program for a few years, the department head called me in to ask why I never signed up for any of the teaching assistant positions.
"'Cause I don't wanna be a teacher," I said. I've never been a fan of social interaction--I've gone on one, maybe two dates in my five decades, but I could never quite see what the point was--and I couldn't imagine a more horrible sort of social interaction than me standing up in front of a group of people and trying to be an authority figure.
The department head pointed out to me that pretty much the only thing you can do with a Ph.D. in Latin in teach Latin to other people. Then he said something I'll remember the rest of my days. He said, "People don't go to dental school because they like teeth. They go to become dentists." He then offered me a way out--"a terminal M.A.," they call it--and I took it.
We had fraternities and sororities at UCI at the time, but they weren't allowed to have houses, so as far as I could tell, they were just social organizations. As I said, I wasn't interested in socializing, so I joined the campus radio station where I've been hosting a show now for the past 31 years.
Once I find something I like, I tend to stick to it. I've just never found any sort of social interaction that I like, I guess...
Mike
3332851
Jeez, I've gone to the same schools as two other members of RCL? What the heck is this!?
Ah, but if you use witty condescension it'll sail over their heads like an eagle! It's super satisfying...not that I've ever done that sort of thing.
I've been an "academic" all my life. I think by around nine or ten my goal was to "get a scholarship and go to college" (and then become a construction worker. Kids, eh?). I chose physics as my pursuit in college because I thought I could do what Einstein didnt. I commuted because it was close, and didn't attend a single party or spend a single night on campus. I only really made four new good friends, three of whom I've fallen out of contact with.
The only thing that ever saved me from being a pre-ponyville twilight sparkle was that I had two brothers who were socialites (and who had girls grabbing their crotches since highschool), and that I basically tripped into a group of friends who were the exact opposite of me, who I still spend time with. Otherwise my experience would hardly extend beyond the borders of my textbooks. I'm very content by myself. Solitary confinement in prison wouldn't so much be punishment as it would a chance to relax (and be a nice challenge).
There's no real theme to all of this. But I will say: the last two years post college has been a process of learning how to actually think and truly learn--how to understand--and discovering that for all my years of academia, I was never really learning, even with A's and B's and a physics degree.
3330624
3332920
I sense:
The workings of Fate, whom Robert Benchley has called "that saucy minx"...
Mike
3333556
Well at the very least, I'm going to have to start tuning in on Sunday evenings.
This is bizarre to me. I went to a technical community college to learn. So did everyone else. In fact, the change from High School was shockingly abrupt: in High School, nobody gave the slightest crap about learning. In college, you're paying for this stuff yourself. Only the people who really want to learn will go there. The people who didn't care dropped out very quickly.
None of our college teachers were saying "You must sit and accept your free mandatory education regardless of how you feel about it." Instead, it was "If you decide to skip classes and be lazy, please drop out sooner rather than later. It gives us more time and effort to spend on the students who actually care."
And they were completely honest and up front about one thing: The teachers were under no obligation to pass students, just to make the college look good or to stop rich parents from whining and complaining. They pass you if you learn. If every single student failed their courses due to laziness or incompetence, the teachers get paid the same.
I wonder if this attitude is unique to technical community colleges. Maybe they're more practical minded and geared towards finding a career, rather than academic learning for it's own sake? I dunno. Either way, it was friggin' amazing. Just beautiful, I tell you.
When I went to technical college for Computer Stuff, there were four specializations: programming, network administration, web design, and database. During your second year, you have to pick a specialization. But during your first year, you had to study a little of everything: every single one of those jobs requires basic knowledge of the other three jobs. Nearly all the other students were hip teens or young adults, so everybody wanted to take the sexy, sexy web design or game programming courses. The least popular option? Database. How boring.
Except for one detail: the teacher we had for database was the most AMAZING person ever. He looked like a dumpy, overweight, balding accountant with oversized glasses, but he turned out to be extremely passionate, hilariously entertaining, and charismatic to boot. On the first day of classes, he asked us if there were any questions. I raised my hand, and cautioned him that "this is kind of a stupid question but." He immediately said "there are no stupid questions." Accepting his challenge, I said "I'm sitting at the very back of the classroom, and I can still clearly read your handwriting on the whiteboard. Are you sure you're a teacher?"
He happily explained that he previously had a job teaching soldiers in the Canadian military. When you take that job, the military makes you take a course to learn better communication methods, which included clear, legible handwriting that's visible at a distance, and the ability to give presentations to crowds. He then went on to tell us a story about how the military asked him to come up with a design for a database that would completely overhaul their entire staff filing system: some very high-security stuff, on the national level. They gave him one weekend to get it done, and they were willing to pay him with a pizza.
He had it done by Saturday. He sent them the final design layout scribbled on the napkins that came with the pizza. It worked perfectly.
Before the first year of college was even half over, two thirds of the trendy teens and young adults had decided to switch specializations and go into database. He turned the most boring class into the most exciting one. Never underestimate the value of a teacher who really loves their subject, and really loves the act of teaching.
I can't imagine statistics being interesting in the slightest... but neither would I have imagined that relational database design could be interesting.
Those sexy, sexy databases.