More to Life

I was eating dinner in the dining hall tonight when I became the witness of something not so cool. A high school senior made his way into the dining hall. Apparently he had been accepted and was visiting to see if the school was right for him. If any of you keep up on the college-industry's literature, you might notice that it's very emphatic about recommending people to visit schools before they officially enroll. Not only do they recommend a visit. They recommend an overnight stay, and a meal in the dining halls, and talking to students, among other things. So this high school senior apparently decided to take this advice to heart. He approached a group of students eating at a table right beside the one I was sitting by.

"Mind if I sit with you?" He asked. The students didn't give give him much more than an apathetic shrug, but he persisted.
"Are you Cornell students?" He asked. The students gave him a nasty look, as if, "what else would we be?" The high school student's question might have been a bit odd, except for the fact that one of the "Cornell students" was wearing a big, fat YALE t-shirt. The high school kid proceeded to explain that he is visiting and wanted to know if he could ask them a few questions about the school.
"Sure," they sort of said. They should have just saved him the grief and said no in advance, because the conversation that followed was pretty pathetic. I think the kid's first question was about how they liked the school. The one college kid who emerged as the main respondent quickly wanted to know what college he had been accepted to.
"I'm a liberal arts student." The high schooler said.
"Oh, well we're not, so we probably couldn't tell you much." That's such bull. Almost one third of the student body here is "liberal arts" students. A lot of the classes are mixed, and so are the dorms, so for those students to pretend that they don't know anything about liberal arts students or what it's like is just a pathetic excuse. If they didn't want to talk to him they should have just said so instead of giving him a hard time.
The college kids responded to pretty much all of his following questions, whether they were about academics or student life, with snappy answers like, "it depends," "you should ask someone who's in liberal arts," or just one-word answers.
The high school kid was smart enough to pick up on their vibe and apparently realized it would a waste of time for him to stay there any try to get some useful information out of them. He thanked them and walked away.
By the time the highschooler was five steps away from the table, the college students broke out in a neanderthal-like laughter.
"Oh dude, we gave him like the worst impression," one of the guys managed to say between his gleeful oinks.
"Fuck, I wouldn't come here if I were him," another one said. They then had the nerv to go on and make fun of him and his questions.

Geez, I was fuming. If I weren't so tired, I would have given them a piece of my mind, or maybe tossed them back to where they came from--the stone age. I felt bad for the kid. He deserved to be treated with some basic dignity, which the college students were pretty hard pressed to accord to him. For someone to have the guts to approach a group of strangers who are older than him, he should have gotten a bit more respect. That's why I didn't even bother to approach college students after I got my acceptance letter and came to visit. I didn't want to spend so much time and waste my energy building up the strength to approach someone only to be mocked or made to feel like some annoying little burden. I'm glad I spared myself the grief, but that doesn't mean the kids who actually do try to talk to college students before they enroll should be given grief!!!

See that's the thing about college and college students these days. They're not all that--even the ivy-leaguers. I attended one of the presentations in an Affirmative Action conference that was going on on campus this Friday. During the panel discussion, one of the presenters mentioned that Ivy League schools (like this one) grant athletes and legacies a bigger advantage than they do to minority students. [And no, by legacies I don't mean someone who's done something wonderful and therefore deserves the title of a "legacy"--for some reason the people here call students whose parents or other family members attended the same school a legacy.] It's pretty astonishing if you think about it. There's so much fuss about affirmative action programs when there are other admissions policies around that influence who's admitted even more than affirmative action programs do. Some people at the conference mentioned that even when minority students are admitted, they're often stigmatized or given a hard time about it--"oh, you only got in because of your race." Well, using that same argument, think about how many students "only got in because they're legacies/jocks." You hear much less of that, and even though it's pretty obvious who got in because of his/her jockishness, that's generally not considered a shameful thing (whereas getting in because of your race is?).

I really don't get the whole legacy thing though, and especially that legacies are given such a big "tip factor" (as the Harvard admission folks like to call it). The conference presenters said that it originally stemmed from the idea that children of ivy-league college graduates would generally tend to be well educated and well qualified. Well duh, when your parents are rich and smart it's not a big surprise that the children would have a huge advantage to begin with, so why do we need to give them a "tip factor" on top of that all?! There's another to these legacies, an unspoken truth of some sort. A lot of the legacy students come from wealthier families and grow up sheltered and overprotected. The real zinger is that many of these kids end up being really spoiled rich brats who engage in things that "society" doesn't quite approve of. You know what I'm talking about, you know how many of those goodie-goodie rich suburbanites end up sniffing up drugs like it's the air they breathe or fill their water bottles with beer.

I know that saying this kind of stuff can get me in trouble, but, before you lash out, don't accuse me of making false generalizations. I know there are plenty of good people among the legacies, and plenty of good people among the jocks. We'd be naive though, if we didn't consider the flipside--which we often like to turn a big blind eye towards. Before I came to Cornell, I was told that a school like this is where I would find many people "like me," be it people who aren't into drinking, who don't do drugs, who take school more seriously, whatever, I don't know--can't define myself--but you get the idea. The truth of the matter is that the reality I came to experience here was far from that. Even in this ivy league school, smoking up and drinking till you puke seem to be the extracurriculars of choice for most people. I KNOW there are people out there who don't do that, I am NOT generalizing, but it is true that those who opt out from the wildness end up in isolated pockets and it's much harder to connect. It's the drinkers and the smokers and rich snobs who tend to get most of the attention.

Even the highschooler gravitated right towards them, while I was sitting there, nearby, with an empty seat right across from me. I wondering why he didn't want to try to talk to me over some kids who seemed too occupied with each other to give him any attention. I then realized that I had my water bottle right across from me, not leaving enough room for a tray. I quickly moved my waterbottle and cleared up the other half of the table, but he didn't come over. Oh well, I don't blame him. I thought he was going to crawl into a whole after the way those college kids treated him... but after a couple minutes I saw him still moving from table to table trying to talk to people... Gosh, if that's not called "gettin' and up keepin' on moving," I don't know what is.

I want to end this entry with some sort of nice moral or final thought, but I can't really. There is no resolution. That kid rocks for persisting after being snubbed by those college students. There are also other issues like why students like those sullen-laughing college kids even get into schools like this. And what about all the drinking and drugging up that runs rampant even in schools like Harvard, how often does the average Joe associate ivy-league students with that type of behavior? There's a lot going on as far as misconceptions and twisted realities in college life... The admissions machines at schools like these would want you to believe that everyone they accept is the "creme de la creme," and that you have to be ultra-amazing to get into a school like this. But no, I contend, that's not the case, there's definitely some stuff going on the down-low that is not readily apparent to the general public...