The Thing About Ivy Leagues - 常春藤盟校
The differences between going to a good university and an exceptional university are many. But one thing stands out - the social network and people you make contact with.
At a fundamental level if you enter an Ivy League, people will want to know you because they think you are (a) very smart, or (b) very rich and have influential parents (G.W.Bush, case in point). This I can tell purely from seeing dozens of former fellow students from London fly off to Harvard/Columbia for their postdoc research and suddenly gaining a LOT of new friends, through partying/socializing/getting involved in community projects a LOT. I remember my Dad used to tell me about all these brilliant characters he met at MIT and immediately plunging himself into a huge group of new friends he instantly befriended, even if some of them turned out to be idiots. If you want to be superficial, you could argue that students, or scholars, who enter Ivy Leagues, major universities or mega companies always seem to gain a huge number of friends on Facebook, simply as a reflection of how many MORE people they come into contact with.
My first impressions of coming to work at this, my current medical school was how few social activities there are for research students and postdocs and the general lack of communal interaction between departments (save for graduate open days). There is not even a decent-sized communal lunch space for graduate students and postdocs (there is a space in the basement). I see pathetic students eat shitty pieces of sandwich everyday outside their respective labs, on their own, on dusty rotting chairs for christ sake! There is a rather dindgy canteen for undergrad. students and a decent gym (I'm not complaining about the state of the art gym), but such is the miniature size of this med. school and university as a whole, it simply breeds and shouts CLAUSTROPHOBIA, all around. In my old university in London there was a seminar room which was converted into a coffee room at mid-morning, a lunch room during lunch hours and a beer/party room in the evening for visiting or leaving scholars, providing a spirit for all people in the department to socialize together - and that was just in one department, on a daily basis. Here, there is no communal coffee morning, no communal lunch (especially not in my lab of F.O.B.s). Asking some of these guys to go out or do some fun activities outdoors at the weekends is like trying to drag out a two ton rock! How are you supposed to work hard and do good science, if you don't play hard?!?!
Still, the lab I work in currently seems to be hard working and the boss is very good at motivating people on top of getting grants/publishing papers. Where in the world they get their energy from to work so hard, if they stay at home all weekend watching American Idol, remains a mystery to me. I get my energy from pumping iron at the gym while trying to work away the frustration of not being able to socialize. From every pain, there is gain.
At a fundamental level if you enter an Ivy League, people will want to know you because they think you are (a) very smart, or (b) very rich and have influential parents (G.W.Bush, case in point). This I can tell purely from seeing dozens of former fellow students from London fly off to Harvard/Columbia for their postdoc research and suddenly gaining a LOT of new friends, through partying/socializing/getting involved in community projects a LOT. I remember my Dad used to tell me about all these brilliant characters he met at MIT and immediately plunging himself into a huge group of new friends he instantly befriended, even if some of them turned out to be idiots. If you want to be superficial, you could argue that students, or scholars, who enter Ivy Leagues, major universities or mega companies always seem to gain a huge number of friends on Facebook, simply as a reflection of how many MORE people they come into contact with.
My first impressions of coming to work at this, my current medical school was how few social activities there are for research students and postdocs and the general lack of communal interaction between departments (save for graduate open days). There is not even a decent-sized communal lunch space for graduate students and postdocs (there is a space in the basement). I see pathetic students eat shitty pieces of sandwich everyday outside their respective labs, on their own, on dusty rotting chairs for christ sake! There is a rather dindgy canteen for undergrad. students and a decent gym (I'm not complaining about the state of the art gym), but such is the miniature size of this med. school and university as a whole, it simply breeds and shouts CLAUSTROPHOBIA, all around. In my old university in London there was a seminar room which was converted into a coffee room at mid-morning, a lunch room during lunch hours and a beer/party room in the evening for visiting or leaving scholars, providing a spirit for all people in the department to socialize together - and that was just in one department, on a daily basis. Here, there is no communal coffee morning, no communal lunch (especially not in my lab of F.O.B.s). Asking some of these guys to go out or do some fun activities outdoors at the weekends is like trying to drag out a two ton rock! How are you supposed to work hard and do good science, if you don't play hard?!?!
Still, the lab I work in currently seems to be hard working and the boss is very good at motivating people on top of getting grants/publishing papers. Where in the world they get their energy from to work so hard, if they stay at home all weekend watching American Idol, remains a mystery to me. I get my energy from pumping iron at the gym while trying to work away the frustration of not being able to socialize. From every pain, there is gain.
posted by Lost in Americana at 1:00 am
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