IVIES

Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth

An Ivy… Almost everyone can tell you that simple phrase refers to the most nation’s academic conference and can probably even tell you which eight schools are members of this prestigious group. Is being a student at an Ivy League school all it’s cracked up to be though? Goes going to an Ivy really make you a better student?

I personally am a student in the Ivy League. Before coming here, I was from a small town in Michigan. I was undoubtedly the oddball for applying to anything out-of-state and even more so for applying to one of the "Big 3 Ivies" (Yale, Harvard, Princeton). When I got accepted and decided to pursue my education in New York rather than Michigan, I was called crazy by some for wanting to be on the east coast and crazy by even more people for going to one of "the hardest schools out there."

When I came out to New York in August, I was prepared for the worst – insane amounts of homework, no time for a social life, classes with absolutely no curve, students wouldn’t offer any help out of fear that you might do better, etc. What I found was greatly different though. Teachers kept homework to a minimum, I had never had so much time to socialize and goof around, the average score on any given test was in the low sixties and was then curved to a B, and students generally did not care significantly about their grades.

As my first semester drew to a close and I could truly reflect on what it is like to be an Ivy League student and could look at it objectively, I came to a few conclusions:

1. Ivy League schools are good because of the students that attend them and students that attend them are good because of the name of the school. Classes might very well be as good if not better at New York University, which is only minutes away from Columbia, but the students that apply to Columbia are those that are traditionally looked upon as being smarter. Why would someone pick a school that might not be as good in some respects – because one is an Ivy and one isn’t. So, when the students graduate from an Ivy are viewed as being the smartest graduates in the country, it’s not because they got a great education that made them smart, it’s because they were smart going in.

2. Students at Ivy League schools are the nations biggest slackers. The homework that teachers do assign is rarely turned in by students and even more rarely done well. More often each student does a few problems and then relies on other students to have hopefully figured out the rest. Let us consider my calculus class as an example. Each week the teacher would assign about a dozen problems. The vast majority of students would do only the ones that they could do easily, most likely from prior knowledge. Usually though there were 2 or 3 that this didn’t work with and were related to a specific example in the text. Only 1 or 2 people (out of a class of 30) would even attempt those problems. The rest would just show up a couple minutes early on the day they were due and find someone who had some work that looked semi-coherent and would copy it down and turn it in. Does this give you the picture of a hard working, dedicated group of students that were incredibly ambitious? It certainly didn’t do that for me.

3. Ivy League = Parties 24/7. One of the first things that I noticed when I arrived on campus is that people would slip notices for 2, 3, 4 or more parties under your door every night. When you’d go to a dining hall for dinner, more people would be standing outside passing out flyers. Even in my dorm, there are posters for various parties and even a map that shows where the best parties usually are. While I was not a party person, my former roommate would go out nearly every night and would attend 2 or 3 different parties every night, often coming home just in time to pick up her books for morning classes barely coherent because she was either drunk or hung-over. From my experiences, this is the typical Ivy League student. There was contest in my dorm near the beginning of the year on who could go out and party the most consecutive night and still pass all of their classes (if you partied and failed classes, you were out of the bet). The winner was 21 straight nights.

All in all, I have liked my Ivy experience. I have enjoyed the times when all of my friends are stressing out over their work at other schools and I’m watching a movie because I have nothing at all due. I have enjoyed earning a D on an exam and having it curved up to an A. Would I give it up? Absolutely not. Would I get a better education elsewhere outside the Ivies? Absolutely.

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