pride and shame
May. 31st, 2002 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauralhI'm on my High School Alumni mailing list, which occasionally produces traffic. Not too often though. But today, of course, it had a note - requesting alumni for "college contacts" for current students looking to go to college. (Which is about 99% of them, generally. Literally. One person in my class didn't go to college.)
Anyway I briefly thought about doing it, but then I realized that I'd just encourage the person not to go to Duke. I mean, I'm pretty defensive about it myself, and I think it was a pretty damn good school (although not great), but the student body left me cold, as did the non-college-town it was in.
When I tell people that I went to Duke, they're generally fairly impressed. I always got a kick out of that before my senior year, since I knew it wasn't that impressive. Granted I'm biased but still.
My senior year, I took a telelearning computer science course with a professor at UNC, along with about 12 other Dukies. We were all hardcore CPS majors, and I assume that the UNC people were too. Anyway, we all had to do these sort of term-length team projects, and at the end of the term, present what we did.
Now, everyone knows (I think) that UNC in Chapel Hill is one of the top state universities in the nation. But the caliber of projects that our class did compared to their class? Un-be-fucking-lievable. I really didn't Get It till that moment; till that moment I'd wished that I'd gone to a state school and partied more, etc. But that moment I was convinced of the superiority of private education. Whether it's the students themselves or the education, I'm not positive (probably both), but damn, we kicked those kids' asses.
So that was one good thing, anyway. Still had problems with the people, though. I mean, I used to randomly surf people's web pages at school when there just to find interesting people. It really didn't work. I found one guy's "personal site", which included musings on subjects such as - get this - the smell of the soap in the student center. I always liked to ask "What is wrong with people? Why don't they think?" But that moment I realized "People do think, just about Very Different Things than I do."
Anyway. I still have very mixed feelings about having gone to Duke. I did meet a few Very Cool People there, and one of them got me into teaching summer camp, which led me to Seattle one summer, which led me here (in a very roundabout way) last spring. Which is good, of course. Others of them got me into film and travel (I wanted to travel always but never did till then), and Terry Pratchett.
Anyway I briefly thought about doing it, but then I realized that I'd just encourage the person not to go to Duke. I mean, I'm pretty defensive about it myself, and I think it was a pretty damn good school (although not great), but the student body left me cold, as did the non-college-town it was in.
When I tell people that I went to Duke, they're generally fairly impressed. I always got a kick out of that before my senior year, since I knew it wasn't that impressive. Granted I'm biased but still.
My senior year, I took a telelearning computer science course with a professor at UNC, along with about 12 other Dukies. We were all hardcore CPS majors, and I assume that the UNC people were too. Anyway, we all had to do these sort of term-length team projects, and at the end of the term, present what we did.
Now, everyone knows (I think) that UNC in Chapel Hill is one of the top state universities in the nation. But the caliber of projects that our class did compared to their class? Un-be-fucking-lievable. I really didn't Get It till that moment; till that moment I'd wished that I'd gone to a state school and partied more, etc. But that moment I was convinced of the superiority of private education. Whether it's the students themselves or the education, I'm not positive (probably both), but damn, we kicked those kids' asses.
So that was one good thing, anyway. Still had problems with the people, though. I mean, I used to randomly surf people's web pages at school when there just to find interesting people. It really didn't work. I found one guy's "personal site", which included musings on subjects such as - get this - the smell of the soap in the student center. I always liked to ask "What is wrong with people? Why don't they think?" But that moment I realized "People do think, just about Very Different Things than I do."
Anyway. I still have very mixed feelings about having gone to Duke. I did meet a few Very Cool People there, and one of them got me into teaching summer camp, which led me to Seattle one summer, which led me here (in a very roundabout way) last spring. Which is good, of course. Others of them got me into film and travel (I wanted to travel always but never did till then), and Terry Pratchett.
