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Ivy League Aspirations Unleashed (NYT Q&A with Harvard's DofA)
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Anonymous
No rowers. |
Anonymous
No need for you to apologize about the second-hand nature of your input. I don't take offense. I just wanted to make clear that many parents encourage their children to row for non-cynical reasons that have nothing to do with college admission. In fact, it sounds like there are at least two families with a "pure" interest in rowing that are posting on this thread! Also, in case anyone is interested, I pulled a list of local high school rowing programs. Seems to be a fairly diverse group of schools. • Bethesda Chevy Chase High School Bethesda, MD • Bishop O'Connell HS Arlington, VA • Capital Crew Jr. Rowing Washington, DC • Combined Cathedral Crew Rowing Club Washington, DC - the National Cathedral and St. Albans Schools • Fairfax High School Crew Fairfax, VA • Georgetown Day High School Washington, DC • Georgetown Visitation Washington, DC • Gonzaga College High School Washington, D.C. • Holton-Arms School Crew Bethesda, MD • Hylton High School Woodbridge, VA • James Madison HS Vienna, VA • Lake Braddock Crew Burke VA • Langley HS Crew McLean, VA • McLean Crew McLean, VA • Mount Vernon High School Crew Alexandria, VA • ODBC High School Select Team Alexandria, VA • Robinson High School Fairfax, VA • South County Secondary School Lorton, VA • TC Williams Crew Alexandria, VA • Thomas Jefferson High School Alexandria, VA • W.T. Woodson Crew Fairfax, VA • Wakefield High School Crew Washington, DC • Walt Whitman High School Bethesda, MD • Washington-Lee High School Crew Alumni & Friends Arlington, VA • West Potomac HS crew Fairfax Co, VA • West Springfield High School Springfield, VA • Woodbridge High School Woodbridge, VA • Woodrow Wilson Senior High School Washington, DC • Yorktown High School Arlington, VA |
Anonymous
| Do the high schools above cater to a higher proportion of parents from elite educational institutions (e.g., Ivies, prep schools, NE colleges) with crew teams? I would bet they do. And just as the children attending these high schools are competing to get into some of the elite institutions their parents once attended, they too are involved in some of the sports and activities their parents were and may still be engaged in (e.g., rowing, golf and squash). This comes from years of grooming in households from these communities serving these listed high schools, attending the multiple 5-year reunion cycles at these elite colleges and universities since the high schoolers were in diapers and being embedded in the social university alumni network of their parents. I am not surprised these high schools "along the Potomac" have crew teams to round out their students! |
Anonymous
| ....Hmm...."fairly diverse group of schools" |
Anonymous
I meant mainly that I'd never heard of half of them. |
Anonymous
Or, as my dad (another harvard grad) used to quip: "You can always tell a Harvard Man-- but you can't tell him much." |
Anonymous
| Can't speak for the MD schools but I know the Alexandria schools pretty well. They are very diverse public schools that include families from the lowest to highest income brackets. Other than TJ, nothing elistist about any of them. |
Anonymous
| Sure, some kids row because their parents see it as a potential boost in college admissions, but many row because it's sport you can begin in high school without having spent years playing on select and travel teams as you must if you want to play high school soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis or, increasingly, lacrosse. In this sense, crew is the water equivalent of cross-country. Many of my son's friends who didn't make their high school baseball team have turned to crew -- some fall in love with the sport and others give it up because they hate the early morning practices. |
Anonymous
| You can also identify kids who do crew purely for the fun of it by looking at their heights -- at the competitive levels, it really helps to be tall, just like in basketball. This isn't to say that the tall kids are all doing it with an eye on Harvard, by any means. |
Anonymous
| I hardly agree with the poster who wrote that attending Harvard does not impact someone's ability to land a job after the first one out of college. I see the (positive) impact of having Harvard on your resume all the time, and not for entry-level jobs. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
| Hmm, that didn't work. I was trying to copy the person who said "Thus speaketh a Harvard grad...." |
Anonymous
There is also a positive impact of having virtually any school on your resume, if the hiring manager went to the same school. That's how I got one job. I'm sure coming from Harvard helps in some instances, but depending on what you're applying for it could also be interpreted to mean that you have higher ambitions than their job. |
Anonymous
| Harvard (or Yale, or Duke, or Stanford) degrees are a definite plus in life, IF your professional life ends up being in circles where that "pedigree" matters or where there is a critical mass of similarly diploma'd people. For my friends and relatives in the entertainment industry, NYU or UCLA (or Harvard Lampoon) are much more impressive to their professional peers and much more useful in their professional networking. Ultimately, 20+ years out, the degree can provide a bit of a network boost, but beyond that, poor performance is not fixed by a fancy degree, and excellent performance, regardless of degree, speaks for itself. |
Anonymous
| My kids are not in HS yet, but all of our babysitters go to TC Williams. A number of them are on Crew, and my impression is that crew is a popular sport and great school tradition that lots of kids try out for because it is cool and fun - not because parents are micromanaging them to do so. |