Anonymous wrote:I'm at a SLAC that's known for being very supportive. It's such a refreshing pace after spending five semesters at an Ivy, which my Chinese immigrant parents forced me to choose when I was a senior in high school four years ago since they were thrilled that I got in.
The difference is night and day. The environment is SO much less cutthroat and competitive. Barely any clubs have competitive application processes. The students are so much more friendly and gracious and have much better social skills (which IMO is infinitely more important for success than which college you go to). There's so much more diversity in terms of interests and career goals within the student body -- people are planning on going to vet school or becoming art conservationists or librarians or humanitarian aid workers. It's a real break from the intense finance/consulting/tech focus that surrounded me at an Ivy (and I'm saying this as a solidly middle class student who won't have any parental financial support post-grad).
Most importantly, I'm a lot mentally healthier -- and so are most of the people around me. Most of my classmates at the Ivy were seeing a therapist or on meds (or oftentimes both). While that still happens at my SLAC, the degree of psychopathology is nowhere near the fever pitch that it was when I was at an Ivy.
Trust me, I know where you guys are coming from. I also have Chinese immigrant tiger parents and went to a competitive high school that encouraged striving for Ivies. My mental health broke down in college and the Ivy forced me to take a year-long leave of absence in the middle of my junior year, where I re-evaluted my priorities and just decided to leave entirely.
In retrospect, that was the best thing that could've happened to me. At my new SLAC (not a hyper-competitive one like Amherst or Williams), I've already been nominated for a departmental award, have very close relationships with my professors, am writing an honors thesis, and got a super-competitive REU for this summer. But most importantly, I'm in an environment where I'm encouraged to define myself without any relation to my achievements and have a wonderfully laid back, non-competitive, and genuinely diverse group of friends.
Most of the people I entered college with (my freshman year at an Ivy) have graduated by now. Their post-grad outcomes are mixed -- some of them have landed the FAANG or IB/MBB gig they've always wanted. But a lot of them -- arguably the majority of the mostly middle-class kids I was friends with -- are in normal jobs, or are underemployed and just trying to figure it out. Many of them are bitter and resentful that they grinded away in high school and spent four years of college surrounded by douchebags, only with no reward at the end.
Think twice about what you want out of the next four years and the rest of your twenties. It's really important that you deliberately make choices with your own sense of agency instead of simply just going with what your parents or the people around you are pressuring you to do.
From this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1bqr3js/i_dropped_out_of_an_ivy_and_my_life_is_way_better/
The comments reveal that OP went to an Ivy (that is not Cornell), and that the SLAC is ranked in the 20s-30s and is not particularly competitive.
What is DCUM's thoughts on this?
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