Reply to Missing Princeton student

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Missing Princeton student"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Among other issues, it seems like their admissions office is doing a poor job of selecting mentally healthy and resilient students.

People complain about athletes getting preferential treatment in admissions, but every high-level athlete has plenty of experience with failure and losing high stakes competitions.  The capacity to fail in gutwrenching fashion, and still bounce back, is sometimes untested in other high school student profiles. [/quote]

A healthy person can become unhealthy.

Every high level student has experience with failure and losing competitions too. 
[/quote]

Disagree. 
The Princeton selection process purposely picks perfectionist kids. This leads to a horrific cycle, as perfectionism is the opposite of mentally healthy and resilient.
It's a culture that is pervasive there.

p.s. I know the parents of TWO of the kids who've passed in the last 3 years.

[/quote]

A perfectionist isn’t perfect, it’s someone who strives to be, which actually means they’ve encountered coming short quite often, if not daily.

The point being responded to was claiming athletes are uniquely experienced in dealing with losing. That may be sorta true at age 8, but at age 18 top students have at some point experienced losing meaningful academic competitions and awards or getting a disappointing grade or passed up for some position.

Regrettably, I know parents who have lost kids too. Quite well, actually. One was an elite athlete, ok student, and socially very popular. He seemed very happy. It came out of nowhere. It can happen to anyone. It’s important not to generalize. It’s important to continue asking what we can do to make things better.

I’m not trying to bash Princeton when I say they should do better. Every school should. The most unique thing about Princeton isn’t that their students are less resilient (a claim I strongly disagree with) or more stressed (they are stressed though not uniquely so), but that Princeton has the resources to do more. Schools with fewer resources can then learn from them. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics