Reply to Grinders and strivers and curators, oh my!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Do you genuinely not get that there's a difference between a grinder and someone who works really hard because they are genuinely and intrinsically passionate about some cause other than prestige or self-promotion?

I've known both types of students. It can be really hard to tell them apart on the surface. I'm sure admissions committees make mistakes all the tie. [/quote]

My first gen immigrant parents worked really hard to provide a better quality of life for future generations. They didn’t have the luxury of being “genuinely and intrinsically passionate” about their jobs. It sounds like you would use term “grinder” pejoratively regarding people like them?[/quote]

Oh, give me a break. I'm actually first gen, both as an immigrant and as the first gen to attend college. And yet I was still raised with values besides caring about money and self-promotion and can tell the difference between a grinder/striver/curator and an intrinsically motivated person with genuine scholarly interests.[/quote]

You didn’t answer my question. Are my parents bad people because they worked jobs they didn’t love?[/quote]

No. They cared about YOU presumably, and they worked hard because it was necessary to provide for you, that's great. So did my parents, who worked manual labor jobs despite one having been interested in medicine and the other being interested engineering. If they had the opportunity to go to college, they would have been intrinsically motivated.

But how is this relevant to college admissions? If your kid is intrinsically motivated and works hard, I wouldn't call him/her a grinder/striver/curator. Are you trying to work some sob story about an immigrant history to claim that your own kid with a curated profile and fake interests is just as good as other hardworking applicants who are genuine and passionate? If so, that's not really going to convince me. [/quote]

Thank you for clarifying, and I apologize for mistaking your meaning. I think we have been talking past each other (easy to do when quickly reading and typing). I am genuinely curious why terms I personally find neutral or even positive are considered by many to be quite negative. I would be the first to call my own DC a grinder (because they work hard to be the best research scientist they can be), striver (because they continually try to improve themselves), and a curator (because they successfully played the college admissions game which will serve as the first stepping stone to an impactful research career in their preferred field). No sob story whatsoever, just honest-to-goodness confusion why people think I’m negging my child when in fact I am super proud of them![/quote]

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