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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Figure 50-75 a year at the best nova high schools get into UVA, plus the kids old and younger than you. Plus local kids you know from sports, clubs, church, family connections. Easy to get to UVA and know a few hundred faces.

versus getting to an Ivy and loosely knowing maybe 1-3 kids.

Big difference.[/quote]

I went to an Ivy from a private school (the only kid from my class at that particular Ivy for that particular year, maybe a max of 10 from my school were at the Ivy at any given time and we averaged 75 kids a year). That aside, was it strange and scaring going to a college where I didn't know anyone? Sure. And I coped.

Every college is going to have incoming freshmen who struggle to settle in. Sometimes it's personality (shy, reticent), sometimes it's sheer bad luck (placed into a dorm where, for some reason, person has nothing in common with the rest of the floor and can't make friends). And each year there are students who transfer to other schools for a fresh start.

Coming from NOVA, which in the eyes of the rest of the country is already a privileged area that sends hundreds of students to the Ivies each year, is no different than coming from anywhere else in the US (substitute affluent suburb of X city for NOVA).

When articles talk about "middle class" kids struggling to fit in at the Ivies they're really talking about lower middle class kids from anonymous places or small towns where very few people go to the Ivies, let alone the flagship state university. NOVA does not fit in this category. [/quote]

This. There are TONS of kids who are from a large public high school and the kid of a suburban dentist and teacher or something like that, or a defense contractor and nurse. TONS. I was one of these, and there were lots of kids like me--suburban kids with college-educated parents. There are also, not surprising, lots of kids who don't have much money but whose parents are geeky academics or do-gooders (for example, social workers without much money but lots of awareness or the kid of an English professor). However, these kids tend to have a lot of awareness of the world and of academic life and so fit in quite easily in a university.

When they talk about struggling to fit in they are talking about people like the girl in "I am Charlotte Simmons" who come from places where nobody has had the experience of leaving town or going away for college and so they are totally unprepared.[/quote]

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