Reply to Risks of attending a “Reach” school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom.  He gave an example of a [b]Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she  thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field. [/b]
  [/quote]
Likely the other way around. [/quote]

I was going to say, why didn't she just go to slacker UMD and skate her way to that PhD?[/quote]

The bad news is that a PhD at a less-prestigious institution is just as much work as at a more prestigious one, but with far less chance of getting an academic job afterwards.[/quote]

Switch majors after your freshman year, though, and there’s a 0% chance you’ll get an academic job in the field.

That’s what Gladwell is talking about: if a kid who would be 25th percentile at Brown but 75th percentile at UMD goes to Brown, they get four years of discouragement and negative feedback, even though they’re objectively one of the best (that’s how they got into Brown) and would have been recognized as such at UMD. Not a lot of people have the emotional resilience to take four years of constant discouragement without getting thoroughly discouraged.

Getting into reaches feels great. Attending them is often a different story. [/quote]

There are far too many PhDs generated anyway, and we want the ones who get academic jobs to be the ones who tough it out at Brown, not the ones who are coddled at a state school.

“High level of discouragement” should be purposely incorporated into PhD programs.[/quote]

Yeah, it’s not the best example. Here’s a better one: long ago, my brother (a white man with an 800 SAT math score and a very healthy ego) called me to say he was going to drop his CS major because he was “the worst student in the department.” At Stanford. At the height of the dot com boom. I was the one who had to be like “the worst CS student at the most selective school in Silicon Valley is probably still pretty good?” He did finish the major. He did not earn departmental honors. He still works in the field. That’s a net positive, for him and for the world. [/quote]

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