Princeton grad says Ivy League made him 'social climbing weasel' | Hacker News Reader

Princeton grad says Ivy League made him 'social climbing weasel'

nypost.com

38 pointst2324 comments

>My biggest regret was not getting into enough trouble.

Too many movies, not enough life.

Not wanting to be sheltered is fine, and if the author can genuinely make it as a full-time writer, more power to him, but the reason his family has status is because his parents (and their parents probably) worked for it. Being a writer is a high status position if successful, but "wanting to get into more trouble" is silly. What the author is really saying is "I watched [insert x movie about honors student who works super hard and never has any fun deciding to cut loose] and want to live that in real life." And the thing that the author missed is: those are just movies. In real life, when you go crazy, that has consequences. Skipping out on financial security for the sake of art is a difficult choice, with actual sacrifices involved. Though it's probably easier if you come from a family that can pay full tuition at Princeton.

> Too many movies, not enough life.

I got into trouble. That is life. How many college kids do drugs, for example? A lot! This is undeniable. Some people suffer consequences from that, and some don't. As with everything in life, it's a risk. If you think college kids doing really dumb things only occurs in movies, I'm interested to hear which college you attended.

We had a recent Supreme Court confirmation that dealt with the trouble the nominee got into as an undergrad. (Spoiler: There were no consequences.)

I just graduated from an Ivy, now work at a FAANG, went to jail during my high school years, got tattoos around the same time, and couldn't afford a fraction of the tuition that the school helped me cover. And I wasn't the only one. The person from this article (since when does HN take NY Post seriously?) is offering one, extremely personal take on a process and community that is far larger than himself. The editors are just as guilty of generalizing with their pervasive use of "they." Just my two cents.

You choose what life you live. Don’t pass the blame. Determine the life you will live that will leave you without regret, and then live it.

Anything else is a waste of time and will leave you with regret.

The author did ultimately choose to leave, but in general we can't expect kids under 20 years old (or even under 30 years old for that matter) to make great life choices. I certainly didn't.

It usually takes experience to be able to make good choices. You have to learn from your mistakes. It's not helpful advice to suggest "Never have regrets, never make mistakes".

Dear Scott,

Thank you for showing us a glimpse of the elite world. I hope that during your journey ahead you might discover more about the world as well as yourself.

Life stages might serve as microcosms to foster our own growth. University is just the first taste of what the world could be like, but once you step out there is a whole different world of possibilities, if you bother to look.

Being fortunate to have knowledge gives you a higher responsibility toward others. My advice to your regrets is that you spend some time with people outside this cohort, especially the unfortunate. You don't need to go to Australia or even a 3rd world country to learn perspective - just talk to the outcasts, desperate, immigrants, sick and unemployed. You might learn something from them.

It is unfortunate that everyone is living in their own bubbles, especially the "rich" i.e. anyone with some life edge: American, educated, white, 1st world, healthy, employed, etc. Once you immerse yourself in the stories on the opposite, the "poor", you will begin to realize how delusional the notion of "choice" is. In reality, nobody has any choice in life: we were all just given different things in this world and our part (responsibility) is to make good use of them.

You might rightfully scorn at the elite for "playing the game", but realize that they themselves are imprisoned by their own fortune: the stress of "keeping up with the Joneses" by chasing wealth, prestige, image, etc. They are covert victims of their own successes, slaves to their own vices: in finance (stealing), consulting (lying), and tech (brainwashing). Only a few will knowingly (let alone willingly) admit their own sins - this is the curse of knowledge.

Once you understand better the human condition - that we are all just imperfect creatures, puns in a dark world, you might just be able to better discover your role in it. And perhaps, your "regrets" might just be the very key to forge you into a better writer.

Best of luck,

Ironically he’s still at it, writing a piece that is essentially virtue signalling his white guilt instead of actually taking any kind of action.

> instead of actually taking any kind of action

He left Princeton and moved to Australia. I'd call that some kind of action.

How does moving to Australia using your parent’s money tackle the snobbery of the Ivy League?

What do you mean by "tackle"? He removed himself from what he considered a bad influence, and he's writing about it publicly. I'm not sure what you expect? A 22 year old to single-handedly take down an extremely powerful institution that's almost 300 years old and has a $25 billion endowment?

Suffering from success

you know, you can also do all those kinds of things as a kid non-cynically, and then go to those schools all the same

Yeah but the number of kids doing it non-cynically is orders of magnitude smaller. I went to one of the top high schools in the country and pretty much all everyone who cared about Ivies inflated their resume to look like they cared about some flavor of the day cause.

To do it non-cynically, you would need to, by coincidence, truly want to do exactly those things that are needed to get in: the same causes, organizations, and activities. That coincidence is unlikely.

Or be an outlier.

It's not hard to be an outlier, if you set your mind to it. It's a lot easier than playing the game at a sufficient level to be admitted.

I was an outlier, and now I'm raising my kid to be an outlier.

But yeah, there is a culture of corruption spanning the upper tier.

It’s interesting that ivy students are trying to use their pedigree to get into tech. Tech itself isn’t impressed by an ivy university degree like other professions, nor does it really look for one in applicants.

There are many state schools that don’t require an insane ivy league resume to get into that have just as good or better paths to work in tech.

> It’s interesting that ivy students are trying to use their pedigree to get into tech. Tech itself isn’t impressed by an ivy university degree like other professions, nor does it really look for one in applicants.

I used to believe that, since I knew so many self taught coders become pretty successful 10-15 years ago. But the typical Stanford grad to FAANG route has become a total laughable mockery of its former 'build shit to gain a reputation' ethos but explains why their is so much corruption in University admissions.

You can still be pretty successful without a university degree with the right connections, but now with so much unemployment and significant applicant noise to signal ratio I think we will continue to see this as the norm. Which is how so many founders get their start anyhow; Elon's story of being a shy nerd waiting in the lobby of a tech company hoping to talk to someone to no avail comes to mind being perhaps the most famous of this phenomenon.

With that said, I think this how the toxic Ivy league mentality of entitlement happens; they often justify their entitlement as something they deserve after years/decades of not 'living life enough.'

What's always been striking to me is seeing the pervasive humanistic, liberal attitude at a place like Princeton. People there must somehow deal with the dissonance of being the best example of entrenched privilege, absurd wealth, sophistication, luxury, comfort. Yet anytime I've been there it's all about the virtues of egalitarianism, inclusivity, etc. A jarring juxtaposition of rhetoric/reality.

> they often justify their entitlement as something they deserve after years/decades of not 'living life enough.'

Possibly, although I suspect it's more an ego phenomenon. Where they're all aware they've hit the jackpot in global relative terms, but they see this as some type of weird manifest destiny and duty where they're now tasked with using their privilege to be elite agents of good in the world.

> Possibly, although I suspect it's more an ego phenomenon. Where they're all aware they've hit the jackpot in global relative terms, but they see this as some type of weird manifest destiny and duty where they're now tasked with using their privilege to be elite agents of good in the world.

I'm not saying it true, simply a rationalization they use to justify it which you can see and feel in their behaviour; the only person I ever knew from Princeton was an engineer ( afirst generation immigrant?) Indian or Arab family (I forget but recall his community pics) and he was always super helpful but also very reluctant to talk about 'campus life' and preferred to help us understand the math and engineering aspects behind certain things in a car forum.

Not sure what happened to him, but this may explain why most like myself in University were completely over it by our sophomore year and openly bitched about it hindering our 'real lives' he, a PhD student at the time, was spending the majority of his time answering questions about things like unsprung mass, and analyzing home-brew ECU Turbo maps and hanging out with us at meetups eating BBQ with dirty, oily fingers than being amongst 'his own.'

> Tech itself isn’t impressed by an ivy university degree like other professions

Bill Gates: Harvard

Mark Zuckerberg: Harvard

Jeff Bezos: Princeton

Eric Schmidt: Princeton

Sundar Pichai: University of Pennsylvania (MBA)

Elon Musk: University of Pennsylvania

Stanford is in a climate maybe less favorable to ivy, but a) it has a degree of prestige, and b) its graduates have done OK in tech.

Not to mention that, despite CS degrees being devilishly useful, college isn’t strictly necessary full stop. These days you can get your foot in the door via code schools. I worked with an excellent engineer who never went to college but apprenticed back when that was a thing, another very entrepreneurial former colleague just built up a portfolio in high school and became a contractor while his contemporaries were in college.

> These days you can get your foot in the door via code schools.

I don't think Ivy League kids are looking to just get their foot in the door; they're looking to be at the top.

Yeah. The code school route has a pretty hard glass ceiling.

I'm glad I took graduate coursework in advanced algorithms, signal processing, control systems, AI, etc. which followed on a course of differential equations, advanced linear algebra, probability, and so on.

There is a difference in computer science curricula, with more than a little bit of correlation with which tier school you go to. Without a solid theoretical background, you can become a decent engineer building a database-backed web application, but there's a world of possibilities closed off to you.

And those aren't skills you'll pick up on the job. If you're super-self-motivated, MOOCs and similar can do it, but I've found few adults able to invest the time to learn skills which don't have a pay-off for years. Differential equations or linear algebra aren't very helpful in isolation; it's the application which build on top of them which add value. That's a few semesters of study.

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