Ivy league rejects

In high school, my parents took me on a tour of the Ivy League schools on the East Coast. I didn’t really know why, because even then I knew I wouldn’t have gotten in—mostly because of my English. In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought I’d get into MIT because the odds there were just as slim given my childhood. I think it was probably because MIT was more of a math-focused school and my parents were both math people. Plus, the MIT campus was clearly built for people who were and are mathematically inclined. It’s an engineering school, after all. I do feel I have a math brain at the end of the day, even though neuroscience has debunked the concept of a math brain. I wonder if that will ever change with time.

But the school I went to, WashU, is colloquially known in popular culture as the Ivy-League-reject school. It was one of those schools where you couldn’t rely on the institution’s prestige to prove your worth: you had to earn it. At MIT, for instance, I imagine some students just say the name and opportunities from the public will present themselves; it’s easy to get lazy with that sort of setup. But even today, I sense there is some truth in the Ivy-League-reject stereotype of WashU. People who go to Ivy League schools, I imagine, strive for greatness; at least that’s what the institutions want. People don’t go to Harvard just to get married. That’s sort of frowned upon. Yet at WashU, the institution’s collective ethos seemed to be to strive for marriage. Everything from the professions that the school valued, which I felt was predominantly medicine, was centered on the focus of forming the family unit. The school was in Missouri, a highly conservative state, after all.