The Great College Tour Wrap-up: HARVARD UNIVERSITY

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I wasn’t expecting it, but I actually quite liked Harvard. It seemed to me, in many ways, Yale done right: dignified and a little bit snooty without being oppressively so. Most importantly (of course), there was not a single neo-Gothic building in sight. All that brick was a little unsettling at first, but I got used it.

I had a chance to meet with two students there. The first was a junior by the name of Frederick, who goes by “Bindy” for reasons still unknown to me. Bindy gushed. He glowed. His friends were wonderful. His dorm was excellent. A history and lit major, he was spending his summer in Europe doing research for his senior thesis – a trip paid for entirely by the college. Harvard, in short, was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Alex, the other student, was much more candid. He was going to graduate in a few weeks, and had just finished interviewing for grad school at MIT. While he also was very pleased with the professors and upper-level courses, he had some serious issues with the way courses for freshmen and sophomores were run. The organization of Harvard’s core curriculum requires that students take the classes that are farthest away from their chosen discipline. This would not in itself be a problem except for the fact that these core offerings were limited, and comprise mostly of offerings like the “Modern Literature for Dull Engineers” that my father hasn’t ceased to complain about since he graduated from college 30-odd years ago.

Generally, Harvard seemed like a nice (if somewhat bland) place to go with really exceptional faculty. But again, there’s the acceptance rate and the price tag to worry about.

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The Great College Tour Wrap-up: THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

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I had an extremely romantic vision of MIT before I went to look at it. I had read stories about brilliant students running about executing ingenious hacks involving the Great Dome of the school, and had pictured a fun-filled campus full of exceptionally intelligent but otherwise perfectly normal people. MIT had produced Feynman, Stallman, Aldrin, Netenyahu – indeed, the only argument against it seemed that it had also produced (along with Stallman) EMACS.

A meeting with Annie Thomas (a Piedmont grad) did a lot to change my mind. Many students at MIT are, like Annie, indeed intelligent but otherwise perfectly normal. Many of these students are swamped by the workload (Westinghouse winners among them) and many are stressed out and unhappy. They certainly do not have time for hacking.

The Hackers live on the east side of campus, and do crazy things like decorating the Great Dome to look like R2-D2 and building hot tubs on stilts. They do not, however, bathe. Many are lacking in basic social skills.

The whole situation she described to me sounded disturbingly like that in HG Wells’s Time Machine, with a separate Morlock society in the east and very little interaction between them and the other students.

Though I may be a (teeny-tiny) bit of a nerd myself, I still appreciate a good shower once in a while. And besides, college is supposed to be fun – I don’t want to spend the entire time sweating under a massive workload and struggling to keep up with a class full of math prodigies.

On the other hand, the AI class I sat in on was really cool, and I didn’t have any trouble keeping up. I think I could have a lot of fun there, also.

Of course, I have to get in first.

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The Great College Tour Wrap-up: YALE UNIVERSITY

misc, personal

A preface:
In an effort to get my own thoughts in order, but mostly so that every one will stop asking me how my spring break went, I am publishing here all of my notes and observations from the various schools I visited.

A disclaimer:
Obviously, these represent my own opinions and biases and are very much a product of my unique experience at each college. You may have had a different experience. Please share it.

And now, to business:
The first stop on our tour was Yale. It was unique on my tour in being the only school that was exactly what I thought it would be; namely, white, wealthy, and pretentious. I was unable to attend a class or talk to a student (both of which I did at many other schools), so I may not have quite as good an idea of what it’s like, but I was generally put off by the atmosphere.

I saw nine black people during our stay at Yale. Five of them were in another tour group, and one of them was on a television screen. In fact, apart from the remaining three I didn’t see a single student who wasn’t white.

Frank Lloyd Wright was once asked where he would live if he had a choice of any spot in the world. He replied that he would live right on top of Yale’s Harkness Tower, so that he would never have to look at it. Standing under Harkness, at Yale, I sympathized with Mr. Wright. Most of the campus is built in a neo-Gothic style; the Yale campus in particular was designed by a deranged, maniacally egotistical Gothic revivalist architect. He was not merely interested in creating buildings in an old style, but in creating buildings that themselves looked old. To this end, buckets of acid and soil have been liberally applied to various parts of the campus to make it look old. The fact that great pains had been taken to make the college look like Oxford or Cambridge was evidently a source of great pride for our guide (a varsity polo player).

So why not just go to Oxford or Cambridge?

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Mozilla steals people bar from Flock

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Mozilla Labs just announced the development of a new Firefox extension:

Enter “The Coop”, a Mozilla Labs project to experiment with adding social tools to the web browser. We want to create a fun and easy way to share links with your friends, and to browse the set of links that friends have shared with you.

Mozilla Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Keep track of your friends with The Coop

The project’s discussion page includes a number of mockups for the new design, including one lifted directly from Chris Messina’s mockup for a Flock people bar. While Chris is given credit, the Mozilla people have yet to mention anywhere the Flock browser that came up with the idea first, going so far as to edit Flock’s characteristic navigation bar out of Chris’s mockup.

Mozilla’s a good company – I’m shocked by this kind of intellectualy dishonesty.

At any rate, this could spell doom for the folks at Flock, who have yet to produce a 1.0 release and pushed back their implementation of the people bar two releases back. If they don’t come up with something sooner and better implemented, there will really be no use for Flock to all but the most diehard Youtube fans. While I love Flock and would be sorry to see it go, if Mozilla can come up with a better implementation I’ll certainly switch back to Firefox.

Also surprising is the fact that, two days later, there has still been no reaction from the Flock devs themselves. It will be interesting to see if they can come up with any response to this.

technorati tags:flock, mozilla, people, coop, web2.0, social

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