4 ms·

The value of Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc. isn't that the professors are so good at teaching; it's that they are smart student aggregators. Nothing motivates you li

• BrandonM 15y ago
  That might be true of some people. For someone coming from a small town where everyone told him that he would go on to do amazing, wonderful things, it can be very depressing for him to learn that he is nothing special.
  • alexgartrell 15y ago
    That's more of a feature than a bug. The opposite can be true too, I expected to get tanked at CMU and did pretty well (3.65 gpa, senior thesis, going to Facebook). If I'd gone to Ohio State like the majority of my peers from High School (Hilliard Darby High School has sent a whopping two people to top tier engineering schools (CMU and MIT) and none to Harvard) and even gotten a 4.0, I never would have believed I was more than a "talented state school kid." At the end of the day, it's on you to put yourself in the most challenging situation you can possibly survive so that you can learn the most. Sheltering one's fragile ego never did much for anyone in the long run.
  • jimbokun 15y ago
    It certainly motivated me. (former small town kid, went to Carnegie Mellon and realized I wasn't "the smart one" any more)