8 ms·

Dear Americans, let me tell you something. The good and cheerful atmosphere at freshman speeches is something you should be proud of. It gives people spirit an

by WA 13y ago

Dear Americans, let me tell you something. The good and cheerful atmosphere at freshman speeches is something you should be proud of. It gives people spirit and a wonderful first experience. The harsh truth will catch up anyways. The speech in this article, how the OP thought it should be, is utter crap and comes from a place of total arrogance and serves only himself. It doesn't act as an eye-opener, because the students won't listen anyways. They will experience reality soon enough and there's absolutely no need to tell them anything they can't understand at their current position. They are mentally not in the state to receive any "truthful speech". They are in a new chapter of their lives and the only bet is to give it a try. The experience of others is worth close to nothing, because they need to make experiences themselves. Why am I telling you this? Because I'm German. In Germany, there is not even a freshman speech. What we have can be described as a big "fuck you" from some dean or whatever arrogant professor feels entitled to speak up. "50% of you won't be here in 1 year" is something you get told on first day of university. What is this good for? I haven't seen a single student saying "Oh, this guy's right, I'll unenroll right now". They HAVE to try first, because that's the choice they made for this new chapter in life. It might even be true. 50% unenroll after a while, but it's unclear which 50%. My girlfriend is becoming a teacher. She studied for 5 years. After university follows a 1.5 traineeship at school, before she can call herself a real teacher. They have a welcome speech for the new trainee-teachers and it went like that:"Welcome, good to see you, but you won't get a job anyways." Again, a big "fuck you" to all these people who spend 5 years in this system, gave their best, are motivated and accept a lousy pay for 1.5 years with ridiculous long hours. From my limited experience and what people told me who experienced the exact same crap in Germany, I can see this only as some self-righteous bullshit from arrogant frustrated people that serves no purpose at all but only to make THEM feel a tiny little bit better. "I'm here, see, I'm the best." Fuck you! Be proud that it is a common practice in the US to have motivational speeches that give people a good feeling. There's nothing in the world you can tell freshmen to prepare them for reality. The only thing that counts is how you make them feel in this very moment at the Welcome-freshman-party.

peterjancelis 13y ago
Like they say about academia: The politics are so intense because the stakes are so low.
emhart 13y ago
I went to a theatre conservatory in NYC and was constantly assaulted by the drumbeat of "50% attrition rate!" and "If you don't need to be here as much as you need to breath, drop out now" and on and on. So when, in my 3rd semester review with my technique instructor, he asked me why I came to the school, I was frustrated enough to tell him the truth. "I couldn't get in to college." He very nearly spat his water in surprise. This broke the ice and we had one of the most encouraging, pleasant conversations I had while at that school. He told me I was good at this, and I told him that I enjoyed it. We both agreed that even though I wasn't as crazed as the rest of the students and staff, there was no good reason not to take my shot. So, I stayed at the school and started auditioning not long after. I landed my first off-broadway gig a couple months later, then a film, then I co-founded a theatre company that turned a profit on our first off-off-broadway show. While I am living a different life now, I am so thankful for that small moment of encouragement in the midst of all the angst I was exposed to every day. I genuinely believe that short meeting with my instructor inspired the early risks I took, and it certainly kept me going when I wanted to walk away. Thanks for writing your counter-point. Reminded me of an important time in my life.
- richforrester 13y ago
  Just an up-vote didn't seem sufficient. To both you and the writer of that first response; cheers for sharing. Amazing what a diverse audience ends up at HN, and how much you can learn by reading comments to an article. Appreciated.
gambiting 13y ago
Poland here. It's exactly the same as you described - if there is someone speaking at the beginning of the year it's mostly in the tone of "We have accepted 300 students for this course this year. Less than 100 makes it to the second year and usually less than 20 finish it. That means you have to work really hard to stay here and you can fail at any moment". This is what is usually said. Does it help? Of course not. Would it be any better if the speech was more cheerful? I believe so - most students are going to experience a reality crash within a first 2 weeks anyway,so a glimmer of hope at the beginning would not hurt.
- colomon 13y ago
  My parents (in their 70s now) have the same sort of stories about US universities from their experience -- the one that stuck with me was "Look to your left. Look to your right. One of the three of you will not make it to graduation." But it definitely wasn't the case when I went to school circa 1990.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Oh? Early 90s EE curricula my experience was more like 50 students came to the first "ohms law" type class and by the time we were talking about rectifier topologies (half-wave, full-wave, bridge, etc) we were down to like 10. I honestly don't know what happened to the other 40 or so. Even first semester calculus wasn't that high of an attrition rate, maybe only 50%. Something I never really understood about the whole process of attrition is most of the dropouts happened during the really easy stuff like basic continuity concept or perhaps definition of basic derivation equation. Then everyone still present when we talked about the derivative of x squared, mostly made it thru diffeqs together although the difficulty ramped up sharply and smoothly over time. Although freshman classes may distribute on some bell curve, or graduating classes may bell curve, I don't think filter classes have a distribution anything like a bell, because then I'd expect people to randomly drop out at a decreasing rate thru the curriculum rather than all at once in the start. (edited to add there's probably a startup opportunity to "help" attrition rates by introducing prospective EEs to ohms law or similar in other fields. All the ham radio operators (including myself) pretty much slept thru the early classes with straight As so conceptually an early introduction and filter in a non-uni setting should be possible in other fields?)
67726e 13y ago
Honestly, I wish more people would start setting reasonable expectations for students. While I will agree that walking on stage and saying "Look to your left, look to your right. One of you will not be here in a year" is not the right approach to take, someone needs to be realistic. I'm 20, all of my friends are students. I live right next to the university in my city. I know, meet, or merely converse with lots of students, and one thing that kills me is this pervasiveness of expectation that after 4 years (and for some, more than that) of sliding by, they will walk away with a degree and a nice cushy job, regardless of the degree or the effort put forth. By no means do they all think this, but I find the number who do a bit alarming. The number of CS students I've met that think they'll land a nice cushy developer job just like mine when they couldn't implement a linked list if their lives depended on it is almost farcical. Then again, with the amount of new developer jobs I see in the area, maybe they will. But what of the students going for a degree in something like Religious Studies where employers aren't exactly tripping over themselves to find folks with such a degree and no real work experience to speak of? Given the costs associated with a bachelors degree in the US at an in-state university, more people need to start drilling realism into the students' heads. These students cannot afford to waste 4 years and something like 10.000 USD per year, not including living expenses. People need to be more realistic and they need to start doing it sooner than the freshman introductory speech because you are right, they won't listen at that point. It's too little too late.
- dccoolgai 13y ago
  Agreed. College is wasted on the young. When I was there, I had no idea what an absolute privilege it was to have an environment completely geared towards your own personal enrichment for 4 years - and I had a better attitude than 95 percent of the kids there. I wish someone could have tried to get that through to me: how much tougher learning is when you've got a wife kids, 50hr job, etc...
  - sreyaNotfilc 13y ago
    "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got / Till it's gone" Most college students comes directly from High School. To them (or at least to me at the time) it was a "natural" continuation. We have been in school for over a decade. That's all we've known was to sit in a class room, jot down some notes, and then take some test. I totally agree, fast forward 10 years, and you realize how much of a privilege it is to do that. I'm doing very well for myself, but most folks aren't. And its because life takes over. You have kids, relationships, bills to worry about. It take an act of Congress to be able to have 30 mins to yourself a day. Sometimes I joke around and say "Let the kids work first then have them go to school". I would love to see such a program that did that. Perhaps, when I have kids and they grow up, I'll have my kids work for a couple of years, then send them to college. I'm betting that they would appreciate it. Sometimes you need that break to realize what you want in life.
pmorici 13y ago
A lot of American universities are more like what you describe that what is described in the OP. I remember my first day of CS class the prof said something like look to your left look to your right by the end of the year statistically speaking one of you won't be in this major any more. They didn't say that to discourage people or to imply that they had some failure quota but to let people know that they couldn't expect to just show up and slide though any more like a lot of kids do in high school.
- VLM 13y ago
  I would take a different interpretation in that for those who are failing, no need to take a long walk off a short pier or test their gliding skills off the roof of the dorm, its OK, no need to do something drastic if whats happening (failing) is occasionally a perfectly normal and expected part of life. Someone seems to do that about every semester, its always a downer for everyone else.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Well what do you expect if you dont specialise in the last two years? The Uk's A level system has some advantage in that you have mostly decided what to study at Uni by 16.
_mulder_ 13y ago
The fact that not all students will make it is not the point of the article. It's designed to address the underlying sense of entitlement students at the World's best universities can have. As these places can be so hard to get into, successful applicants can adopt a defensive "I'm here because I'm the cleverest and deserve it" mentality. For somewhere like Stanford, having a lot of (daddy's) money is, for most students, also a pre-requisite to attending. The Author is exactly right, being born into a family with money does not mean you deserve to be there, even if you did work really hard during grade school and college. The Freshman's are enormously lucky to have been given the chance to study at Stanford and it is up to them to earn their place, retrospectively. Society will be the judge based on their future work. The message is not so much "don't get comfortable because 50% will be gone by the end of the year" but rather more of "Welcome to Stanford. Understand that you are here though very little of your own merit. You have the opportunity to change that if you work hard and focus on the bigger picture of society and not just furthering your own wealth".
- uhno 13y ago
  Boy. This is not at all the truth. Anecdotally, what I've discovered from a year at MIT is that the norm is feeling like you don't belong (e.g. here is some previous discussion about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890267). Saying "understand that you are here through very little of your own merit" is a recipe for causing already overly stressed students to do something rash, like jumping out of a building: http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/ http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/ (this list isn't even up to date). Motivating people to work hard to feel like they've earned their place is a completely different thing than reinforcing the doubts and insecurities almost all of them have anyway. The pressure at this place (and it's the same at any top-tier place) has been almost too much for me to handle sometimes, and that's without foolish words from foolish people designed to increase it.
  - rattray 13y ago
    MIT is different. That said, I agree "through very little of your own merit" isn't fair at all; "through means other than your merit" seems a little more plausible.
svantana 13y ago
But university education is largely free in Germany right? So the messages seem to be: Germany: if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP U.S.: we don't care too much if you drop out later, as long as you pay your enormous tuition in a timely manner. That makes sense to me...
- WA 13y ago
  Yes, university is largely free in Germany. if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP This is your interpretation. Thing is, it doesn't do more than leave people with a bad feeling. My point is: Whatever you say in a welcome-speech doesn't affect the choices of freshmen in the slightest. People will drop out, that's for sure. But not because some smartass Dean or professor holds a self-righteous speech, but because some students find that university (or that particular subject) isn't for them. They'll find out by EXPERIENCE and not by a stupid speech.
  - Zancarius 13y ago
    Your first post (and this one) were eye-opening for me, and I wanted to thank you for offering a dose of reality from the other side of the pond. For years, I've heard musings among Americans that suggest motivational speeches do more harm than good to those present. I've often wondered how true that is, because the other side of the coin seems just as detrimental--if not more so--to young, impressionable minds. More importantly, though, I think you're absolutely right: It's experience that's the real teacher, not some bloviating figurehead whose speech will be forgotten before the end of the day. If someone's not cut out for it, no amount of (de)motivation will help. Sink or swim. Cheers, my friend.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Surely the most sense would be to do whatever gets the best education for the people who have come in as students, to then create the best researchers and maximise the amount of new shit they can find out about. Screw reasoning about who paid for that student, whether it is their parents, themselves or a state or a charity, universities have a purpose and it is not necessarily best served by making a group of largely inexperienced people stressed out and depressed. Also, the people who are arrogant self-entitled little sods are not going to listen to the negative speech anyway, they will naturally assume it is directed at the other people and think that their parents connections are all the guarantee of finishing with a good grade that they need, and depending on where they are and what they are studying, they may well be right. The people who are more likely to take something like that to heart is the nervous rather than the untalented or arrogant.
guizzy 13y ago
That's a constant with life advice: it's useless not because it's wrong, but because you won't believe it's right until you've experienced it.
mcgwiz 13y ago
This is an apples to oranges comparison. The article centers on (the author's idea of) the messaging that greater American society would like to impart on the archetypal Stanford student, who is upper-class, American, young, inexperienced, entitled, sheltered, and likely the recipient of perks that helped their admission. A message from greater German society to any specific German student archetype would obviously differ. Even the comparison with MIT is arguably invalid, as elite tech university admissions are more objective and less discretionary, making the archetypal student less likely both to have an entitled mentality and to have received perks that helped their admission. Perhaps the author wouldn't have objected to the word "deserve" at an MIT convocation, nor at one in Germany.
ilovecookies 13y ago
Its so fun, the first post always takes the direct opposite standpoint of the link.
ilovecookies 13y ago
To be honest the dean at your girlfriends university and at Stanford should switch places. That would be the perfect solution for all. Im a european living in america, i'm sorry its not the greatest country in the world even if i know most europeans believe so.
norswap 13y ago
You seem to be missing that, despite telling the truth (or what I feel to be the truth anyway) in a brutal way, the speech manages to be quite motivational. It is to me anyway. I think it is no mistake if one of the most highly regarded commencement speech is that of David Foster Wallace (aka "The Truth With A Whole Lot Of Rhetorical Bullshit Pared Away"): http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in... Also, I have received the "50% attrition" comments (I'm from Belgium). In our computer science class, it was more like 70% attrition. But consider that a big difference is that in our countries, getting in a university is not "achievement". You can litteraly just walk in there and if you can't afford the 1K euros a year it costs, the government will pay for you. This is a good thing -- but it needs no one will tell you that you deserve anything. Neither should it be the case in the US because most of the time, access to these universities are conditioned by factors that are largely out of the student direct control.

by WA 13y ago

peterjancelis 13y ago

Like they say about academia: The politics are so intense because the stakes are so low.

emhart 13y ago

I went to a theatre conservatory in NYC and was constantly assaulted by the drumbeat of "50% attrition rate!" and "If you don't need to be here as much as you need to breath, drop out now" and on and on. So when, in my 3rd semester review with my technique instructor, he asked me why I came to the school, I was frustrated enough to tell him the truth. "I couldn't get in to college." He very nearly spat his water in surprise. This broke the ice and we had one of the most encouraging, pleasant conversations I had while at that school. He told me I was good at this, and I told him that I enjoyed it. We both agreed that even though I wasn't as crazed as the rest of the students and staff, there was no good reason not to take my shot. So, I stayed at the school and started auditioning not long after. I landed my first off-broadway gig a couple months later, then a film, then I co-founded a theatre company that turned a profit on our first off-off-broadway show. While I am living a different life now, I am so thankful for that small moment of encouragement in the midst of all the angst I was exposed to every day. I genuinely believe that short meeting with my instructor inspired the early risks I took, and it certainly kept me going when I wanted to walk away. Thanks for writing your counter-point. Reminded me of an important time in my life.

richforrester 13y ago
Just an up-vote didn't seem sufficient. To both you and the writer of that first response; cheers for sharing. Amazing what a diverse audience ends up at HN, and how much you can learn by reading comments to an article. Appreciated.

gambiting 13y ago

Poland here. It's exactly the same as you described - if there is someone speaking at the beginning of the year it's mostly in the tone of "We have accepted 300 students for this course this year. Less than 100 makes it to the second year and usually less than 20 finish it. That means you have to work really hard to stay here and you can fail at any moment". This is what is usually said. Does it help? Of course not. Would it be any better if the speech was more cheerful? I believe so - most students are going to experience a reality crash within a first 2 weeks anyway,so a glimmer of hope at the beginning would not hurt.

colomon 13y ago
My parents (in their 70s now) have the same sort of stories about US universities from their experience -- the one that stuck with me was "Look to your left. Look to your right. One of the three of you will not make it to graduation." But it definitely wasn't the case when I went to school circa 1990.
- VLM 13y ago
  Oh? Early 90s EE curricula my experience was more like 50 students came to the first "ohms law" type class and by the time we were talking about rectifier topologies (half-wave, full-wave, bridge, etc) we were down to like 10. I honestly don't know what happened to the other 40 or so. Even first semester calculus wasn't that high of an attrition rate, maybe only 50%. Something I never really understood about the whole process of attrition is most of the dropouts happened during the really easy stuff like basic continuity concept or perhaps definition of basic derivation equation. Then everyone still present when we talked about the derivative of x squared, mostly made it thru diffeqs together although the difficulty ramped up sharply and smoothly over time. Although freshman classes may distribute on some bell curve, or graduating classes may bell curve, I don't think filter classes have a distribution anything like a bell, because then I'd expect people to randomly drop out at a decreasing rate thru the curriculum rather than all at once in the start. (edited to add there's probably a startup opportunity to "help" attrition rates by introducing prospective EEs to ohms law or similar in other fields. All the ham radio operators (including myself) pretty much slept thru the early classes with straight As so conceptually an early introduction and filter in a non-uni setting should be possible in other fields?)

67726e 13y ago

Honestly, I wish more people would start setting reasonable expectations for students. While I will agree that walking on stage and saying "Look to your left, look to your right. One of you will not be here in a year" is not the right approach to take, someone needs to be realistic. I'm 20, all of my friends are students. I live right next to the university in my city. I know, meet, or merely converse with lots of students, and one thing that kills me is this pervasiveness of expectation that after 4 years (and for some, more than that) of sliding by, they will walk away with a degree and a nice cushy job, regardless of the degree or the effort put forth. By no means do they all think this, but I find the number who do a bit alarming. The number of CS students I've met that think they'll land a nice cushy developer job just like mine when they couldn't implement a linked list if their lives depended on it is almost farcical. Then again, with the amount of new developer jobs I see in the area, maybe they will. But what of the students going for a degree in something like Religious Studies where employers aren't exactly tripping over themselves to find folks with such a degree and no real work experience to speak of? Given the costs associated with a bachelors degree in the US at an in-state university, more people need to start drilling realism into the students' heads. These students cannot afford to waste 4 years and something like 10.000 USD per year, not including living expenses. People need to be more realistic and they need to start doing it sooner than the freshman introductory speech because you are right, they won't listen at that point. It's too little too late.

dccoolgai 13y ago
Agreed. College is wasted on the young. When I was there, I had no idea what an absolute privilege it was to have an environment completely geared towards your own personal enrichment for 4 years - and I had a better attitude than 95 percent of the kids there. I wish someone could have tried to get that through to me: how much tougher learning is when you've got a wife kids, 50hr job, etc...
- sreyaNotfilc 13y ago
  "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got / Till it's gone" Most college students comes directly from High School. To them (or at least to me at the time) it was a "natural" continuation. We have been in school for over a decade. That's all we've known was to sit in a class room, jot down some notes, and then take some test. I totally agree, fast forward 10 years, and you realize how much of a privilege it is to do that. I'm doing very well for myself, but most folks aren't. And its because life takes over. You have kids, relationships, bills to worry about. It take an act of Congress to be able to have 30 mins to yourself a day. Sometimes I joke around and say "Let the kids work first then have them go to school". I would love to see such a program that did that. Perhaps, when I have kids and they grow up, I'll have my kids work for a couple of years, then send them to college. I'm betting that they would appreciate it. Sometimes you need that break to realize what you want in life.

pmorici 13y ago

A lot of American universities are more like what you describe that what is described in the OP. I remember my first day of CS class the prof said something like look to your left look to your right by the end of the year statistically speaking one of you won't be in this major any more. They didn't say that to discourage people or to imply that they had some failure quota but to let people know that they couldn't expect to just show up and slide though any more like a lot of kids do in high school.

VLM 13y ago
I would take a different interpretation in that for those who are failing, no need to take a long walk off a short pier or test their gliding skills off the roof of the dorm, its OK, no need to do something drastic if whats happening (failing) is occasionally a perfectly normal and expected part of life. Someone seems to do that about every semester, its always a downer for everyone else.
walshemj 13y ago
Well what do you expect if you dont specialise in the last two years? The Uk's A level system has some advantage in that you have mostly decided what to study at Uni by 16.

_mulder_ 13y ago

The fact that not all students will make it is not the point of the article. It's designed to address the underlying sense of entitlement students at the World's best universities can have. As these places can be so hard to get into, successful applicants can adopt a defensive "I'm here because I'm the cleverest and deserve it" mentality. For somewhere like Stanford, having a lot of (daddy's) money is, for most students, also a pre-requisite to attending. The Author is exactly right, being born into a family with money does not mean you deserve to be there, even if you did work really hard during grade school and college. The Freshman's are enormously lucky to have been given the chance to study at Stanford and it is up to them to earn their place, retrospectively. Society will be the judge based on their future work. The message is not so much "don't get comfortable because 50% will be gone by the end of the year" but rather more of "Welcome to Stanford. Understand that you are here though very little of your own merit. You have the opportunity to change that if you work hard and focus on the bigger picture of society and not just furthering your own wealth".

uhno 13y ago
Boy. This is not at all the truth. Anecdotally, what I've discovered from a year at MIT is that the norm is feeling like you don't belong (e.g. here is some previous discussion about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890267). Saying "understand that you are here through very little of your own merit" is a recipe for causing already overly stressed students to do something rash, like jumping out of a building: http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/ http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/ (this list isn't even up to date). Motivating people to work hard to feel like they've earned their place is a completely different thing than reinforcing the doubts and insecurities almost all of them have anyway. The pressure at this place (and it's the same at any top-tier place) has been almost too much for me to handle sometimes, and that's without foolish words from foolish people designed to increase it.
- rattray 13y ago
  MIT is different. That said, I agree "through very little of your own merit" isn't fair at all; "through means other than your merit" seems a little more plausible.

svantana 13y ago

But university education is largely free in Germany right? So the messages seem to be: Germany: if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP U.S.: we don't care too much if you drop out later, as long as you pay your enormous tuition in a timely manner. That makes sense to me...

WA 13y ago
Yes, university is largely free in Germany. if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP This is your interpretation. Thing is, it doesn't do more than leave people with a bad feeling. My point is: Whatever you say in a welcome-speech doesn't affect the choices of freshmen in the slightest. People will drop out, that's for sure. But not because some smartass Dean or professor holds a self-righteous speech, but because some students find that university (or that particular subject) isn't for them. They'll find out by EXPERIENCE and not by a stupid speech.
- Zancarius 13y ago
  Your first post (and this one) were eye-opening for me, and I wanted to thank you for offering a dose of reality from the other side of the pond. For years, I've heard musings among Americans that suggest motivational speeches do more harm than good to those present. I've often wondered how true that is, because the other side of the coin seems just as detrimental--if not more so--to young, impressionable minds. More importantly, though, I think you're absolutely right: It's experience that's the real teacher, not some bloviating figurehead whose speech will be forgotten before the end of the day. If someone's not cut out for it, no amount of (de)motivation will help. Sink or swim. Cheers, my friend.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
Surely the most sense would be to do whatever gets the best education for the people who have come in as students, to then create the best researchers and maximise the amount of new shit they can find out about. Screw reasoning about who paid for that student, whether it is their parents, themselves or a state or a charity, universities have a purpose and it is not necessarily best served by making a group of largely inexperienced people stressed out and depressed. Also, the people who are arrogant self-entitled little sods are not going to listen to the negative speech anyway, they will naturally assume it is directed at the other people and think that their parents connections are all the guarantee of finishing with a good grade that they need, and depending on where they are and what they are studying, they may well be right. The people who are more likely to take something like that to heart is the nervous rather than the untalented or arrogant.

guizzy 13y ago

That's a constant with life advice: it's useless not because it's wrong, but because you won't believe it's right until you've experienced it.

mcgwiz 13y ago

This is an apples to oranges comparison. The article centers on (the author's idea of) the messaging that greater American society would like to impart on the archetypal Stanford student, who is upper-class, American, young, inexperienced, entitled, sheltered, and likely the recipient of perks that helped their admission. A message from greater German society to any specific German student archetype would obviously differ. Even the comparison with MIT is arguably invalid, as elite tech university admissions are more objective and less discretionary, making the archetypal student less likely both to have an entitled mentality and to have received perks that helped their admission. Perhaps the author wouldn't have objected to the word "deserve" at an MIT convocation, nor at one in Germany.

ilovecookies 13y ago

Its so fun, the first post always takes the direct opposite standpoint of the link.

ilovecookies 13y ago

To be honest the dean at your girlfriends university and at Stanford should switch places. That would be the perfect solution for all. Im a european living in america, i'm sorry its not the greatest country in the world even if i know most europeans believe so.

norswap 13y ago

You seem to be missing that, despite telling the truth (or what I feel to be the truth anyway) in a brutal way, the speech manages to be quite motivational. It is to me anyway. I think it is no mistake if one of the most highly regarded commencement speech is that of David Foster Wallace (aka "The Truth With A Whole Lot Of Rhetorical Bullshit Pared Away"): http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in... Also, I have received the "50% attrition" comments (I'm from Belgium). In our computer science class, it was more like 70% attrition. But consider that a big difference is that in our countries, getting in a university is not "achievement". You can litteraly just walk in there and if you can't afford the 1K euros a year it costs, the government will pay for you. This is a good thing -- but it needs no one will tell you that you deserve anything. Neither should it be the case in the US because most of the time, access to these universities are conditioned by factors that are largely out of the student direct control.