I spent a month at Princeton this summer, working alongside current Princeton students and a handful of the people that work at Princeton. Princeton people are

I spent a month at Princeton this summer, working alongside current Princeton students and a handful of the people that work at Princeton. Princeton people are usually very bright. Not all of them are—many of them are capable of regurgitating academically and not much more—but overall it's a community of smart people. It is not, however, particularly brighter than a handful of other communities. Perhaps there's less riffraff, so you only have people above average there, but there's this perception that you have to be a genius to be Ivy and that's simply not true. Until my stint at Princeton, I was a "Princeton child". I grew up loving Princeton, I wanted to have a Princeton degree on my resume and live in the enormous castles that Princeton calls dorms. After staying there, I came away with the perception that Princeton's a great college, but it's not head-and-shoulders above any number of other great colleges, and there's nothing special about the people that go there. (They also put up fake ivy on new buildings, which I consider false advertising.) Another way of putting it: The smartest group of people I've ever worked with was a group of twelve writers who I met when I was sixteen. They were all pretty remarkable people. Of that group, two went to Princeton, one went to Brown, a handful went to schools like Vassar and NYU, and a few went to shitty NJ public schools like I did for a year. So when you're talking to people from shitty public schools, remember that there're people there who could put half of Princeton to shame. Not everybody there's going to be brilliant, but not everybody at Princeton's brilliant either.