Notes: Where You Go is not Who You'll Be

by Frank Bruni.

*on the whole anti-Ivy kick, and any anti-Admissions Mania, and the Track (prep, brand college, soulless job, etc)

• It's not where you went to school. It's how hard you work.
• But too many kids get to college and try to collapse it, to make it as comfortable and recognizable as possible. They replicate the friends and friendships they've previously enjoyed. They join groups that perpetuate their high school cliques. 
• College needs to be expansive adventure, propelling students toward unplumbed territory and untested identities rather than indulging and flattering who they already are. 
• the alumni of elite institutions were less clear about why they were at Harvard and what they wanted from it. For them it was the next box in a series that were dutifully checking over the course of their lives. 

[for me, it was the Ladder. Put a ladder in front of me and I would always climb it whether I wanted to or not, whether it had meaning or not. Some call it the Track; I call it the Ladder.]

• St. John's College (New Mexico and Maryland) -- [part of the Colleges that Change Lives book Need to look that book list up. I have actually heard of St. John's. But too Euro centric? Western canon based?]
• The world only cares about -- and pays off on -- what you can do with what you know (and it doesn't care how you learned it).  It also cares about a lot of SOFT SKILLS-- leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. 
• How you use college. What you demand of it. 
• Excellent Sheep, W. Deresiewicz, and his essay, "Disadvantages of an Elite Education."
• There's ideally more to higher education than a springboard to high-paying careers, and an elite school composed almost entirely of young men and women who have aced the SATs or ACTs isn't likely to be the most exciting, eclectic stew of people or perspectives. It doesn't promise to challenge extant prejudices and topple old expectations. And that's largely because there's a surfeit of students who traveled to their elite destinations on an on-ramp of familiar perks and prods. 
• College: What it Was, Is, and Should be, Debanco. There was "germ of truth" to charge that elite colleges bred self-satisfaction and he wished they "encouraged more humility and less hubris."
• "I don't think it matters that much where you go." -- John Green, novelist. Went to Kenyon.
• It's not necessary to get into a highly selective school in order to be successful. What's necessary is to understand what you want and how to do it well, and to be a self-starter.
• College president rued a propensity to be very LINEAR in too many of today's overachievers. 
• I don't know people who've been successful who've worked in a straight line. 
• Fire over Formula: "If you are extremely smart but you're only partially engaged, you will be outperformed, and you should be, by people who are sufficiently smart but fully engaged." -- hedge fund CEO.
• What mattered most in the end was a true, deep attachment to whatever you're making, whatever you're selling, whatever you're doing. Intensity and stamina. Sheer determination. Synonym for HARD WORK. 
• We know that people are often defined as sharply by setbacks, and their responses to them.