One lucky high school student, Charles Park of Pomfret, Connecticut, will be attending Dartmouth College in the fall. He created a blog to discuss this, and apparently the experience he will eventually have in Hanover, New Hampshire.
If you have any incentive to hate Ivy League students because you think they are pretentious, entitled jerks, and not much brighter than the average student, I do not recommend that you read Park’s publication. As he writes on June 4th:
I never really had any intention of going to Weslyen, BC or Northeastern, so those schools were out right away. That left Cornell, Dartmouth and WashU in St. Louis, but I had no intention of killing myself halfway through college so Cornell was out of the picture too. Their ILR program was the only thing I was interested in, but after further consultation with a few of my friends already at Cornell, I decided against it with certainty. (Apparently there’s a lot of reading involved in that program, but come on, who wants to read in college? …right?)
At the end of the day however, WashU isn’t Dartmouth, end of the story. Call me a snob, but I believe Dartmouth’s Ivy status still makes it a more universally recognizable institution. Both are highly regarded institutions within the U.S. that offer great education, but when I am in Korea for the summer trying to find a job, most people will hear “Ivy League” and go, “Oooooh, shiny,” while many will simultaneously go “What’s WashU?”
These are actually more or less valid , if shallow, points but his blog isn’t going over well, especially with actual Dartmouth students, one of whom wrote on a Dartmouth blog “I’m embarrassed to be in the same class with people like this.” But all of this negative feedback caused his readership to spike and so, oddly, he seems to have won.
As Corey Brezak over at IvyGate writes, “well, there you have it, folks. Charles ’15: The ‘Rebecca Black’ of Dartmouth College.”
Oh, the get famous for being awful tactic. If only Park had realized this before he started applying to college; that would certainly be one way to stand out in the crowd of applicants.
