First, to wrap up our interlude of other people's insights, a zinger from one of my favorite professors ever, Dr. Margo Seltzer:

If I had as much disdain for my students as Deresiewicz appears to have for his, I'd get a new job. Seriously -- I view my students so differently from the way he does that it's hard to imagine we teach at similar institutions, and yet we do.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled...

Dear brother,

I haven't said much about my actual experience here, have I? Most of it's been the sort of broad descriptions you could have gleaned by just looking in from the outside; what's it like to actually live there, you ask? I'm glad you did.

Let's start with the people. Here are a few snapshots of my friends, in no particular order:

Sorry, friends; my jet lag (from returning from Hong Kong on Saturday), seems to have finally caught up with me. Part 3 proper is probably going to have to wait a day, since I went to sleep last night instead of writing it. To tide you over, here are a few excerpts from around the internet:

I'm a Laborer's Son. I Went to Yale. I Am Not "Trapped in a Bubble of Privilege." by Andrew Giambrone, Yale grad now writing for The Atlantic, on the New Republic:

First, his argument effaces important economic, social, and personal differences among students, conveniently neglecting the fact that elite colleges allow athletes and engineers to sit around the same seminar tables as sons of farmers and daughters of CEOs. Second, his turgid derision of elite schools risks dissuading lower- and middle-class kids like myself from applying to those very same institutions.

The Ivy League Is Not the Problem by Osita Nwanevu, U. Chicago student, on Slate:

Deresiewicz says that a campus environment is a rare venue where people from different social strata can interact “on an equal footing.” But having them eat the same processed cafeteria foods and doze off in the same introductory lectures will not put the privileged and the underprivileged on an equal footing. Whether they’re under a publicly financed roof or not, these sorts of interactions are shaped by our past experiences. There will always be a divide between the upper-middle-class student who chooses to attend a public college and the poor student who must. There will

Dear brother,

Yesterday, we talked about the (for some) counterintuitive fact that an elite education isn't just for those with elite pocketbooks. (Fun fact: for 90% of students, Harvard is cheaper than state school.) Today, we're grappling with something a bit more meaty.

Deresiewicz's swipe at the financial cost of an Ivy education is delivered offhand, but his critiques of Ivy League admissions policy are full-throated. We, he alleges, were admitted not because we demonstrated true passions and talents or showed any real promise as peers and fellow-students-to-be, but merely because we were "manufactured" to be "fit to compete in the college admissions game."

Well, to borrow a phrase, "it almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard" attract truly talented students. What, an admissions committee with basically free choice of the nation's graduating seniors, some of the business's most talented officers, more than a few decades experience, and a year-round mission to see through the ploys of Ivy-at-all-costs parents to the true character of applicants...is just going to fail at their single job? Paint me skeptical.

To the contrary, I'm sure Mr. Deresiewicz would be ecstatic to hear that writing an essay about your all-expenses-paid service trip to Guatemala is a really easy way to get your application canned; if instead you wrote about "waiting tables so that you can see [that] you really aren’t as smart as everyone has been telling you," you'd have a much better shot at convincing the committee that you're

Dear brother,

Congratulations on making it through three years of that purgatory called high school! Soon you'll be getting up close and personal with that great Millenial coming-of-age ritual: the one where you and a few dozen people you've never met conspire to decide what sort of weather and dining hall food you'll be enjoying (or cursing) for four years of your life.

You're going to get a lot of advice on how to navigate the next year or so. Unfortunately, not all of it will be good. One day, I'll try to organize my own thoughts on the matter, but today, I feel compelled to rebut a refrain I've heard echoed far too often recently.

The fundamental complaint is that "elite" education (for some definition) leaves students with empty credentials at the expense of true learning, and that graduating high school students have better options for learning to become citizens of the twenty-first century. I contend that this is mostly stereotype and sensationalism -- at least, my own experience at the elitest of elite schools has been overwhelmingly positive.

I fear you are already familiar with the charges that William Deresiewicz, writing for the New Republic, recently leveled (seemingly indiscriminately) against the whole of the elite-education-industrial-complex:

• that the preparations required for an "elite college" are, on the whole, soul-destroying;
• that the admissions process is completely, hopelessly rigged;
• that the student body is firstly, invariably "entitled little shits", and secondly, enslaved to some abstract myth of excellence;
• that the same students are four

At work, for the past week or so, I've been wrestling with a complicated-ish thing, born of a conversation over lunch about something completely different, and taking me deep into some statistics and algebra that I don't really understand (yet). It's awesome.

But (more than once), I've been explaining the thing to someone, and had them offer helpful advice: "Isn't this problem basically [this simpler thing]?" My response has consistently been along the lines of "No, of course not! Can't you see that it's obviously more complicated than that?" I even had a version of this exchange with myself recently, where I thought for a moment that it was actually trivial after all, and then (with some relief) reminded myself that it was, in fact, hard. Whew, what a relief.

...except that, if the point was actually to solve problems in the world, that's entirely the wrong attitude to take. This problem either:

• actually isn't complex, in which case rooting for it to be harder is pretty useless
• actually is complex, in which case rooting for it to be even harder is pretty useless

This isn't academia, where pretending that the problem you've got a solution to is actually Really Quite Hard is a good thing, since you can then wow people by solving it. I'd like to think that I'm in the business of actually solving problems -- and to do that, I can't take sides on whether it's hard or easy. Either way, the only thing to be done is to do it. If it's easy, do it fast and get something harder.

Now, it's true that discretion is the better part of valor,

Today's quote comes from a talk about programming languages:

"If you're ever writing code to loop over the indices of an array, just assume there's a bug in it somewhere."

(In particular, we were discussing pitfalls of imperative languages, but that's not at all important to what I'm trying to talk about, so ignore this sentence if you didn't understand it.)

Okay, so it's not quite true; I've reached the point in my programming career where, upon needing to write array-indexing code, I am still forced to stop, ask myself what I want to do, and then tell the computer to do it -- but at least I usually get it right that first time. Even so, there are certainly other areas of my life where I could benefit by applying similar logic:

• If you're ever planning to be on time to a class/meeting/event, just assume that you're going to be ten minutes late.
• If you're ever planning your time around the deadline for an assignment, just assume that you're going to be working up to literally the last minute.
• If you're ever coming up with a password, encryption key, or other important string of characters to remember, just assume you're going to forget it tomorrow.
• If you're ever reading a book before bed, just assume you're going to read at least an hour later than you expected.
• If you're ever planning to take a small nap and get back to work, just assume it's not going to happen.

The common factor here seems to be "There are some things you're really chronically bad at planning; you should stop assuming that you're going to be

Today, I had someone pull me aside and ask me if I was alright; several people had noticed that I was really worked up about something the other day, to the point of getting angry at one of my coworkers.

It took me a few seconds to figure out what he was talking about, and when I did, I laughed a little. "Oh, Lucian and I go way back; we've been roommates for two years now. We're in the habit of giving each other a hard time; there's nothing wrong."

Afterward, I realized what I should have said -- something like: "Oh. I understand what it might have looked like, but actually everything's okay. We've been roommates for two years now, and I was just giving him a hard time."

The crucial difference: If someone comes to you concerned that there might be a problem, first let them know unambiguously whether there is, in fact, an issue, and then explain. If you put the explanation before the verdict, they'll spend the entire time parsing through what you're saying, trying to determine whether it makes the problem better or worse, before you give them the bottom line at the end. They'll be distracted enough to miss most of what you actually say, and then they'll be forced to change mental gears at the end from whatever conclusions they had dug into to the conclusion you then sprung on them.

The principle, I think, generalizes. If you're trying to tell someone something important (either in conversation, or, as I've found