My first impressions of college

"A university is so much more than its brick and mortar facilities. It is also an eduroam network with intermittent access."
— John Attridge

I really enjoyed my first quarter at UChicago. It's not like I had low expectations coming in, but whatever bar I did have was significantly cleared. This school has been very good to me, besides charging exorbitant prices for laundry. This Christmas break is much needed, but I look forward immensely to winter.

On the people

I'm beyond grateful to have found amazing people. I wasn't at all concerned with generally making friends, but I had a nagging fear that I'd find them somehow inadequate and miss high school friends. But I've done this before; transferring to Loomis was comparable, and I was fine then and am fine now. And the people here are truly wonderful. It's more than I could ever ask for to have so many friends who share my interests, who share aspects of my identity I care about, etc.

On every copy-pasted 'Why Us?' essay for college apps I had some variation of the line "I'm excited to work on interesting problems with like-minded peers"—a line which I didn't remotely believe (granted, very little in those essays I meant)—but it has turned out so true. I saw twitter discourse the other day about how universities are the last bastions of intellectual life; I don't know if they're the last ones, but they certainly are ones. My day-to-day life is very enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. I will not give the school ipso facto too much credit, because classes are the least stimulating part of my day, but I will certainly give it credit for cultivating such a good student body, because everyone’s nice, everyone’s chill, and there's a high baseline of competence. The front desk ladies are evil, but they’re edge cases.

On the culture

That being said, I have found the culture too preprofessional and too academic, viz. although the density of many things e.g. talent, intelligence, work-ethic are reasonably high, the density of agency seems to be low; the funnels here are good (quant, consulting, academia, etc.) and the students are good at engaging with those funnels, but there’s little go-getting.

As an aside, there's lots of discourse re selling out at selective universities. [My take] is that I agree it sucks, but I’m not interested in doing anything about it right now. Also, it isn’t that there is too much selling out, it’s that there isn’t enough building (obviously there’s some trade-off, but if no one here went into finance it wouldn’t dramatically change the level of building).

I’d point to a weak start-up scene as evidence, but I should note that that weakness is a symptom; the root causes are probably character traits the school inadvertently selects for. I have a suspicion that yield rate is Goodhart's Law for this school; the first order effects of farming yield (low RD AR, the addition of ED0, preferring full pay students, preferring prep school kids, etc.) probably have a second order effect of low striver density for self-selection/Bayesian reasons; I've empirically found that RD kids tend to be dramatically more agentic. This isn't so much a value judgement—and it certainly would be hypocritical if it were, given how much selling out I've been doing—as it is a lament, since I'm personally very interested in 'building' these days (I want to create societal value, build something heavy, etc.). And I don't know, I just feel like we could dream bigger.

In all fairness though, I can count on the fingers of one maimed hand the number of schools which have strictly stronger start-up scenes, so it isn’t much of an indictment. On that note, I had a conversation with C. where he mentioned he might transfer for moreorless those reasons. He chose this place over Cal and Columbia and that's terribly funny to me, since those are probably two of the fingers on the maimed hand.

A corollary, though—which I do mean as a value judgement—is that the STEM high-achievers don’t seem to read at all, since they are all fast-tracking industry or academia. And that sucks. I've definitely been reading less this quarter because no one around me reads. I can’t blame the school itself since I haven’t remotely made an effort to engage with any of the literary crowd, but is it so much to ask for a math major who reads?

On the clubs

What a charade! They* are all too competitive in bad ways. I got offers from the two quant clubs, which I appreciated, and I thought for all the effort I went through I ought to be rewarded with something substantial. I mean, damn, all of these finance clubs have single-digit acceptance rates. But it's been disappointing thusfar. Very lackluster. Maybe it'll ramp up in winter (that's what I am told), but right now all my quant-adjacent work has been entirely self-driven. All this has done is strengthen my belief that not only can you just do things™, but you need to just do things.

*I refer to the finance ones, the non-finance ones are all great.

On the campus

The campus is so pretty. I associated Al Capone and skyscrapers and meatpacking with Chicago, so I didn't expect so much nice nature. It's a bit ugly now with the slush and grey skies, but the full swing of fall was sublime, with ivy clinging on our nice Gothic buildings and orange leaves fluttering and winking as they fell. And the sunsets over the Midway were incredible. Multiples times I'd be working in the third floor lounge facing east, and D. would burst in, tell me to look behind me, and I'd turn westward to see the entire sky a ridiculous shade of pink you wouldn't even believe.

I spend too much time in libraries, but I don't mind. Mansueto singlehandedly improves my QoL by ten percent. In Harper, meanwhile, so long as I don’t look up at the ceiling, I can trick myself into thinking I’m back in the Main Rose Reading Room in Manhattan. It's grounding. Harper also, interestingly, has a perfectly chiral interior on both its first and second floors (though the axes are perpendicular). Yet somehow I exit out the wrong door close to 80% of the time (closer to 90% for the first floor); a veritable USB port of a building. I don't like the Reg, but I also don't go there. I want next quarter to explore more study spots—I haven't even been west of Ellis Avenue.

On my dorm

What an unlucky hand to be dealt. All four years of my life where I have boarded I have been assigned the consensus worst dorm available (Harman, Kravis, Taylor, and now I-House). The distance from my dorm to any dining hall is greater than the distance from any other dorm to any other dining hall. I'm subsisting on smoothies for breakfast, since a breakfast detour costs nearly an hour.

The silver lining I've found is that the gulf induces a compartmentalisation which helps productivity and WLB, unlike boarding school, as D. and I talk about often. Guzey has a nice line re productivity about how intentionality is the key difference between home and every other place on planet earth. And the albeit very short commute I think gives me that separation, mentally at least. On that note, Divvy bikes are convenient. The annual pass is saving my life. Obviously there's some self-selection (having the pass makes me bike more), but I have in just one quarter fully recouped the cost and supposedly saved another hundred dollars.

The actual dorm is fine. We have a chill courtyard with an empty fountain and shrubbery with an air of self-sufficiency about them (I doubt they get watered). I have a single larger than my Taylor single, which sufficed already. But god it is far from everything relevant. We get an extra hundred Maroon Dollars which I immensely appreciate, since that equates to six Spicy Tuna Poke Bowls at Paks, but that doesn’t redeem this place. I suppose it’s a bonus that we host political events (Trudeau came recently) but we don’t even get priority access (I languished in the lottery just to not get picked), so it’s immaterial to me. I met the Estonian president’s bodyguards though, that was cool.

On classes

I don't have anything to say about my classes this quarter. I did what is on some level the maxxed math course rigor (there are Honors versions, but they don't unlock anything the regulars don't) but I don't feel like I did any actual work this whole quarter. Analysis was enjoyable (my lecturer was great) but it wasn't hard. And I've taken linalg before, so this was just to fulfill a requirement. And my humanities and arts (geneds) were nonrigorous. It felt thin, ephermeral.

Yet again, I think this only reinforced my desire to go do things myself. Everything cool I did this quarter was behind a door I opened myself/with friends. The structure provided by the school (RSOs, classes, programs, advisors, career advancement departments, blah blah) is not useful in the ways that matter.

Takeaways

There's a lot of potential here. None of the structure at this place does anything meaningful; I shouldn't spend too much time on schoolwork. But the people here are great, oh so great. We can do great things together. Some friends and I are starting a little prop shop. We will do big things.

Fin

I appreciate that so many Loomis kids are here. I flew out Friday afternoon. A. had told me the night before that RA’s check rooms over break, so that morning I had to dispose of my beer. I hadn’t seen M. in a while, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and daydrink with him. Biking to Plein-air was symbolic, because the street was empty except for—of all people!—a lone I., running to the Metra station with their bags. I mean wow, eight thousand undergrads and it's two Loomis kids I see as I close out my first quarter. I really like this place. I want to end with my journal entry from October 2.

Today I was awaken by my alarm at around nine and having seen no relevant emails to reply to I went back to sleep. I ended up stumbling out of bed around one and made myself a great big bowl of oatmeal which was too much for me to finish so I did not finish it. Then I dredged through some disgustingly sickening bedrot and eventually forced myself downstairs into the basement, into the same study room whose unemptied trash can holds the mandarin rinds from last night. And so I have sat here reading Dance Dance Dance which I have not been enjoying much honestly and doing combo questions until my lamy ran out of ink. Murakami mentioned spaghetti and I got very hungry so I texted that I wanted spaghetti and now I think A. will make us all spaghetti for dinner and that’s so awesome.