Aug
23
News: The Beloit College Mindset List
August 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment
My beloved alma mater (Beloit College), and my beloved advisor (Tom McBride), each year release the Mindset List, a hilarious and insulting rigmarole of what this year’s entering students don’t know about. With such startling revelations as “55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties,” the list reads like an annual scanning of the “Events of 1992″ page on Wikipedia.
I hate this list and it makes me mad, mostly because it doesn’t actually build the understanding it pretends to aim toward. More and more people have no guilt or shame whatsoever in their total lack of knowledge of what came before they were born, and have a borderline-adversarial relationship with the interests of their parents or other adults. We build more lateral connections, with peers and friends and even trusted strangers via blogs or TV, than we do vertical connections, with relatives, educators, and so forth.
The list’s makers insist it is only to give a frame of reference to adults who do not wish to sound irrelevant to the young people in their lives. Yet all the list does is remind everyone how old they are and subtly imply that young people are worse off for their level of knowledge. It makes both sides defensive and both take issue with the items on the list.
The New Yorker asks if the Mindset List is still relevant:
The Beloit list has always been a bit musty, often trading in cultural totems as stale as coffee in a faculty lounge. (See all the lists here.) The reader—young or old, hip or otherwise—can’t help but squirm at lines like: “70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.” But for the class of 2014, for whom “‘digital’ has always been in the cultural DNA,” the list seems particularly outmoded. If nothing else, I suspect that kids now know more, rather than less, about these types of cultural trivia and historical fragments, because as each year passes, the information becomes so much easier to obtain.
I wouldn’t go that far. But I do question the list’s relevance every year. Even if a few people my age at Beloit thought of Paul Newman as “the salad dressing guy” (an item of note on our list), that made me feel deeply embarrassed by their ignorance. The Beloit students I know are also embarrassed that the Mindset List is our college’s only entrance into the national consciousness.
Aug
27
Sam T. Schick & Wandering Works
August 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment
My friend Emily (of the Petit Four) managed to shut the case on one of our great personal mysteries when she traced from the blog Orangette to its progenitor Molly’s new restaurant Delancey. Seeing the “designed by” tag in the corner, she learned the site was the work of Sam T. Schick, our former editor-in-chief and object of great collective fascination.
More than someone I find interesting, Schick is responsible for events that changed my life — namely, when I was 17 and a freshman and a dutiful head-nodding staff writer, he pulled me up when someone quit and installed me in her place. I stayed on staff as the news editor for two years then ran the paper myself for two more, leaving reluctantly when I graduated and fearing for is future well being. I began as someone who could write and ended up becoming an insatiable aesthete with a particular eye and deep personal investment in whatever I do. Sometimes my coworkers or friends don’t understand why I have to spend the extra time to really love the way something looks, why I actually use all those features Microsoft Word offers to change the line height or indents. In turn, I have no idea how those people don’t see the same way.
Schick now operates Sam T. Schick & Wandering Works (what a great name) and seems to be making good for himself, which is so pleasing. He left school and disappeared, and we heard bits and pieces that usually were unsubstantiated. In the website for Wandering Works, I see the same sparse, simple layout that he valued when he trained me at the paper, the same love of negative space, an overall uncluttered look, and serifs. It’s satisfying.
Jul
29
More than a small world, it’s a small block
July 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment
A fascinating acquaintance and Beloit College classmate now works at a Heartland Alliance office a few doors down from my office. He was sitting in the patio area of our local independent fair-trade coffee shop.
Nonprofit Heartland Alliance offers a variety of services at various Chicago locations, including very low-cost healthcare, life skills education, and help for those transitioning from or on the brink of homelessness. Beloit College is some kind of wonderful do-gooder factory, as I can’t even count the number of people I know who’ve gone to work at nonprofits, in higher ed, teaching English overseas, and so forth.
Jun
10
Reed College goes insensitively need-sensitive
June 10, 2009 | 2 Comments
Reed College, in need… — Reed now costs $50 thousand a year, has an endowment of more than $350 million, and will not be accepting students who need too much financial aid. This is need-sensitive as opposed to need-blind, which the New York Times stupidly describes this way:
… accepting students based purely on merit, without regard to wealth, and still meeting their financial need. Only the nation’s richest colleges do that.
My alma mater, Beloit College, was need-blind until some point in the last few years, with a student body similar in size to Reed’s and an endowment of, wait for it, about $100 million. I call bullshit on this Reed debacle. Moreover, Beloit sure as shit didn’t cost $50 large a year, and only around one third of students paid the ticket price of around $35 thousand — most were accepted on an assumed discounted tuition rate (myself included), with variable aid on top of that depending on academic performance and other application factors.
Reed is the Harvard of weirdy schools, and many Beloit students either longed to go to Reed or had friends who ended up there. The last thing weirdy schools need is to have even wealthier student bodies.
Jun
1
NUMB3RS
June 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment
One of my former math professors, Paul Campbell, teaches an all-levels course on the CBS show Numb3rs. At the time, I hadn’t seen the show and knew only that it starred the dreamy tag-team of Northern Exposure’s Rob Morrow and ubiquitous-but-underused David Krumholtz, plus Judd Hirsch.
People complain that the mathematics used on the show aren’t totally sound, or would only suggest a LIKELY answer rather than a certain one, and so on and so on. I don’t give a crap about that, because almost every television show demands a certain suspension of disbelief — does the legal world reflect Law & Order, does high school reflect Gossip Girl?
Plain and simple, it’s awesome that a show in the formulaic crime genre has chosen mathematics as its bread and butter, both glorifying the role of mathematics in our society AND hyping up whatever the future has in store. I really love it.
Mar
17
Mr Incan Empire
March 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment
My fellow alum and former colleague Hunter recently started a concept blog, Mr Incan Empire, which takes place in the modern-day Incan empire. It’s a great idea and ties into a novel he’s shopping around.
Aug
1
The House has approved dramatic changes to student loan policies and the general political attitude toward college costs. This is brilliant:
The bill is an effort to keep college costs down through greater transparency — and perhaps shaming — without imposing price controls.
Recently, my alma mater Beloit College sent me a piece of propaganda celebrating the recently departed college president and highlighting Beloit achievements in the last eight years. I scoffed at a chart bragging about Beloit’s low yearly cost* among ACM institutions at $38,000 and change.
Most students at Beloit receive what’s called the “discounted tuition rate,” meaning a relatively small portion of students actually pay that $38 large. On top of that, the school applies variable scholarships, grants, and loans depending on how badly they want you — a C student may receive a higher proportion of loans, while an A student with a list of accolades will likely receive more in grants. This is the secret to financial flexibility at a hippie school like Beloit: They take tremendous risks in admitting and pursuing students with spotty academic records, but those students often produce the most dynamic results on campus, both academically and extracurricularly. Of course, this means Beloit also has a relatively high rate of transfer-out and changing majors.
The ironic part is that private schools are largely immune to bureaucratic murmurs about cost, when they’re also the most fiscally bloated and out of control. Squeezing down the cost of state schools is blood from a stone.
(Lest we disregard this 1,100-page legislation as icky abstract financial news, here is the MOST EXCITING PART. The FAFSA, a standby behemoth of financing higher education, will be reduced in volume by 71%: 2 pages instead of 7.)
* tuition, room and board. Does not include books, presumably, which can easily be $1000 more per year, nor spending money, which varies by social life and vices of choice.
Apr
22
What Matters to Me and Why
April 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Beloit College Magazine recently reprinted edited versions of two features I wrote last year. The articles were coverage of a speaker series, wherein school figures discussed their values and where they originated. It was one of the most compelling campus events in my four years there, and I sat through endless speakers for the newspaper.
Mar
20
Outlines
March 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment
the other day, my favorite professor told our class that he generally disapproves of outlining because it can limit a thinker’s ability to spread out and really inhabit an idea wholly.
today, another professor told our class that she highly recommends outlining and does not like when she senses a paper has no cohesion.
mixed messages from the english department at such a tiny school! how on earth will i split the difference in the “Real World”?
the smartest kid (by FAR) in my math class said today that he thought the second part of the course could be better — he thought that he would have more time to devote, and be able to teach himself the material, since the professor certainly is not. like me, this kid has an enormous project that has grown into an out-of-proportion monster. somehow, my three and a half credits have grown into twenty.
Mar
15
Things to be happy about
March 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment
• beautiful food
• hot tubs
• extra-long inseams
• down comforters
• the color red
• high heels
• good writing
• the things we say when we’re half asleep
• impromptu dance parties
• old friends
• underlining passages
• noticing things
• this pat benatar song i can’t stop listening to
• emile hirsch
• the elements of editing by arthur plotnik
• diet cherry coke
• my particular brand of madness
• guacamole
• the american beauty score by thomas newman
• how my copy of jurassic park is like the town bicycle these days
• pinstripes
• swearing at belcon meetings
• saltines
• everything is illuminated
• max bielenberg’s handwriting
• a white sport coat and a pink crustacean
• afghans and quilts
• scraps of paper with notes on them
• playing scrabble in the smoking lounge
• ink drawing
• bottlecaps from foreign lands!
• MY SHIRT (as printed by misters f-k and fisher)
• “that lady’s got cigarettes!”
• getting over a cold
• ten more round tables
• steve wright (DUH)
• bass clarinet
• emily miller’s “quirkiness”
• the shawshank redemption
• argyle socks
• those conversations wherein you hear a series of brief, illuminative stories about people whom you do not yet know very well
• gallopy drums
• old postcards and their origins
• this new trend of two beds in one
• living in chicago with nathan after graduation!
• my great grandmother’s homemade christmas ornaments
• how this one time, my mom answered a trivial pursuit question by giving the last line of a men at work song
• really good mountain dew from a soda fountain
• the way eight degrees feels so much warmer than -11
• half-remembered dreams that don’t make any sense
• diet cherry vanilla coke
• patsy cline
• townhouse jay
• surreal nights with funny people
• herb alpert and the tijuana brass
• pool at the chaus
• the idea that potential employers may place any weight on the content of this profile
• frosting fights
• scott’s potstickers!
• acoustic versions
• black pepper
• hating on belcon
• TULLYCRAFT
• goldfish (i speak of the snack food, but the real ones, too, especially the ones with that bubbleheaded business)
• loud patterns
• panda express
• how in my new driver’s license picture, it looks like i am dreamily in love with something just to the side of the camera
• acrylic paint
• round buildings, specifically my cylindrical dreamhouse
• costume jewelry
• large crowds dancing in unison
• www.tvlinks.co.uk, specifically ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK
• charming old books
• fresh haircuts
• ground cumin
• the word “dyspepsia”