h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well... university to you all. As you may have guessed, I'm back from the wilds of BC - I love that province, but my oh my is it nice to be reunited with my computers.

Speaking of my computers, in the attempt to rig up my little harem better, I need to make a trip to the electronics store as soon as possible - it's one of those warehouse-type stores where you can find everything, but it's across town on the freeway so I don't know if my parents will let me drive there. But the object is to get two of the computers running faster so that they'll better support their systems (and so that one will support its system at all), set up a switch so that the two desktop computers only need one monitor, keyboard and mouse between them, and get internet going into the second desktop (since neither of my desktops has PC card slots, and so can't easily connect to the wireless network in my house, I've been routing the connection through one of my laptops via ethernet). Once I get all that done, I can install Solaris on the newest desktop, in the interests of erasing Windows from that hard drive ASAP. I'm really looking forward to checking out Solaris - the DVD came in the mail the other day.

The other major part of my life right now is starting the enormous university applications process. For competitive students in the States it's a huge undertaking. I was pleased to finally get my results back on all the entrance exams (that's more or less what the SATs are) and they were all very good, except for one math score which was sort of average. I was very surprised by how well I did, actually. In any case, these are the universities, as of right now, to which I will be applying:

University of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
McGill University (Montreal, QC, Canada)
University of California-Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
Princeton University (Princeton, NJ)
Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA)
Reed College (Portland, OR)
Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT)
University of California-Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA)

That's more or less in order of preference, though McGill and Berkeley are kind of tied, as are the three colleges.

The next step (and the largest one) is the actual filling-in of the application forms, writing essays, getting letters of recommendation, submitting financial aid requests, etc. Princeton, Swarthmore, Reed and Middlebury all use the "Common Application", a form that's accepted by a number of private universities and colleges across the US. That was the first of the four applications I need to fill in to be available - at midnight last night - so I started putting in the easy things, like my own information, my parents' information, my school's information, and my test scores and my schedule of classes for next year. I kind of enjoy filling in forms, but I'm just starting to realise what an enormous process it is. The sheer volume of essays and "personal statements" to write is astonishing. It's a good thing I'm starting early.

I start university Latin tomorrow, which is my summer activity, I made good money yesterday playing a wedding with a string quartet, and summer is really fun when you have friends. So life is really good right now.

Any thoughts on computers, colleges, etc?

Oh, I forgot to mention: Happy Canada Day!!!

O Canada, our home and native land...

Traveller in Time switching computer
"Try to get a 'self powered' Keyboard Video Mouse switch. Some unpowered will not overcome one system rebooting while the other one keeps alive.

Quite an impressive range of universities, all to say is as there will be some chace involved. "

There's quite a lot of chance involved - that's why I'm applying to so many.

I got the cheapest KVM switch.

I forgot it was Canada day. Any excuse to whack out the national anthem, it is so wonderful.

My friends and I went to see Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, yesterday - so I celebrated Canada Day by feeling smugly superior about the Canadian health system.

Except that it's ist "In all our sons' command..."
Anyway, I thought it went, "Blame Canada..." Sorry, I have too many sensitive Canadian friends. Canadians are sooo easy to tease. If you're American, I mean.

No thoughts on computers except that you sound like you have more boxes than any person can need, and I don't even understand how to do half the stuff you're describing (three computers and one monitor? doesn't it usually go the other way?), so I'll lurk and hope you describe it in further detail later.

I remember applying to college - I got all sorts of neat mail because I checked off the "contact me" box on the SATs. Among them was a neat CD from Reed that made me want to attend there - they seemed so geekily . The only thing I know about the rest of the colleges you have lined up is that they're all pretty much Ivy League caliber.

Enjoy the personal statement writing. No here. Me and a friend actually do them professionally for students heading to graduate school, so my tips are: make it a single, flowing narrative if possible; don't give them any fluff, pathos, or melodrama; don't be afraid to brag about yourself, but do it with facts not hot air; take it from the most unusual angle you can think of. Any essay about a topic that has nothing to do with you should still have lots to do with you. But you probably knew that.

I don't have room on a desk for two monitors/keyboards/mice, you see, and I have two desktop computers. So there's this nifty little box that you can set up: you plug in one monitor, keyboard and mouse into the box and then plug the box into each of the two computers. Then you can press a button to switch between the two computers on the input/output. I haven't actually gotten it to work yet, though...

I checked off the contact box, too. It's been fun, and had I not gotten a really cool letter from UChicago I probably would have never considered it. So that's good.

Thanks a lot for the personal statement advice - actually that's really quite helpful.

UChicago is a neat school--I very nearly decided to go there, but Caltech offered me better financial aid and seemed slightly neater for chemistry/physics. I don't know if I'd have even thought of them except that their application came in the mail and the essays looked really fun. I'm told that they've gone to common app now, though, so perhaps no more really cool essay prompts? That'd be too bad.

We musn't forget that the Canadian national anthem has alternating verses in English and French - or French and English, depending on where you are. The first verse goes:
Oh, Canada! Shit! I don't know the words...
and the second
Oh, Canada! Tarbernacle! Je ne sais pas les mots..."
(Anyway...are you sure it's not 'Eh, Canada'?)

Colleges:
Having graduated from a cultural desert, my advice would be to choose somewhere you'd like to live. There's more to life than education! It looks like you've chosen some top flight institutions anyway.

Latin? Any particular reason? Nothing against it - I speak it like a native myself - just that it's quite unusual.

Nice story about when Jessica Mitford's daughter was applying to college. Decca had to fill out a form, which asked for details of her father's occupation. She asked a friend for advice:
"He never did a day's work in his life - he was in the House of Lords. I suppose I could mention that he owned a gold mine, but I'm certain that he never visited it."

Chicago's not switching over until next year, so I'm still using the delightful Uncommon App. The switch has set up a huge furor, actually - especially because it was apparently done by the administrative types without consulting the students or faculty - and students have got up a petition against it and all that sort of thing.

I love the idea of Chicago because I seem much less likely to run into people from my high school there.

As to Latin: I took a year in school 8th grade (in Massachusetts)and then carried on with a tutor in 9th grade (they don't offer Latin in the schools here). I want to regain what I learned then and have it appear on my record as something I really did - and I want the experience of taking a college course.

It's not just any college course, though - it's a 6-week intensive one. It's quite... special.

It certainly has its attractions. I remember enjoying reading Cattulus when I was at school. Real mucky stuff!

Oh, indeed.

A professor of mine has fond memories of when she took one of those intensive Latin courses. Says it changed the way she understood literature and language and blah blah... It certainly seemed to help her understand Milton.
Then again, a Swiss friend who majored in language in high school said Latin was the worst year of her life.
Personally, I'd rather take a summer of French or something useful. But I imagine you're enjoying. Can you *talk* Latin at all?

No...but I've never had a Spanish lesson in my life, yet can get the gist of written Spanish at least. Spanish, Italian and French are basically dialects of Latin. Romanian, too. Plus it teaches some linguistic concepts which are not easy to grasp from English or French, thus making German and Russian a lot easier.

Besides, when did 'usefulness' become the only criteria to judge learning by?

If I'd learnt Greek, I'd have known I meant 'criterion'.

Well, when civilization collapses, useful knowledge will be the valued stuff.

But until then, I'd still prefer to learn things that make me a better citizen of the world.

Of course, if you call it a "hobby" it's ok to do things that are not a jot useful.

Latin's useful to me because I'm considering history and linguistics as possible fields of study. Chances are that I'll reach some point in my life when I'll have to know it, and I've actually already used it for research - when you know the language that an original source was written in, why read the translation?

I can't really speak it - Latin isn't really spoken, just read and translated, and that's how it's taught - but I'm also not very good at speaking languages. I find grammar much easier to master than vocabulary, you see.

Besides, like Edward said, I'm a big believer in learning for the sake of learning, and I have a slight nostalgia for liberal arts curricula of days gone by.