How to Achieve the American Dream

How to Achieve the American Dream

Right now, most of you reading this are twenty somethings with extremely bright futures ahead of you. Many of you were the stars of your high school, if not area, if not state, if not country. Then you got here and things changed. All of a sudden, everything was challenging. From the first moment you got here you were in competition with all the other freshmen for spots in a fraternity, sorority, independent living group, or dorm. You compared SAT scores, compared achievements, and found that they, like you, were amazingly accomplished. Many were National Merit Scholars, AP Scholars, Governor’s School participants, Math Olympiad winners, Science Fair winners, and Scholarship recipients.

MIT is the premier science and engineering school in the country if not the world. Within it’s walls, minds have been coached and trained to excel in such diverse areas as film, computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, math, physics, economics, management, chemistry, architecture, and aero-space engineering. In Hollywood we are portrayed as the end all be all. In the movie Independence Day the scientist who discovers the secrets of the aliens is an MIT Ph.D. Also an MIT PhD in Physics is portrayed as a scientist in the movie Armageddon. People travel from all parts of the world to walk through our hallways and to hear MIT professors give lectures and to watch students cross at 77 Massachusetts Avenue.

So you start school and soon find that the work that is assigned for the most part is busy work. Going to bed at four or five am start to seem like reasonable bedtime hours. In addition to this, you can actually count how many hours you have slept in the last three days on your hands. Suddenly, you don’t see yourself as being lucky for being so privileged as to be attending MIT. Complaining about how much work you have, how little you slept last night, and how much this place “sucks” seems to pepper all the conversations that you have during the day. Not only that, but the administration knows what it does to students so they have three-day and four-day weekends to let the students let off a little steam. The administration calls these weekends “long weekends”, whereas the students call them as “Suicide Weekends” – They are held so that students don’t become over-stressed and commit suicide.