Saturday, November 13, 2010

Thoughts

In One Day, All Children... , which chronicles the founding of Teach for America from the founder's viewpoint, she mentions that part of the inspiration was seeing people with good educational backgrounds flourish at Princeton where others with backgrounds that prepared them less adequately struggle to do well at Princeton.

Is this an anecdote, or is there a causal relationship between the two? I just realized that somewhere I got it into my head that "Regardless of background, everyone who comes to MIT can do well because (a) their inner potential (b) MIT's resources." I would be interested in crunching data for rough approximants such as neighborhood wealth of graduating school and GPA.

In other news, MIT FML has some oddly encouraging people on it who have good advice for adjusting to MIT.

[Edit 14-Nov-2010]
Maja (my freshman roommate ^^) recommended Waiting for "Superman", a movie that came out recently on this topic. I've yet to see it, but Maja says that it's good.

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