IvyGate’s Guide to Admissions: Part IV

Somewhere between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s untimely death and that Tom Green movie about Harvard, some misconceptions of the awesome Ivy League education have spiraled out of control. First of all, the classes are not that difficult—seriously. And if you don’t like just plain easy classes, there are stupid easy ones too! Beware, though, it’s actually pretty easy to get (sort of) kicked out for a million things besides getting a C. Wait, you didn’t know that grades are being phased out in the Ivies? Welcome to the high graduation-rate heaven of the still very profitable elite universities.

So if you’re one of the happy few, be prepared to abandon all those bright-eyed ideals of your presumably successful high school career. Time to get greedy, lazy, jaded, and depressed.

1. Shine your shoes and practice that shit eating grin. A good grade is not hard to find at any Ivy if you know the right way to slut it up. First of all, we’re all familiar with this grade inflation myth, right? Without even getting into the whole argument, it exists. According to the Boston Globe, over half of the grades given out at Harvard in 2007 were in the A-range. The real question, then, is how to make sure you’re in the lucky half rather than the poor bastards who have to settle for B’s, a sure fire dive into a life of destitution and, consequently, fewer orgasms. The answers…

• BORROW a learning disability. No kidding. Just make it up, go to health services, and enjoy with the fun medication or exemptions from required credits. One anonymous source told us about an anonymous freshman from an anonymous school who convinced doctors that he had an inability to learn foreign languages and thus avoided the language requirement. Too bad he wanted to be a comp lit major.
• BEG your professors for extensions, exemptions, and excellent grades you don’t deserve. It’s an art in its own way, but little things like attending office hours (with lots of cleavage) and chatting with your TA (with lots of cleavage) really do translate into better results.
• STEAL someone’s identity! A couple years ago, a con artist got into and attended Columbia–though that’s no big deal. Or you could just steal somebody else’s work. If Kaavya Viswanathan (among others) can  bullshit her way up, so can you!

After the jump: skipping class, going nuts, and graduating happy! Plus, hating the Ivy League, leaving, and coming back by novelist Andrea Seigel.

2. Skip the Hard Classes and Fake the Easy Ones. It’s a well-known fact that Ivy course guides are thick, poorly-designed, and full of ways to squander your tuition dollars. Harvard has a course called “Dinosaurs and Their Relatives,” a particularly “notable” class according to the Crimson, and a wine-tasting seminar (for credit) that may or may not return this spring. Or head to Yale for this:

alcohol and other drugs in american culture: If you did not salivate the second that you read the name of this course, you seriously must be illiterate. This definitely wins the “name that sounds most like the content of my favorite mtv shows and thus i must take it class” award this year, taking the crown from food psych and fat and thin. The reviews look really good for this gut, and I have no doubt in my mind that the entire swim team will be sitting together for this one when I show up on day one. This gut is hotter than Michael Vick and Matt Sills combined right now.

If you do make the fatal mistake for signing up for something remotely challenging, please read the above advice on snuggling in between a professor (named Mansfield’s) buttchecks for extended deadlines and consciously inflated grades.

3. Take a Leave of Absence, or, The Trouble With the Crazy Card. At the end of the day, the Dean has a vested interest in keeping graduation rates high (for Newsweek ranking, etc.) so Ivy League universities are all but designed to shoo all admitted students towards commencement—no matter how long it takes. This system can have both positive and negative effects depending on how you swing it. Andrea Seigel, author of a novel about a Brown student living in the infirmary, told us about the perks of her own in-and-out experience at an Ivy:

I’d love to say that I left Brown for Berkeley for mostly ideological or educational reasons or something, but really, I set that ball in motion after freaking out that my boyfriend was graduating from Princeton and going back to the west coast until he figured out what he was doing with his life…..I must have been aware of how flighty I can be because instead of dropping out of Brown, I just took a leave.  The administration was fine with it, but they had no cause not to be because they didn’t know what was going on.  I went to Berkeley…..

But the bottom line is that I didn’t think the education was as good, and I realized that pretty fast.  I’m sure it’s comparable if you’re doing something more educationally concrete, like learning engineering or a language, but since I was, unfortunately, interested in a more abstract kind of learning, I had to admit that Brown was teaching me to think in a much more complicated way than Berkeley.  So I dropped out of Berkeley and let Brown know I was coming back for senior year.

Yes! If you have any doubts just take off for a while and come back whenever! Be advised that if you push it too hard (that is, develop an illness or do moderately poorly in a course), you may be submitted to the university’s steadfast “Involuntay Leave” procedure. You might also make sure you’re the right candidate to allow back in no matter what. Like this one:

When I dropped out of Barnard College, the dean’s form for my withdrawal said ‘unconditional readmission,’ which was either due to my reason for leaving, or the fact that I had no financial aid.

So get out while you can! And apply for grants while you’re gone, because the Ivy League has a dangerous amount of money.

4. If You Really Need to Leave, Just Leave. As sobering and unsnarky as this may sound, the Ivy League experience can suck and the education is not all it’s cracked up to be. While some people think that the ivory tower is ohmygodawesome, it actually drives others out of their minds. This situation can yield extensions, etc like one ill-willed reader explains:

the easiest way to get a deadline extension or work out a “special deal” with the deans (who control the serious grade/coursework alterations, not the professors) is to schedule an appointment with the student health department’s therapist. unfortunately, you’ll get stuck in a loop of follow-up sessions where you’ll have to talk out your worries about being a failure at life, or doubting your sexuality, or breaking up with your soulmate boyfriend, to the point that you’ll start believing it and drive yourself insane for real. but you’ll definitely get the extension you want. i know one kid who had so many personal crises the dean ultimately called his parents to check on the severity of things. since his mom was willing to lie, it was fine.

But it’s also ultimately unspeakably sinister that these schools allow that to happen. A letter last year from an Ivy freshman to Salon.com sums up the collective awful:

I just have no place here anymore, and I’m really alone and isolated and depressed nearly all the time. I don’t know what to do, and I certainly have no idea how to begin making headway on my homework. Most days I feel accomplished if I just go to class. I feel as though I can’t do anything, much less think, much less write. I feel like I can’t do anything right.

Welcome to the suck. Instead of selling her soul by staying, let’s hope “California Dreaming” actually transferred back to one of those colleges with good parties and attractive people.  And will graduate happy. By the way, this is by no means a guide to have a good college experience.