I welcome comments, questions, article links, and stories of your personal experiences. Don’t be bashful, all you unemployed Ivy Leaguers and graduates of other highly-ranked universities – you’re not as alone as you think.
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Please send emails to clayton.thomas@alumni.duke.edu. I can be reached on Skype under the username cbthomas2006. You can follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cbt2006 or on Google Plus at https://plus.google.com/+ClaytonThomas2006.
For more detailed information about my education and work history, you can view my LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/clayton-thomas/5/b8b/104.
I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but I went to a private, very expensive University. I did all that stuff about the ACT and the hardest classes in High school, it was honors everything. I had a business and a math degree, and all I could find was low paying jobs a high school dropout could do. (this was back in the early 90’s) Some of it was my fault as the better jobs I was offered involved flying long distances and I had a problem with airplanes. I ended up getting married and staying home with kids and helping my husband with his business. I now sell stuff online.
My high school age daughter is now starting all that stuff about I need to get into an Ivy league school. All my friends and teachers say it’s the best. I am telling her, get some marketable skills and go to a decent university/trade school or something. She likes hair styling, I encouraged her to try business school and hair school. All these kids are stressed out and smoking marijuana in their basements and stressing about the IB program. I talked to several colleges and many don’t even care about IB program. (that program does make a lot of money for schools, but I can’t see it helps the students that much) Most of the parents are believing the feaking lies they are told. My children don’t believe me. I have been there. I don’t want them to go through all I went through and spend all that money and not have some decent marketable skills. thanks for the Blog.
I went to an ivy league school in the 1990’s. I try not to look back on the past but to stay focused on the present moment through the practice of meditation. But when I do find my mind wondering to the past it is amazing how dysfunctional and destructive the ivy league culture was. The herd mentality was beyond description. I remember someone who had been involved in math competitions in high school and decided to be a math major because they already knew the material and knew they could get all A’s without doing much work. At the time I wanted to learn Spanish because of the demographic shift in the US Spanish speaking population. I was not from a Spanish speaking household. A huge number of students enrolled in those classes who were already fluent because they grew up in a Spanish speaking household. They dominated the class, talking at every turn, and not allowing other students to participate or work on their skills. I heard many of them say they took the class because they were already fluent from speaking Spanish at home growing up and knew the class would be an easy A. The school administration knew this was going on and did nothing about it. They didn’t even care. At the time it was common to here students talk about a professor they had played tennis or racquetball with, gotten to know on a personal basis, and knew they would automatically get an A in their class. Another time I heard someone talking about a class where a fraternity had a copy of the test that a professor gave every year. So the fraternity would memorize the answers from the test in advance. This was a really funny joke to this person. So many students there were doing things simply to be able to land an investment banking job at graduation with no care whatsoever about building character, growing spiritually, or learning anything meaningful at all. This was just so dark and dreary. The sheep mentality was beyond anything I thought could be possible. And the amazing thing is that coaches and professors and other “adults” who were there didn’t even question what was going on. It was simply survival of the fittest. And then there is the fraternity culture. The only thing to do at the ivy league school I went to on the weekends was go to a fraternity basement party where people were drunk and peeing all over the walls. It was really gross. So someone who isn’t comfortable in that environment had no social options whatsoever to simply go and talk and socialize with people in a civilized manner. There was nothing else there. That was all there was. There was a culture there of “nice is weak.” If you were a nice person with decent manners just trying to get along with people this was “weak.” The real capable people were the ones who were callous and insensitive. Why do people behave like this? How can this be tolerated? The amazing thing is people behaved in these ways in a kind of autopilot. It’s like they just did these things without even thinking about it. It’s amazing.
Anyway I faced a ton of adversity in those times and I try to hone skills like meditation in response. I try to use it to develop something positive in the here and now. For example, someone can use a ton of mud to grow a beautiful garden. In this way I think of myself as a master gardner. Dig the mud into the earth and an amazing mango tree will grow with time.