The understanding with most art is that it takes several rounds of critique for a piece to even be complete, much less for an artist to reach their overall potential. And it's considered an honor to receive criticism from someone whose work you admire.
Similarly, self-management is completely necessary if you're completing something long-term, like a novel. Scrappiness, too -- it's very often the case that you have to skip around the gatekeepers to reach an audience for the first time.
I'd also add that there's a certain strange cognitive advantage. A lot of art is built on taking concepts from one situation and applying them somewhere foreign -- translating the feeling of loss into a series of musical notes, or applying the principles of the punk rock movement to dance.
I know it sounds like bullshit to a lot of hackers. But that trick, of abstracting away the details of problems so that their solutions can be used in isomorphic situations, is very handy in computer science.
I'm from a family in the bottom income bracket, and I went to Stanford.
It's as alien and daunting as the article makes it sound. I would never have thought to apply if it weren't for a suggestion from my aunt who married rich. My high school guidance counselor was completely unhelpful, and she actively discouraged all of my peers who I wanted to apply with me (because "Stanford wants 1s and 2s," not people ranked 5th or 8th in the class). When I got in, I had to ask a relative to pay the $300 placeholder fee. My mother cried because she didn't believe that I could get full financial aid.
It was easy to spot the two other low-income students in my 100-person freshman dorm. We didn't know how to talk or study or dress or think the way our peers did. It took me years to learn.
My sister was in the same position, but didn't have the blind ambition to ignore our hometown horror stories ("he was top of his class, but he went off to some fancy college and ended up flunking out..."). I convinced her to apply to several very prestigious schools. She was accepted, but went with a more modest, local one instead. She spent her freshman year interpreting every setback as a sign that she had overreached by going to a four-year university at all. It turned out fine, but she switched her plans from medical school to nursing by graduation.
It's hard to communicate to people who grew up with even modest privilege how much all of this matters. My worlds before and after Stanford feel entirely separate. The Internet helped, but I was like an archaeologist combing through relics of a long-dead culture. What counts as an Ivy? How did these schools have so many AP classes? Why did all of these people have SAT tutors -- weren't tutors for people who were behind?
Information matters. Culture matters. I was lucky, but a few well-placed text messages could absolutely replicate that luck. Even to just say, "We noticed you're a good student. You could go here. You could afford it. This is doable." Hearing that from any authority at all would be huge. Because when you're low-income or first-generation, everyone and everything in your life is constantly telling you the opposite.
The exceptions are students who are black, Latino, low-income, or first-generation college attendees. I understand that these populations are a minority in the Ivy League, but they easily combine to be a majority of the country.
So we could more accurately say that Ivies help students earn higher salaries, except for students from certain privileged backgrounds.
The understanding with most art is that it takes several rounds of critique for a piece to even be complete, much less for an artist to reach their overall potential. And it's considered an honor to receive criticism from someone whose work you admire.
Similarly, self-management is completely necessary if you're completing something long-term, like a novel. Scrappiness, too -- it's very often the case that you have to skip around the gatekeepers to reach an audience for the first time.
I'd also add that there's a certain strange cognitive advantage. A lot of art is built on taking concepts from one situation and applying them somewhere foreign -- translating the feeling of loss into a series of musical notes, or applying the principles of the punk rock movement to dance.
I know it sounds like bullshit to a lot of hackers. But that trick, of abstracting away the details of problems so that their solutions can be used in isomorphic situations, is very handy in computer science.