- (Note: Some of the source links may not match since the original document mentions replacing foreign universities with American universities) 2022/3/4
Also, it’s a common sense story that makes you wonder why I didn’t realize it when I was 18, but going to Harvard University doesn’t automatically make you a great talent by the time you graduate four years later. It’s often said that “it’s harder to graduate from American universities than to get in,” but Harvard students are already rigorously selected at the admission stage, so most students who are admitted can graduate. So if you don’t think about what you want to learn and become during these four years as “yourself,” you may graduate without fully utilizing the university’s resources before you know it. This fear has always been there. Well, it’s a common sense thing, but going to the United States doesn’t solve everything.
- This is important (blu3mo)
- There was a comment in Nikkei article: “Reproducing the Gap in the Competition for Successful Applicants: Difficulties in Overcoming Difficult Entrance Exams Depend on Parents’ Financial Power” (paid article) that pointed out something similar (takker)
https://atelier-basi.themedia.jp/posts/18251267
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The goal of applying to American universities is to be highly evaluated by people other than yourself. It is a process of optimizing yourself as an application to maximize evaluations from external sources that you cannot see, such as names, faces, and criteria. If you can access privileged models, all that remains is luck. The strength of applying to American universities is that it does not necessarily correlate with academic ability or talent. If you succeed in this survival game, you will develop a thought process that extends to “designing your life to maximize evaluations from others” in all subsequent situations. You unconsciously begin to deconstruct the image of a person that others desire. However, you cannot ignore the existence of more optimized individuals, and the basis for defining the self as “special” gradually narrows. When there is uncertainty in self-identity, unnecessary approval and exposure are sought to obtain new signifiers. In the dilemma of searching for necessity in social belonging, you end up living your life essentially based on others’ time.
- I believe that I am pursuing an understanding of the evaluation function of “what I find interesting” during the exam process.
- So I don’t think I’m influenced by external evaluations too much.
- However, there are parts where I consider “having such a way of thinking” as “my strength,” so in that sense, I may be influenced by others.
- I have resistance to confidently speaking out loud
- Does this mean that I have resistance to living based on others’ time?
- (I might just be embellishing it with similar words)
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The process of studying abroad at an American undergraduate institution, which has begun to move to end the niche and spread widely, seems to have greatly confused means and ends, phenomena and essence through the event of entrance exams. I want to believe that observing from different positions and ideologies and gradually guaranteeing altruism within the human species will be a step towards behavioral change to have altruism towards other species in the age of creative destruction, rather than extinction.
- I want to see skills and universities as mere means for doing what I find interesting.