Let's Keep It Real
Roderick Morris
Issue date: 10/15/01 Section: Opinions
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Driving the U-Haul truck from Austin, Texas to Stanford, California, I was excited for the journey ahead. I hadn’t attended a high-prestige school such as Stanford before, and I wondered what (among other things) the academics would be like. Where would I stand in the class overall, and did it really matter? The HBS guys I had worked for before grad school assured me that my academic performance didn’t matter much, that I should take it easy and enjoy the “two years off,” and that the learning would come when I wanted it to. A Stanford GSB grad took me out to lunch when I was admitted and told me to take classes from the best professors regardless what they taught. It was the experience and not the content that mattered, he said.
Classmates appeared to feel the same way. There were some people who took all academics in all classes more seriously than the rest, but I just figured that they were the sorts of people who took most things in life very seriously. And within that group of serious people, there was a driven subset that had broad (not necessarily deep) business knowledge, was highly quantitatively inclined, and spoke English very fluently. This subset had the best chance at the Siebel scholarships. (Actually, let me take this moment to point out to those who consider academics a great equalizer that all of the Stanford Siebel Scholars this year were native English speakers and worked as consultants for McKinsey, Bain, or BCG.) But beyond those “top gunners,” almost nobody was very concerned about academic standing. The prevailing thought seemed to be that there was greater value to be had in getting to know classmates, hatching business plans, getting involved in interest-based activities, and enjoying Northern California together than there was in focusing on the individual, solitary task of improving class rank. But that was before the Dean’s List letters went out.
In the course of our vote for class norms, 23% voted that they wanted to view their academic standings online. It is not a coincidence that this number is not far off from the 25% of the class that received Dean’s List letters only weeks before. Why do they want to see their standing now when most of them claimed not to care last year? After all, well over 77% of the people I spoke with last year intimated that they could care less about grades. It’s because the people in this 23% want to know whether they should try for Arjay Miller this year, or if they are better off spending more time on (enjoyable, practical, group-oriented) non-academic pursuits. That looks like a shift in class thinking to me.
Classmates appeared to feel the same way. There were some people who took all academics in all classes more seriously than the rest, but I just figured that they were the sorts of people who took most things in life very seriously. And within that group of serious people, there was a driven subset that had broad (not necessarily deep) business knowledge, was highly quantitatively inclined, and spoke English very fluently. This subset had the best chance at the Siebel scholarships. (Actually, let me take this moment to point out to those who consider academics a great equalizer that all of the Stanford Siebel Scholars this year were native English speakers and worked as consultants for McKinsey, Bain, or BCG.) But beyond those “top gunners,” almost nobody was very concerned about academic standing. The prevailing thought seemed to be that there was greater value to be had in getting to know classmates, hatching business plans, getting involved in interest-based activities, and enjoying Northern California together than there was in focusing on the individual, solitary task of improving class rank. But that was before the Dean’s List letters went out.
In the course of our vote for class norms, 23% voted that they wanted to view their academic standings online. It is not a coincidence that this number is not far off from the 25% of the class that received Dean’s List letters only weeks before. Why do they want to see their standing now when most of them claimed not to care last year? After all, well over 77% of the people I spoke with last year intimated that they could care less about grades. It’s because the people in this 23% want to know whether they should try for Arjay Miller this year, or if they are better off spending more time on (enjoyable, practical, group-oriented) non-academic pursuits. That looks like a shift in class thinking to me.