Anyone go here? I'm not bragging, this is my last hope. I'm desperate for any literary friends...

anyone go here? I'm not bragging, this is my last hope. I'm desperate for any literary friends. I'm surrounded on all sides by soullrss premed and CS majors who only talk about making the next retarded start up, and I am completely alone in my interest in lit and phil. stanford said that they have a balance of stem and humanities but that is complete bullshit. please someone help me

You always had the solution, browse Veeky Forums like the rest of us.

I think it's cool that we live in a society where there are people with degrees from places like Stanford or Cornell or MIT whose favorite books are something like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. But they have CS or engineering degrees and make 200k a year. These are people who go through their entire lives being told how smart they are and how proud everybody is of them and they get all their news and opinions from John Oliver. These are people who will say things like "Oh, I don't like black and white movies," or "A foreign film? Like with subtitles the whole time? No thanks."

What the fuck are you talking about. I know Stanford is basically STEM Harvard/Princeton and I know identity politics has fucked the social scene there more than any other private unit (except perhaps Yale) but it's not like kids there don't read books. Admit it, this is "I got to Stanford" the post

yes, they really can't compete with someone like you. A wage slaving nobody with a degree (if any) from some no name university who will contribute or achieve anything significant in their life
But hey, you can appriciate Gravity's Rainbow because your secret online autism club says it's a landmark work of the 20th C. Truly you are superior.

That's American education for you. Just have parents that know the system. As long as you have a reasonable amount of intelligence and work ethic than you'll get into a top 10 uni

will never contribute*

I applied to the law school yesterday. Hopefully they accept me but I dont think they will. If I get in Ill read with you OP

>Law school
Bad move, hombre. The most soulless of places preparing you (and not well, I might add) for the most soulless of professions.

Yes but I'm a total sperg so I'm not gonna get a hot wife unless I make six figures. Also ive worked as an office wage slave long enough to know that mid level management and below is even more soulless

Sorry, what do STEM majors actually contribute to society? Do they do anything other than fulfill the artificial needs that their friends in Marketing created?

>criticizing someone for going to a no name university
I don't respect you any more for having a piece of paper from some trust fund baby playground. And sorry, but I don't consider buying a new BMW every 2 years to be achieving anything significant in life.

I despise them, yet I envy them so much. It's gotten to the point the Harvard is like Mecca to me, and I despise myself for being unable to attend it.

Eh it's not that bad. The only real job that isn't "soulless" would be being a professor or research scientist in the private sector. Most jobs in general are gonna such dick, and not everyone can be a professor.

I'd much rather be a lawyer, like this guy said , than get a English degree or psychology degree only to end up being a high school English teacher or counselor. If you can't be a professor or research scientist (e.g. for a pharmaceutical company), than your best bet is probably accounting or law. At least it's SOMEWHAT intellectually stimulating, prestigious, and lucrative (if you're lucky and you make it to partner at mid to large sized firm you can even make up to 7 figures, never mind 6, and even at a small to mid sized firm you can end up making like 400-800k).

There's a lot of people with law degrees who aren't even making 100k. I don't know if I'd want to go 200k+ in debt for the possibility of coming out making only 70 or 80k...

Accounting is far from intellectually stimulating. You could train a dog to do most of it.

Some people study STEM, not to make money and engineer stupid, useless technology, but because the pursuit and acquisition of scientific knowledge provides the same sense of existential fulfillment and contact with something transcendental or eternal, so to speak, that some people find in humanities and literature. I'm a big linguistics/pure math/philosophy-fag for much the same reason that people on Veeky Forums like classic literature and theology (and once in awhile I'll read some literature or theology, although I'm not too well read on such subjects).

Don't be so closed-minded. Not all STEM-fag are autistic CS majors whose only concern is making some coolio programs (btw theoretical computer science is actually pretty esoteric, it's basically the shit Wittgenstein, Turing, and Godel were interested in).

Making partner is incredibly difficult. Most talented lawyers who arent entrepreneurial enough to start their own practice work for the government, a nonprofit, or go in house after slaving away in big law. Then once they find themselves having to pay for their kids' education in full because theyre in that upper middle class no financial aid sweet spot, they might be lucky enough to join a firm as a partner if theyve made a name for themselves

Law school is just a bad idea if you dont get into a prestigious school. I cringe when I hear about someone paying full price to go to Brooklyn Law or Suffolk Law

>your best bet is probably accounting
No, it most definitely is not. As said it's boring as fuck.

this is pretty true but i also really like amazon same-day delivery

i go to a top law school and its not horrible but i hope youre not expecting much w/r/t the intellectual climate. 40% of the class will know who david foster wallace is, 5% will have read him, and maybe there will be one kid who has read kant outside of coursework. imagine a clever kid whose only 'intellectual' interest is regurgitating all of the arguments against the death penalty, that's the average law student.

sour grapes, get like this guy theres a reason most people quit biglaw after 2-3 years.

I'm well aware most law students absolutely suck. Im expecting it to be a very lonely experience. My only goals are to make law review, and find a nice lady

I can't imagine spending so much money and effort to do something you know you will find miserable. Especially when the goal is a lady.

But who knows, maybe I'll be thinking the way you are in a couple years.

I'd like to be involved with the labor and worklife program at harvard too but only 50/50 shot I get in. This cycle is supposed to be more competitive than usual

>50/50
I dont know why I was being so generous, its more like 30/70

>law review
i hope you realize that all you'll do is edit footnotes to meet style guidelines

>sour grapes, get like this guy
You don't want to be like me. I'm so bitter it's exhausting. I spend at least an hour a day trying to draft a plan to somehow get accepted to a school like that. I also can't go to family events because I get too angry when I see a relative of one that attends an Ivy League school.

Hey lawfag is it true that law is pure sophistry?

i meant, like, get real, honest.

can you reformulate this question for me?

I'm coming to terms with it by shifting my goal to
having a kid that attends one.

Sure. Why is sophistry so prevalent in law, if at all?

Don't try to live vicariously through your kids. It will fuck them up. And why do you worship a university anyway? Is it the "prestige"? Do you desire power and think that's your only way to get it? Or do you just want to fuck some senator's coked up daughter?

>Don't try to live vicariously through your kids. It will fuck them up.
They wouldn't be so much people as they would be a means of vindicating me. If they fail, I'll just break off all contact as soon I'm legally allowed.
>And why do you worship a university anyway?
I'm deeply insecure about my intelligence through my constant failures in education, and that's the only way I'll ever be able to get over it.

I just realized I italicized The Bible in my application. Theyre going to think I'm retarded

nice. the easiest way is to go to a lower ranked uni for ug, get a 4.0, and apply for grad programs. things are much more competitive straight out of hs.

I'm going to assume you mean in the United States, and further that you're talking about constitutional law cases (the only kind that laypersons care about). Personally, I place most of the blame squarely on the 14th amendment. It gave federal courts way too much power over public policy, and politicized them to an extreme degree. So since every tortured DP/EP issued is binding precedent, a lot of legal sophistry is required in subsequent cases.

One further difficulty is that legislatures tend to pass bills that are quite obtuse. This is more of an issue in administrative law cases, but judges are typically forced to resort to their pet canon of construction.

Maybe if you bothered reading Gravity's Rainbow you'd be able to spell "appreciate."

you sound like a brainlet too to be honest and id love to know what your major is.

10 years ago I woulda said get out of that bubble and go hang out across the Bay, but the state of affairs at my alma mater is fucking depressing as of late.

No clue if it's the same at Stanfurd, but if it is: good luck.

Wew lad

Don't attend Stanford but I live 5 minutes away and I need to chime in about how much of a fucking shithole Silicon Valley is, tech company faggots are the worst people you will ever meet and good luck moving out because apartments start at like 5K. At least there are good hiking spots around here

You'd be surprised.

you sound poor and jealous

Lol you're not missing much you resentful faggot. You should cry about not being able to attend Harvard during its heyday instead.

i have a friend there who does french lit but i think he's switched to CS

I am missing out on the ability to ever respect myself, and I'm sure it's still pretty great.
Yeah, but these feelings aren't going away anytime soon.

desu i dont even think that was the point of that guy's post man. he wasn't implying 'superiority' or inferiority

yes I go here and feel exactly the same way as you. palo alto chugs dick and most students here are functionally illiterate. but i'm a graduate student and so can't associate with the likes of you

what're you studying m8

How do you counter the stem meme? I see colleges shilling for stem all the damn time.

Not once did I ever say "all STEM majors are this way". I'm only observing that a large number of people who think very highly of themselves for going to some prestigious university have absolutely zero of the taste that one might expect from a cultured or well rounded citizen. I don't expect every STEM major to be an expert on Russian literature, and there'd be no reason for them to be, but it's sad when you have adults who are supposedly the smartest people in the nation thinking that Star Wars is the greatest achievement in global cinema and that Hamilton is the greatest achievement in all of theatre.

stanford accepted me for a masters in ee and i turned them down because the culture there was so shit, like you realize

i go to asu now, a year away from a doctorate

i hope i made the right choice

>tfw arts student in state university with a well-paying job lined up right out of uni

stay mad STEM fags

what kind of job

im in the same boat of embitterment

i feel subhuman and dont respect myself bc i was rejected from the elites club

how does one overcome this

what books do i read

escort

A pretty solid tech job at a theater in a city nearby. Starting off with 80k and working my way up.

ugh. higher level schools are really their own sorts of deathtraps

If you can't get a 165 on the LSAT don't even think about going, and its still probably a bad idea at that point. 165 = top 8% of test takers.

If you don't make biglaw you start between 40k and 70k (gov't or small law, midlaw rarely hires new JDs). Almost no one starts between 70k and 140k, look up "bimodal salary distribution curve". You can make good upper middle class money outside biglaw, but its FAR from a guarantee and you're def not starting at the point as a new JD. And thats if you get a job that isn't doc review or what you would've done with your BA if you never went to law school

>asu
>right choice
Dude they take anyone worst college to be at by far

How do you make 700k?

...

Jesus, that sounds awful.

do you feel like you've been overlooked, that you have the talent/intelligence to make it at top schools and therefore belong there?

or is it a more general desire to be validated by ones peers viz. preordained authorities?

what is the basis of your hate, and how does it differ from the basis of your envy?

i feel you, OP. i went to stanford--just try enjoy the weather, take some trips down to capitola/santa cruz, head into haight ashbury. i fucking biked everywhere when i was there--plus, top floor of green--i wanna say the bender reading room?--is a great place to study during the day

>theater tech
>80k

nice larp

the second one

i feel like i will never get (or merit!) any respect and that in being rejected i have been condemned to mediocrity

only learning from the greats qualifies you to do valuable work. the important problems of our day are handed to The Best

So do you think Abraham Lincoln was just some stupid country bumpkin?

k man I'll just sit here enjoying my good-paying job straight out of college while you enjoy slaving in a lab to make shampoo

yes user, im sure ur making 80k per yr straight out of college in a job that pays 40k - 70k for people with 10 years of experience. very believable.

do you go to ucsd

abe lincoln was not an aspiring engineer / mathematican / physicist in the year 2017

>do you feel like you've been overlooked, that you have the talent/intelligence to make it at top schools and therefore belong there?
Not really. It's not like I was rejected from any of these schools. I was always a poor student.
>or is it a more general desire to be validated by ones peers viz. preordained authorities?
I think I'm just looking for validation for myself. I so desperately want to be bettr than what I am.

STEM is terrible, and they do it to make money.
'muh eternal' is just as bad, by the way. Fucking subhuman platonists.

Harvard and all American and 'elite' schools are absolute trash.

A lot of them will be that way yes, but you also would probably find more people at those schools with an actual appreciation of the western canon than in just the general population.

There are a lot of other valid points in this thread on this topic. Making money has never necessarily been about "having good taste." It's mostly about capitalizing on what's profitable at any given time.

Spend enough time around Ivy League people and you'll realize they're not the super-geniuses they're made out to be. Some of them are downright stupid actually (not most of them though, but a handful). I go to a top public university (grad student) but date an Ivy League alum, hang out with all her Ivy league friends, spent lots of time around Ivy Leaguers while doing abroad study at Cambridge, and lot of my current professors are Ivy League Ph.Ds. There's an upper boundary to how smart a person can be. It's not like they're superhumans or anything, and a lot of them are woefully ignorant of English literature (but of course it's not always really relevant to their field, so who cares).

I had really wanted to go to law school but it was these kinds of stories that made me decide not to. Also didn't want to go further into debt.

>he thinks being able to quote some pseud poetry is what makes one smart
you sound stupid and you spend a lot of time rationalizing why these smart people are actually not smart to satisfy your own fragile ego

>t. assblasted european
your schools are simply inferior. when i check out a book from the library at my ivy league institution, it's annotated; at your school, it's unread.

going to an ivy, at worst, means you are not retarded. if you have not gone to an ivy (or equivalent), there can be no such guarantee. it's a fact that the ivies, despite a few matriculates who come from money or 'diverse' backgrounds, have an overall higher caliber of student, and, on the top end, skim the cream.

Did I say anything about poetry? The point I was getting at is that if Ivy League undergrads and graduates students are that much smarter than people from other schools—at least for some of them—it might only be marginally so. They might just be more disciplined, or (more likely, as the evidence shows that the feature most correlated with high SAT score is familial wealth) they might just come from richer and more stable families.

you're one of those /smartbutlazy/ faggots arent you

>the only standardized test is the SAT
anyways, have you ever considered that, maybe, retarded and low-achieving individuals tend to have retarded and low-achieving children?

>Spend enough time around Ivy League people and you'll realize they're not the super-geniuses they're made out to be. Some of them are downright stupid actually (not most of them though, but a handful). I go to a top public university (grad student) but date an Ivy League alum, hang out with all her Ivy league friends, spent lots of time around Ivy Leaguers while doing abroad study at Cambridge, and lot of my current professors are Ivy League Ph.Ds. There's an upper boundary to how smart a person can be. It's not like they're superhumans or anything, and a lot of them are woefully ignorant of English literature (but of course it's not always really relevant to their field, so who cares).
I've known a handful of them, and while only one was overwhelming brilliant, they were all very bright. There;s just a certain standard of academic achievement that I want more than anything else in my life, nd these people have all managed to attain it.
It's not fair to compare the world we live in with that of the prewar era.

No. I dislike lazy people, but just because you're busy doesn't mean that you're productive—it just increases your chances of being productive.

It's a real possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that if two students with identical potentialities come from different backgrounds the one with more familial resources would probably end up faring better, though.

a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Should have gone to Princeton, my man.

I'm not European.
You're delusional. Take yourself out.

kys

I bet you think Ben Shapiro is very bright too.

I'm not really familiar with him. Even bright people can have dumb political stances.

>I think it's cool that we live in a society where there are people with degrees from places like Harvard or Middlebury or Dartmouth who think that mathematics has no practical application to reality. But they have literature or philosophy degrees and make 200k pseudo-intellectual posts on Veeky Forums a year. These are people who go through their entire lives being told how smart they are and how proud everybody is of them and they get all their news and opinions from Stiner or Ayn Rand. These are people who will say things like "Oh, I don't like using data to support my theses," or, "A trigenometry class? No thanks."

Ftfy. Two can play this game.

you seem pretty butthurt
almost everyone I've ever seen who loves Ayn Rand has been an engineering major

> Engineering major
> Reading

I'm a math and CS major and I think that what he was saying is totally asinine. I know plenty of STEM majors who deeply appreciate philosophy, and I know many humanities majors who can appreciate science. He was being a twat.

Constitutional issues in public education?

There's no simple explanation. You cant disregard the fact that so many ivy students went to prep and "public" schools that ecist solely to feed ivies. Meanwhile there are plenty of kids who are just as smart and regular schools who are never taught the game

Are you asian or something?

retarded and low-achieving people usually can't afford to send their retarded and low-achieving children to feeder schools, and I'm not sure how that contravenes my original point. They're feeder schools for a reason, that reason being that the kids there tend to be smart. If you filled one up with nogs from Chiraq, the school would quickly lose its reputation for turning out polished applicants, and matriculation to top programs would plummet. It's more than a refinement process, it's a symbiotic relationship.

jfc, how out of touch are you?

idk, i went to public school. go figure, the kids in my ap classes were overwhelmingly not poor. you sound like a bitter nobody.

Go find the Narcomey twins and tell them I said hi.