I
was always a good in h.s. with very little effort,
with a B to B+ GPA. I was shocked
that I got into BMC. When I got there
I was dumbfounded at the amount of work it took
just to stay afloat—it was a total paradigm shift in
how to work and what to study. I worked
SO hard and learned how to be uncompromising with myself—I
had high standards already but had to push them to
be sky-high. Ultimately it was very good for me
because it trained me to have high standards for everything
related to what I did, and that led to great
career success and a reputation for uncompromising excellence. It
also led to me overthinking things a lot. It
wasn't until I was out for about 10 years that
I realized I could relax the standards, not work so
hard and still be WAY better than everyone around me.
It took me too long to learn that and I
wasted a lot of time acting as if I was
still being graded. Everyone's BMC experience is different, depending on
their major, when they went there and what kind of
background they have. I think that as students approach
their senior year at BMC they should start to break
away from the insular environment, do more in the community
or in Philadelphia and in general coast back down to
earth. I loved BMC but students should realize that
it is not the real world. It is much,
much harder than the real world and people at BMC
are much more tolerant of quirkiness than they are in
the real world. At BMC you are both coddled and
slave-driven at the same time—coddled socially and slave-driven academically.
The sooner students learn that and arrange their lives to
adjust the balance to something more healthy, the better off
they will be in the long run.
High school students
should understand what they are getting themselves into. BMC
is the ideal place to express yourself, especially if you
felt out of the mainstream in high school, because nobody
will judge you. Be as brilliant as you want to
be. They will welcome eccentricity—wear those capes, play the
strange music (the more obscure, the better), read poetry out
loud at midnight. But know that there are few
men around outside of your profs and unless you work
at it, little opportunity to meet men. There were
plenty of men in the heyday of bi-college cooperation with
Haverford, back in my day (the early '80s were the
height). Since Haverford went co-ed BMC is academically and
socially isolated. Know this, love this, and you will
do just fine there.
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