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The way I see it, many of us spend our college experience trying to get back to where we started: to being distinct and proud—a name, not just a number. The quest often involves building up résumés that demonstrate not just that an...
The desired effect is called status, and it’s an unusual social necessity in that its distribution really is a zero-sum game, at least when everybody’s keeping score by the same rules.
Studying abroad in Delhi for the fall semester of my junior year, I got to see from an outsider’s point of view the status-seeking competition of a top university. My host institution, St. Stephen’s College of Delhi University, is known as one of...
Entering such a setting as an outside observer provides a new perspective on the apparent ridiculousness of some status-determining customs in a closed system. Exam questions at St. Stephen’s, for instance, came from a short list approved 20 years ago by the central University of Delhi...
The upshot, however, is that the fundamental status contest is the same in each place, and the game’s conventions are arbitrary. The options at Harvard for charting a future path, choosing a field of study, or even balancing extra-curricular activities with unstructured time present themselves within...