First, I wouldn’t say I am so obsessed with them. Second, I think the reason I wanted to attend so badly was because I had the impression that there would be more people like me there. People are friends with people with common interests and similar ways of thinking, usually. So if you like popular things like Gossip Girl or Nicholas Sparks movies or Kanye West, you have a much larger pool to choose from for potential friends. If you happen to relate your life to greek mythology, read primarily dead russian writers and doodle the genealogical charts of most of the monarchies of europe for fun, then you have a pool of potential friends that is much, much smaller. I feel strange all the time and my mind works in a way that I don’t think even my friends really get. And its not that being unusual is bad but it hurts when I sit there and know that no one I care about understands what I’m trying to convey with my analogy to Tiresias.
I don’t believe that all people that go Ivy Leagues are geniuses or that normal people don’t go to them. I also don’t believe that people who go to less prestigious universities are any less brilliant. None of those generalizations are true. However, I’ve often felt that the communities created by institutions like Harvard or Columbia or Brown were ones that might provide me a larger pool of likeminded people. That really was the main appeal to me, aside from the opportunities afforded just because it is a big name, or whatever for lectures offered and well known professors and all those other stereotypical answers.
(Normal is not meant to be a pejorative term here, either. People who like Gossip girl and those things are no less than me. )
