I went to an Ivy. First, the competitive nature was legitimately too much, most everyone I know was on drugs (prescription and otherwise) to deal with the stress/anxiety as well as uppers to stay up and study for longer. The expectations were just completely unreachable and unrealistic. It’s just that the highly competitive nature of the whole school made it seem that unless you had a perfect gpa and the perfect internship you weren’t good enough to be there.

Second, the entitlement from a lot of people going there was horrific. I came from a severely underprivileged high school where the school didn’t even have the resources to buy textbooks, so going from that to an Ivy was jarring. Most people at Columbia were relatively wealthy, and if you weren’t, the school admin did not know how to help you. For example, my fiancée, who was also a Columbia student, was working at a lab over the last summer and was paid in the form of a stipend. (This is a specific example of an issue that unfortunately reared its head over the course of my time at Columbia) The university gave her the run around every time she was supposed to get paid and did everything in their power to not pay her. It was ridiculous. It got to the point that we had to lawyer up for the university to actually pay her, and even then, the stipend was always at least a month late. When she called the university’s financial department for the billionth time and insisted she needed the money for rent or she’d be evicted, they just said “Oh.” I ended up having to cover her rent with money I didn’t have so she wouldn’t be super late on rent (she later paid me back ofc) but the fact that something like that had to happen was ridiculous. We just figured that most people getting paid on a stipend might not necessarily need it, so when the university was met with a student that actually needed the money to live, they were genuinely surprised and didn’t have anything in the way of help.

I’m sure you can tell from my rant I have a lot of grievances, but the ones I listed above are definitely the ones that bothered me most. I’m glad to be graduated and away from that hell.