Monday Rambles

I was shifting quilts around today, moving the very summery ones to the princess bed and bringing out more fall colored and themed. One nice aspect of having my stack is rediscovering quilts. If I haven't seen them for a while it is like rediscovering lost treasures. I get the same feeling when I bring out the Christmas decorations. This year it will be Santa Claus not nutcrackers except for the family nutcrackers.

The New York Times has an opinion column today (9/22) about the problems students from poor backgrounds have going to college at all let alone going to the top schools. Not all of my students are from modest backgrounds but I do worry about them finding their niche. Even coming from middle class families is a stark change from the trust fund babies. Some perform very well, working toward goals and taking advantage of the opportunities and some just plod along. I haven't had any dropouts yet but there have been several who have changed their ideas of reasonable career goals because they are intimidated by their classmates. The ones who irk me the most are the ones who end up choosing finance as a career goal. It certainly isn't that I resent the rich and since my husband has an MBA from Wharton it isn't business as a career. But so much of the market these days seems based on greed alone, on money as a product, that I find making money just to make money distasteful. Of course my husband's career has always been in some form of manufacturing so there is always a product and my own goals are very product oriented or process intense. Perhaps if I thought of developing financial algorithms as a process like solving a puzzle I would find it less reprehensible.

My former student, the Vietnamese refugee, is now a sophomore at Harvard. She has stayed in touch so I know more or less how she is doing. Her original career goal was medicine but her favorite class freshman year was expository writing. She even got a position on the Harvard Crimson. On top of that she had a lifelong dream fulfilled because she spent time in Paris this summer taking a class, paid for by Harvard. Hard work has certainly led to major rewards for her.