16 minute read
From Alumni to Teachers: Are Ivies Worth It?
By AFRA MAHMUD, FRANCESCA NEMATI, SASHA SOCOLOW, DEXTER WELLS, and KELLY YIP
For many Stuyvesant students, attending an Ivy League college is vital to their academic careers and future success. These schools are known for their academic quality, selectivity, renowned facilities, and, of course, extensive legacies and reputations. However, is going to such an elite school worth it, and does it truly defne one’s future? The Spectator conducted interviews with various teachers and alumni, who shared their own experiences and refections.
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Evelyn Mao (‘15)
Evelyn Mao (’15) studied biology at SUNY Stony Brook and after graduating in 2019, earned a second bachelor’s degree in nursing from Hunter College in 2021. Overall, Mao had a decent experience at Stony Brook but noticed that her quiet nature held her back from enjoying her frst few years. However, she enjoyed her second-degree program more. “Everyone already has a career or family, so we all have a focus,” Mao noted.
Having recently graduated, Mao plans to become a registered nurse next year. “I was considering all kinds of healthcare professions, but nursing was the best choice for me,” she said. Factors such as the length of the program, affordability, and the ability to direct patient care played important roles in her decision.
Mao’s most rewarding college experience, studying abroad in Madagascar, is part of the reason she decided to follow this path. After researching indigenous butterfies for three months, she realized the reality of research was not for her. “It was too much networking or writing and too little hands-on time,” she says. Her participation in the program led her to her current career avenue: nursing. Not only was studying abroad valuable to her academics, but it also helped Mao connect with those who had similar interests. “I got to meet a bunch of peers [who] have a clear direction in life, mostly conservation-related research,” she said.
Despite fnding her career path, Mao has regrets about her college application process. She applied for her dream schools, many of which were highly ranked, and Stony Brook as a “safety” school. She believes that if she had applied to schools that were more feasible, she would have had more college options, but she now realizes that her life would not necessarily be better if she went to a private school that was ranked higher. Mao described her diffculties with Stony Brook’s curriculum: “If I’d known that I wouldn’t stick with research, I’d have gone to another school […] Their curriculum is not compatible with most other schools […] I had to jump through many hoops for course equivalency.” This incompatibility presented a challenge for Mao when applying to professional schools. Foundational classes are hard and can be detrimental to one’s GPA, but Mao appreciates the rigor in terms of education.
Mao’s largest piece of advice for students applying to colleges is not to become hyper-fxated on the prestige of a school, but to seek out options that are best for your interests. “Really focus on your end goal instead of the ranking of the school. If you want to go to medical school, pick a school that will save some money and be friendly to your GPA. If you want to do research in a certain feld, look for a school that is supportive of undergraduate research and has good programs in that feld,” she said. In Mao’s opinion, if you pursue your interests, you can enjoy college life at any school. However, many of us still don’t know exactly what we want to do, and in this situation, she advises opting for a large school that offers many opportunities in multiple felds. Mao graduated but still changed her career path––as she shows, it’s always okay to take another trajectory: “If it doesn’t work out, there’s always the chance to try again or switch to something else. But it is most important to keep trying.” Overall, she hopes everyone can look outside the box and know that it actually gets better.
Jeffrey Wan (‘15), physics teacher
When applying to college, Jeffrey Wan (’15) was in the auspicious position of having a good sense of what his plans were after college; he wanted to teach high school physics in New York City. At the end of his senior year, Wan was enrolled at Stony Brook University when a revelation struck him: “Why would I pay for room and board at Stony Brook and also be outside of the city when my goal [was] to teach in the city and also not spend a lot of money?” Wan subsequently consulted Assistant Principal of Pupil Personnel Services Casey Pedrick— who worked in the college offce at the time—and decided to take advantage of walk-in admissions at City College. “I went up there the day after with my transcript and my report card, some stuff from Stuy: my report card, my SAT scores, all that, some stuff from the College Board. I brought it up there, and I think they just took me in,” he recalled. At City College, Wan appreciated the benefts of going to school in the city that he had sought out. “Being in city schools gives you ins with the city schools,” he said. He also did feld work within the Department of Education. “[It] is just being in a classroom under some teacher who knows more [...] and kind of absorbing by osmosis the teacher knowledge,” he said. This frsthand experience gave Wan greater insight into planning and delivering lessons and also set him up for an eventual job at Stuyvesant. He not only worked with teachers but also conducted his own student teaching. “You’re dropped into a class, and you serve as a student-teacher. You actually teach more than during feldwork,” Wan explained.
Wan’s college experience was perhaps most remarkably characterized by the lucidity he gained and how well his plan worked out. He was able to get a job teaching physics—at the high school he had graduated from, no less—right out of the gate. His regrets from college are, impressively, few and far between. While he admits that he probably should have shown up to his freshman year calculus class more often (“Some days I chose to sleep,” he said), much seems to have worked out just as he hoped. Additionally, and certainly to the beneft of his students, Wan has a unique familiarity with what it is like to be a student at Stuyvesant. “I’m familiar with the people here. I’m familiar with how things are here […] I said, ‘Sure, let’s head over. Let’s see what I can do.’”
Wan earnestly recommends that students stressed about applying to college give serious consideration to what they want to do academically, or at least to what they like. He explained that students should not let their parents steer every aspect of their college course, illustrating the perils of doing so: “You change majors your second or third year into college. Then you’ve wasted time. You’ve wasted money.”
“Even if you don’t know what you want to do, make sure you are doing something that lines up with what you enjoy. If you don’t like math and physics, maybe don’t be an engineer. If you don’t like math and science and biology, organic chemistry, maybe don’t go into pre-med. You have to be able to stomach what you are doing.”
Eve Wening (‘20)
Eve Wening (’20) is currently a second-year attending Dartmouth College. Though she has not yet declared a major, she plans on pursuing computer science or a modifed major that incorporates elements of the computer science classes she has been taking.
Wening admits to not liking Dartmouth during her frst year, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, but she has felt more at home in recent months. “This fall has been totally different. I like it a lot more. It’s been really fun, very relaxed. I feel like I’ve been growing very quickly,” she said. She has enjoyed taking advantage of Dartmouth’s unique outdoor opportunities, such as mountain biking and backpacking. “Dartmouth fully paid for me to go backpacking in the Guadalupe Mountains, and it was the best week of my life,” she shared. “There are so many trips that you can go on, and they’ll help pay for [them].”
Though she has come to fnd her place at Dartmouth, Wening still has some regrets, especially in the way she chose her school. Though she applied to Dartmouth Early Decision, which made the application process smoother for her, it left her with some misgivings. “I regret EDing because I felt locked in. You change so much from November to May, and I felt like I wanted more opportunities,” she said.
Looking back, Wening wishes that she had given herself more options and refected more on what she was looking for in college. “I ED-ed to an Ivy, and I got in. That’s what a lot of people want the most. That’s the goal. But as soon as I got into Dartmouth, I thought, ‘I am such an idiot,’” she confessed. “This entire time I’ve been at Stuy, I thought I could think for myself and I didn’t fall into the ‘Stuy-thinking’ [patterns]. I hadn’t thought about the culture of this school, who I am, what kind of people I want to be around.”
Though Wening has come to enjoy certain aspects of Dartmouth and found people she feels welcome amongst, it took longer than she had expected. Wening noticed the lack of diversity she has seen at Dartmouth. “Dartmouth is full of really ambitious people, but they’re also really privileged. A lot of them had really secure, solid lives, and I feel like if I had gone to a school where people were a little bit more relaxed about academics and less wanting to do fnance and economics, that might have been a better ft for me,” she said.
As someone who attends an Ivy League school, Wening is not enchanted by the band of elite universities. “The things that we get from Stuyvesant, being with kids who are really ambitious, working really hard, caring about grades, everyone feels really similarly, this is a pretty serious monoculture in that everyone really wants the same thing. That’s not the real world. But that is the Ivy League,” she said.
“If you get through this place and then you fall in love with a school that isn’t in the Ivy League, defnitely go to that school. And if you fall in love with a school that is in the Ivy League and then you don’t get into that school, feel really good about your other options because those are places that are probably going to be more intellectually, culturally diverse than the Ivy League, and that will beneft you greatly.”
From Alumni to Teachers: Are Ivies Worth It?
Dr. Maria Nedwidek-Moore (’98), biology teacher
Biology teacher Dr. Maria Nedwidek-Moore (’98) is known for having an impressive academic trajectory. She majored in biology and completed her undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after graduating from Stuyvesant. She then attended Princeton University for graduate school, earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology, and followed this with a postdoctoral program at Harvard University. Halfway through her postdoctoral, she chose to pursue teaching as a career, eventually landing a job at Stuyvesant.
Dr. Ned believes that going to MIT had both challenges and benefts. It provided an extensive amount of training in biology and genetics, which was important for future endeavors, but was also extremely diffcult. Students were required to immerse themselves in complicated material very early on. “Being in an environment that’s really academically challenging can inform and help focus your energy in ways that are useful later in life,” Dr. Ned said. “But in hindsight, I’m not entirely sure that I needed that much stress that early […] MIT would have been a lot better as a graduate student, but as an undergraduate, it was one of the most diffcult experiences of my life and […] It was extremely humbling, and I felt marginally unintelligent during the frst couple of years there.”
Dr. Ned’s education at MIT certainly helped spur her career, but she believes that it was ultimately unnecessary for being a teacher. “The one thing that I bring to this job that’s unusual—and there [are] a few of us in the department that have this—is [my] extensive advanced training,” Dr. Ned said. “But there are many, many successful teachers in education who don’t have to do all that because what I did was grueling and diffcult.”
She urges students to avoid assumptions about results during their college application process, because failing to acknowledge that we can’t be held responsible for every outcome can be extremely harmful and contributes to an environment in which students are embarrassed by their results. “I want people to understand that the schools are looking for certain things that they need, and if you don’t meet that or if someone else meets that more, then you won’t make it,” Dr. Ned said.
“Whether or not you go to a place like that does not determine whether you are a whole human or whether you are a good person or whether you are successful or whether you are marketable. You are marketable by the sheer virtue of your intellectual capacity and talents that you have. And where you execute those, what university or what environment you execute those in is your choice and it’s your life and you don’t have a whole lot of control of where you get in or how you manifest that.”
Alicia Yu / The Spectator
Matt Polazzo, history teacher
History teacher Matt Polazzo graduated in 1998 from Bowdoin College in Maine, which he said “is spelled strangely, so everyone always thinks it’s ‘Bow-Down’ or ‘Boy-Doin,’” but it’s pronounced “BowDen.” He double-majored in government and philosophy, with a minor in Latin American history.
For Polazzo, who grew up in New York City, attending a small liberal arts college in Maine was a drastic change. The small size of the school meant that there were no graduate students, which allowed for Polazzo to be in classes with as few as 10 students. “[There were] lots of opportunities for independent study with professors. In that particular case, I ended up being inspired by Paul Franco. He’s a scholar of Nietzsche, and he’s a political theory guy, so I ended up taking a bunch of really great classes with him,” Polazzo said. The emphasis on learning and the ability to closely work with great professors was the highlight of Polazzo’s college experience. His biggest regret was not taking more classes taught by great professors in his undergraduate years, pointing out the ones that he did take as defnite improvements to his overall academic experience.
Being a teacher has allowed Polazzo to use all those extensive college classes, however niche they may have been, throughout his professional career, especially when teaching his AP Government classes over many years. “At the end of my undergraduate experience I had become a lot less enamored with philosophy than I was as a freshman and sophomore, but I took enough of those courses that they provided me with a pretty solid grounding in the basics of Anglo-American philosophy, empiricism, that sort of stuff,” he said.
Bowdoin, a college with a running joke about its name and how no one seems to know how to pronounce it, may not be as well-known as other colleges are, but Polazzo fnds that peers and classes defne one’s college experience much more. “Your experience [in college] is going to be shaped a lot more based on who you become friends with and what classes you take […] If you took a gap year and went to the same university, you might have a different experience than going to two different universities because you would meet different people or have different experiences,” he commented.
“The experience you have is going to be so idiosyncratic because it’s going to be based on your peer group that ultimately it really doesn’t matter. As long as you go to a school that’s kind of okay, you’re probably going to be fne in life.”
Jim Cocoros, math teacher
Math teacher Jim Cocoros attended Cornell University’s College of Engineering and graduated in 1994 as an Operations Research Industrial Engineer. He then attended the University of Chicago Law School for graduate studies. After fnding himself disinterested in professional law, he chose to pursue teaching during the city’s math teacher shortage in 1999, using his Applied Mathematics degree from Cornell. He joined Stuyvesant’s teaching faculty in 2004.
At Cornell, Cocoros originally planned to become a chemical engineer because he was profcient in math and science in high school, but he took a detour. “I was a chemical engineer for about two hours, then I was an electrical engineer for about a week, and then I was a nothing, and then I ended up in applied math,” he said. “It was the only thing I could sign up for, and I ended up liking it.”
Furthermore, Cornell provided a wide range of academic opportunities, which was perfect for Cocoros, who was not sure of his future career path at the time. Cocoros wanted a place where he could take advantage of other offers the school had in case engineering, his original plan, did not work out. “And it worked out that engineering did work out […] So from a courses-to-study point of view, it was defnitely the perfect school for me,” Cocoros said.
His experience at the school was defned not only by his education but also by the people he met there—most notably his wife, whom he met when they were assigned to the same dorm. “I will always love Cornell because that’s where I met wifey-poo,” he said. He met some of his lifelong friends at Cornell as well, contributing to the beauty of his undergraduate education.
After graduating, Cocoros went to the University of Chicago Law School, and he believes that attending Cornell helped his chances in the law school admissions process. “About 80 percent of us came from about 15 different schools, so Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst, [and] Stanford,” he said. “At UChicago, most of us came from those schools, and maybe 20 percent came from other schools around the country, so on that front, it looks like it must’ve helped.”
However, he also pointed out that the top students at his law school came from a variety of different undergraduate colleges, including Fordham University, Binghamton University, and Washington University, proving that it is not necessary to attend an Ivy League school to succeed in graduate school. “The top kids, wherever they go, are going to become top kids, so you don’t need Harvard or Yale to excel,” Cocoros said. “What you put into a place is more of what you’re going to get out of a place, more than the name.”
Cocoros believes that while there are clear benefts in going to a large, well-known school, which include worldwide alumni networks and the availability of resources, attending an Ivy League school is not necessary for success. “It’s the same stuff everywhere,” Cocoros said. “And one of the smartest people I know did his undergrad at Brooklyn College, and he’s the person I bounce ideas off of—[math teacher Stan] Kats.”
“Where you go doesn’t matter as much. It’s more who you are and what you fnd interesting and how you pursue your passions. And what you want to do is surround yourself with people who are passionate about what they’re doing. That’s really what you want, and you can fnd that anywhere.”
