| rev:text
| - Me: "I want to make something of myself. Be historically significant. Contribute to the world."
U of T Dean: "Well, B., you have to understand that the gene pool is not distributed so that we can all be world-class pianists or tennis players or what-have-you."
And that's all I learnt after two years at U of T: I was stupid, unloveable and useless. It was so bad that I became suicidal. I now have mood and anxiety disorders caused by my experience at the University. Since 2005, I have needed psychiatrists, psychologists and medication to survive. A decade later, I still cannot walk through the campus without risking a breakdown.
The University's culture borders on institutional psychopathy. Unless you can win a Nobel Prize or donate 7-figures to them, you will find that you are as good as dead to U of T. I knew a few suicide stories from U of T. I remember telling one that hit the papers to high-ranking U of T officials who had no idea and, when I told them my story, they simply replied, "good luck." That's it. That's all the empathy they're capable of, it seems.
Many people do well at U of T and love it. From my experience, you can survive there if you meet at least 3 of the following 4 criteria:
1) You are happy graduating with a B or C average. If you do all of the assigned work and readings, you might get an A-. The fabled bell curves only prevent most of the class from failing. Professors use a lot of cruel tricks to bring marks down and force 70 averages. In one accounting final, for example, the professor only gave us parts of account names (eg, "__ inventory") and only a few digits of their balances (eg, "$3_4,2__"), expecting us somehow to guess the rest before we could answer the question ("do a materials variance analysis"). This effectively turned the final into a game of hangman;
2) Academic counsellors at U of T advised me to work 3 hours for every hour in class. This means you must be able to study 60 hours a week, every week. I knew students who spent New Year's Eve doing problem sets;
3) Students and faculty can be very callous. The general attitude is "if you have to ask, you aren't smart enough to understand." I went to one prof a week and a half before a midterm explaining that, although I understood the textbook, I struggled with the end of chapter exercises. Appreciating that he was a busy man, I offered to pay for a tutor rather than have him explain to me. His response: "drop the course," because I was beyond rescue (it turned out that, doing nothing else but studying for that midterm got me an A-);
4) You will benefit if you have a prodigous intellectual or academic talent. This is pretty much necessary if you want marks consistently above 85.
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