Fact: While sitting for a particularly challenging exam in physics, you comfort yourself with the thought that there is no way anyone was going to do well on this.
"The curve is my friend," you repeat. But to your horror the next day, the professor announces that he is pleased that nearly 30 students performed gloriously on the exam - and five managed perfect papers. "How typical," you think, rolling your eyes and sipping your morning cappuccino. Life goes on.
Fiction: While absentmindedly enjoying an innocent conversation with a friend in lab, your academic archenemy, twiddling his thumbs with an evil smile, seizes the opportunity to make a few changes here and there in your lab book. The next day your report is returned, now adorned with a large red "F," as the TA shakes her head reproachfully, whispering, "a 1000 percent error?!" Staring dumbstruck at your paper, you hear a few cackles from behind.
In reality, the test room at Johns Hopkins is not a battlefield. While a handful of students might seem to think so, these students exist at many competitive colleges but by no means shape the collective atmosphere on campus. Beyond being an intellectual challenge, Hopkins is an opportunity for you to evolve in so many respects.
Here you will encounter students with a large diversity of interests and achievements, intellectuals with a passionate curiosity of world around them. You will find students who are self-driven and have a yearning to prove themselves. But you will rarely meet students who willingly sacrifice their well-being and sanity in the name of academic competition - a stigma that Hopkins has often been credited with.
Most students are able to find a pleasant balance between work and play, academics and extracurricular activities. Students at Hopkins are involved in hundreds of different pursuits outside of their studies - ranging from performing arts, athletics, Greek life and political action groups to cultural and religious organizations, student government and volunteer service. If you have your own unique interest and idea for a campus group, you can even organize your own. This is essentially what drives the unique vibrancy of the campus community.
"My freshman year was definitely a blur of having fun, studying and staying up late - but I found the `cutthroat' reputation Hopkins supposedly carries to be completely untrue. Because my friends and I were all in classes together, working together and studying in groups was a major help, and, although everyone is diligent, never did I feel any overzealous competition amongst my classmates," said sophomore Sonia Sarkar, who is double-majoring in public health studies and International Relations.
"Hopkins students are amazingly wellrounded - that's what makes them such a pleasure to meet. Everyone has their own niche, whether it be HERO or writing for a literary magazine, and don't confine themselves at all to a `pre-med/science' constraint," she added.
