If I recall correctly, I was the only person from either of my two childhood zip codes—11234 in Mill Basin, 11235 in Sheepshead Bay—to arrive at Harvard that fall. And while my high school, Stuyvesant, was one of the biggest feeders to the Ivies every year, the lived experience of the two places couldn't have been more at odds.
At Stuyvesant, everyone was a hustler—a striver—from the school newspaper editors to the immigrant kids on the math team down to the jocks, perennially ignored and forever losing (Stuy had a profoundly inverted food chain). Almost no one took the days there for granted. In contrast, Harvard kids were, how you say, comfortable. Entitled.
Oh dear. I was apparently, as a "forever losing" high school athlete, at the bottom of the school's food chain. Perhaps the fact that my friends were mainly debaters or similar made me a bit cooler, though. Hard to say... But, on a less self-referential note, I'm guessing that part of why Caramanica perceived his Stuyvesant classmates to be hustlers and strivers was that he was Harvard-bound, with Harvard- (or, god forbid, Yale-) bound friends. Not everyone was like that. The admissions test has not a thing to do with drive, and it shows. Sure, a certain number of kids realize that they're smart, they might as well do something with that, but for many others, being at the school is just about having intelligent but gossipy conversations during class whenever the teacher wasn't looking.
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