I appreciate achievement and aspirations as much as anyone. So why do I hate these ads?
An obvious reason is that these are young, idealistic university students with dreams of great, world-changing accomplishments. That's me from twenty years ago, before I became bitter and pragmatic. But really, I think there's more than just personal reasons for not liking the ads:
- What the world needs isn't more breakthroughs - we've had plenty of those. What we need in a general improvement in our maturity. If anything, we need to get past the idea that brilliant people will invent our way out of current problems.
- This is such typical university thinking: total focus on high achievement, total ignorance of the majority of students. Really it's that good-but-not-great majority who pay most of the university's bills, and carry most of society's work.
- They're such generic dreams: landing on Mars? Curing cancer? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see that happen. But anyone who's been paying attention in recent decades has noticed that innovation no longer works that way. Technological innovations are rarely predictable ahead of time, and medical progress is a series of unheralded advancements, not massive breakthroughs.
- They also seem to be an old-fashioned view of the future, if that makes any sense. Space travel? Vague discussion of curing diseases? What about genetic engineering, nanotechnology, data mining. Trade your Asimov in for some Gibson.
- For that matter, they're not even realistic time frames. Another ad talks about the first human on Mars in 2027. Fourteen years? Who's going to believe that?
- If I could offer advice to current and future university students, it's that you can't be aiming at pre-planned ideals of success. Instead you have to be willing to be flexible in your life goals, and derive self-esteem from a wide variety of accomplishments. If you've already written a life story, you're setting yourself up for disappointment regardless of which university you choose.
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