Can you tell me a little bit 'bout educational system in America?What I need to do to become a good student?
Not all US high schools are as bad as that other poster made them out to be. I should know, I went to one. The problem most of the bad schools have isthat they are filled with stupid poor people. Avoid inner city schools. In general what you want to do to be a good student is just make the teachers think you are trying hard. If you do that they will grade you easier and give you the benfit of the doubt in most circumstances. Yes, you shoucl participate in extracurricular activities. They look good on applications and they keep you busy so you dont fall in with a crowd of drug addict losers.
I got accepted into Drexel University, is it a prestigious school?
Drexel University is an institution of higher learning and research located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school was founded in 1891 by Anthony J. Drexel, a noted financier and philanthropist. The current president is Constantine Papadakis. On July 1, 2002, Drexel was officially united with the former MCP Hahnemann University, creating the Drexel University College of Medicine; and in the fall of 2006, Drexel established its College of Law. Rankings Drexel has been ranked among the "Best National Universities-Top Schools" by U.S. News & World Report in its annual "America's Best Colleges". The 2008 rankings placed Drexel 108th, whereas 2006 rankings had the school at 109th. Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania are the only Philadelphia colleges in this category. In the 2006 edition of U.S. News & World Report, Drexel University is ranked the #109 university in the National Universities Doctoral category and the LeBow College of Business is ranked #99. In 2007, Business Week ranked the undergraduate business program among the top 30 private institutions in the country. Drexel frequently ranks among the top 25 schools in the nation for technology use according to The Princeton Review and The Intel Corporation, and was ranked first for wireless access by Yahoo!. The Drexel College of Medicine and College of Nursing & Health Professions also share accolades. The Physician's assistant program is in the nation's top 50, the CRNA program in the top 25. Not all of its rankings are positive, however. The Princeton Review ranked Drexel 1st for "Campus Is Tiny, Unsightly, or Both," 4th for "Professors Make Themselves Scarce," 7th for "Long Lines and Red Tape," 11th for "Least Happy Students," 14th for "Professors Get Low Marks," and 17th for "Teaching Assistants Teach Too Many Upper-Level Courses". The Math Forum@Drexel has been selected as one of the most useful websites by PC Magazine and Scientific American. The university's endowment has grown to $640 million and is the 16th largest private university in the U.S., with an enrollment of over 20,000 students. Drexel is the third largest private engineering college in the nation.
What colleges and universities do the CIA, NSA and FBI like to recruit from? Are there any schools they prefer?
I can’t get into specifics without compromising colleagues and friends.Let’s just say they allow follow predictable patterns, some of which are quite well known historically.All try to chose schools near them: the DC area.They choose schools where some of their own best alumni are from.The CIA tends to have something of a bias toward the Ivy League. I have never visited Yale, but nearly had a business trip near by, and none of my friends ever went there. And I think that’s a bias they have to live down.The Fort has a different set of problems. What I can say has been recently published in a new book titled Code Girls, similar to an awful book on Rocket Girls (the problems with this well meaning book irked my former boss who was one of them). My problem is that I did not finish Code Girls before misplacing it at a friend’s house (up near PDX). But what I can tell you was researched by a historian who researched WW2 women’s colleges and did a presentation on their role in hiring code breakers while the men were sent off to fight. This kind of relationship (gender) is a little spoken part of the IC and used to catch guys behaving badly, too (and not for sex but thinking (which makes me suspicious of imitation games (like Turing))). But the important part is that they are good mathematicians if not necessarily the most ground breaking.The NSA sends recruiters to both mainstream computing conferences as well in particular to recruit women and minorities like the ACM Richard Tapia Conferences. Good swag. You really have to understand what the dynamic is here.Being DOD, for IC agencies try to draw from the Language School for linguists.I think the Bureau tends to draw from a different set of schools with somewhat of a deemphasis on colleges and universities, but I never chatted with them about recruiting. Check their web site. I do know they think they need new talent for new challenges.
How does hereditary, ethnicity, and social class impact intelligence?
Well, intelligence is hereditary, so that answers the first part. Ethnicity comes into play only because certain parts of the world have better education programs than others. Social Class has a positive and a negative impact because the rich can get by being dumb if they inherit their fathers' or mothers' estate and have an honest person take care of it for them. Rich kids go to Ivy league schools, but they are not necessarily the best education. They are more for social status. I am assuming this is a Sociology class you are in. But.....Intelligence can occur to poor or upper class, mother and not daughter, all races, and so on. It is through education that intelligence is put to use, with no education, a person could seem as dumb as a rock. So, this is really a trick question. In reality, we are products of society.
I'm fourteen years old, I have a 4.0 GPA at a college prep school in California, and aspire to go to an Ivy League school. What should I do or change in order to appeal to the Ivy League school and ultimately succeed in that environment?
Since you're 14, I'm going to assume that you've probably just finished your (very successful) freshman year of high school. Congrats! While achieving a 4.0 GPA is certainly impressive, like many of the other posters here, I encourage you to dream bigger. Although I had a 4.0 GPA in high school, I have met very few people at Harvard who did the same. This also holds true of people who scored 2400 on the SAT. Instead, what makes me go "wow!" after meeting my peers here is their stories -- not all of which are centered around academic or even general achievement. In addition to IMO gold medalists and Intel finalists, I've met: a girl whose parents didn't allow her to use language until she was 9; a Jewish activist who campaigned for discussion of Palestinian independence at his local Hillel, an aspiring real estate developer who started and chaired a PAC in his state; and tech entrepreneur who started his own shipping business out of his basement. Don't let brief summaries fool you. What made these people interesting was not their name-dropping or humble-bragging, but hearing how they reflected upon their experiences. What exactly had they learned? How had they changed from it? It's this kind of depth and critical thought that top institutions are looking for. Students should not just critically think but actually be critical thinkers, and this is demonstrated by manifesting outside the classroom. Once you reach this level of understanding, you'll see that first, getting into an Ivy League is not anywhere near as valuable as the experiences these people had, and two, these schools are a starting point, not an end goal. TL;DR It's going to take 5 seconds to fill out "4.0" in the GPA space and maybe 20 more seconds to fill out "captain of extracurriculars XYZ" on the app. Yet it takes weeks and weeks on end to finish them; what are you going to fill your essays with? Seek formative experiences, not clichéd credentials.