David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Little Fish in the Big Pond of the Salon or a Big Fish in a Little Pond of their own choosing?
    In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse. The story of the Impressionists suggests a second, parallel problem. We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest. There are many examples of this, but few more telling than the way we think about where to attend university.

2.
    Caroline Sacks 1 grew up on the farthest fringes of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. She went to public schools through high school. Her mother is an accountant and her father works for a technology company. As a child she sang in the church choir and loved to write and draw. But what really excited her was science.
    “I did a lot of crawling around in the grass with a magnifying glass and a sketchbook, following bugs and drawing them,” Sacks says. She is a thoughtful and articulate young woman, with a refreshing honesty and directness. “I was really, really into bugs. And sharks. So for a while I thought I was going to be a veterinarian or an ichthyologist. Eugenie Clark was my hero. She was the first woman diver. She grew up in New York City in a family of immigrants and ended up rising to the top of her field, despite having a lot of ‘Oh, you’re a woman, you can’t go under the ocean’ setbacks. I just thought she was great. My dad met her and was able to give me a signed photo and I was really excited. Science was always a really big part of what I did.”
    Sacks sailed through high school at the top of her class. She took a political science course at a nearby college while she was still in high school, as well as a multivariant calculus course at the local community college. She got As in both, as well as an A in every class she took in high school. She got perfect scores on every one of her Advanced Placement pre-college courses.
    The summer after her junior year in high school, her father took her on a whirlwind tour of American universities. “I think we looked at five schools in three days,” she says. “It was Wesleyan, Brown, Providence College, Boston College, and Yale. Wesleyan was fun but very small. Yale was cool, but I definitely didn’t fit the vibe.” But Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, won her heart. It is small and exclusive, situated in the middle of a nineteenth-century neighborhood of redbrick Georgian and Colonial buildings on the top of a gently sloping hill. It might be the most beautiful college campus in the United States. She applied to Brown, with the University of Maryland as her backup. A few months later, she got a letter in the mail. She was in.
    “I expected that everyone at Brown would be really rich and worldly and knowledgeable,” she says. “Then I got there, and everybody seemed to be just like me—intellectually curious and kind of nervous and excited and not sure whether they’d be able to make friends. It was very reassuring.” The hardest part was choosing which courses to take, because she loved the sound of everything. She ended up in Introductory Chemistry, Spanish, a class called the Evolution of Language, and Botanical Roots of Modern Medicine, which she describes as “sort of half botany class, half looking at uses of indigenous plants as medicine and what kind of chemical theories they are based on.” She was in heaven.

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    Did Caroline Sacks make the right choice? Most of us would say that she did. When she went on that whirlwind tour with her father, she ranked the colleges she saw, from best to worst. Brown University was number one. The University of Maryland was her backup because it was not in any way as good a school as Brown. Brown is a member of the Ivy League. It has more resources, more academically able students, more prestige, and more accomplished faculty than the University of Maryland. In the rankings of American colleges published every year by the magazine U.S. News & World Report, Brown routinely places