Johns Hopkins University

Date: Oct 20 2009
Major: Math (This Major's Salary over time)
I was told in the early 1980s that to survive at JHU as something other than premed/prelaw, you would have to become a de facto graduate student. I think that was for the most part true. At that time, you needed to be exceptionally well-motivated to get the most out of the school. I put myself through with a combination of scholarships and work-study, was a course away from a double masters in mathematics and engineering after four years of study and, after doing contract work for two years in various fields, returned to get an Ivy League PHD on full fellowship at another institution. So it was a success by that measure. I actually did the bulk of my dissertation research as a research assistant at JHU prior to even attending the PhD program. I was presenting as a first year grad student at the same conferences my professors were. The PhD coursework was not significantly more challenging than what I took at JHU, so grad school was a more pleasant experience. The freedom to design your own program at JHU allowed a student to make themselves unique and thus more desirable on the grad school/job market (or gave the student enough rope to hang themselves, depending upon the experience).

That was the good news about JHU. The bad news was that being a de facto grad student meant you became cynical well before your time, and JHU's policies for faculty and research (JHU was primarily a research institute with a small all-too-necessary educational component) made it easy to become very cynical indeed. The social situation was abysmal, but that was during the transition period as women were just starting to trickle into places like JHU instead of being segregated into Goucher, and between that and the sex/drug/rock hangover from the 60s/70s it was a bit of a mess everywhere. But 60% premed/prelaw student body didn't help the situation…folks were so focused on their career (careerists/yuppies before there was even a term for it) that there wasn't the critical mass for a naturally evolving social scene to arise that motivated students needed for any sort of healthy emotional development.