We Are Huxley
From and Beyond My Legacy: What Huxley Did For Me
31. That was my ACT composite score. It’s mediocre, no, it’s good for an average person. But I had my heart set on my Dad’s alma mater. Hux will forgive me for mentioning our arch nemesis and/or frenemy here: Harvard. Even with a 36, I wasn’t going to get in there, not without starting my own small business lending money to other small businesses in third world countries so that unemployed fathers could start small sustainable farms to feed their children. Sorry, I forgot to sign up for that course in high school. And I forgot to pay $2000 to learn how to ace the ACT. Can we just cut the Drosophila dung that has become the college admissions process of our generation? It’s all a big phony farce. I guess if I had gone on a mission trip to Guatemala in the seventh grade (I spent my break at the beach instead), maybe I would be telling you about playing capture the flag and swapping friendship bracelets with children from an orphanage. Maybe if I had taken that extra AP then I would have been more inclined to offer my 18 year old, well-thought out anecdotes about saving the world to the admissions people at fill-in-the-blank but who cared it was high school and I like PE. Sue me. Huxley is nothing if it isn’t honest. They know who their students are intimately because they can sort out the phoniness. Life isn’t science fiction and it isn’t your own personal fairy tale either, and Huxley knows it. And get this, I am here working on food economics with respect to genetically engineered plant production. Next summer, I’ll be living in Ghana. Saving the world after all. Email me if you have more questions or if seven sentences didn’t give you a satisfying taste of a typical Hux student. Guess Hux knew I could do it all along despite my less than perfect ACT score.
-Happily a Helix, Ford
-Happily a Helix, Ford
Two Peas in a Genetic Pod
Hello future students of Huxley University! I am a sophomore student at Hux, along with my twin brother Stefen. We are, of course, the same in terms of nature (vs. nurture). More accurately, we have identical nucleotide sequence squiggles squirming around in our nuclei. People sometimes ask how the “controversial” admissions process worked for James and me. Did we only have to send in one DNA sample? How do they differentiate between the two of us? These questions make us smile. We have to remind our friends that DNA alone does not unlock the secrets of a fully functional, walking, talking, breathing, living, sinning person. (And we hope they are sinning, if they are in college.) Hux knows what they are doing. Let’s be real they wrote the textbook, and the other institutions are just waiting to get their hands on the published document. During the admissions process, our DNA tests were coupled with environmental factors tests and the most basic of aptitude tests.
We always knew we wanted to be together for college, but because of a bad decision that I made as a 14 year old boy, I thought my past was going to throw us apart. No school but Huxley could understand that we needed to be together in order to do our best work. Hux could with empirical knowledge overlook what no other school would overlook, and the rest is history.
They trusted us, so much so that they agreed to modify our estimated academic trajectories in order to incorporate our thesis we put together the summer after senior year of high school. We live our life as an experiment; we have decided to take the same courses and continue to collect data. Two times a semester, we complete thorough assessments of our thoughts, emotions, cognitive development, social experiences, political views (which are different, by the way) etc . We are talking right down to the nitty gritty. Our spreadsheets are endless. We are comparing and contrasting and tracking changes. We are developing algorithms for data analysis. We won’t bore you with the whole Avogadro’s number but you get the point. Our research is going to be coupled with several of the groups within the Gene Expression & Environmental Factors Department. We are taking cerebral MRI’s with the thought of future Neuroscience collaboration, maybe after we take Introduction to Neuroscience next semester?
Huxley is the only proper stage for our scientific boldness. We like to think we are bold anyway. Stephen’s wardrobe is pretty bold compared to mine. In fact, he may or may not be wearing a hot pink shirt as we speak. Excuse me while I reach for my sunglasses. There’s another inherent difference between us: I can pull off pink. We can’t imagine being anywhere else. We are on top of the world. We are worker bees in a microcosm of science. You could say we like undergrad at Huxley. -J.B.
We always knew we wanted to be together for college, but because of a bad decision that I made as a 14 year old boy, I thought my past was going to throw us apart. No school but Huxley could understand that we needed to be together in order to do our best work. Hux could with empirical knowledge overlook what no other school would overlook, and the rest is history.
They trusted us, so much so that they agreed to modify our estimated academic trajectories in order to incorporate our thesis we put together the summer after senior year of high school. We live our life as an experiment; we have decided to take the same courses and continue to collect data. Two times a semester, we complete thorough assessments of our thoughts, emotions, cognitive development, social experiences, political views (which are different, by the way) etc . We are talking right down to the nitty gritty. Our spreadsheets are endless. We are comparing and contrasting and tracking changes. We are developing algorithms for data analysis. We won’t bore you with the whole Avogadro’s number but you get the point. Our research is going to be coupled with several of the groups within the Gene Expression & Environmental Factors Department. We are taking cerebral MRI’s with the thought of future Neuroscience collaboration, maybe after we take Introduction to Neuroscience next semester?
Huxley is the only proper stage for our scientific boldness. We like to think we are bold anyway. Stephen’s wardrobe is pretty bold compared to mine. In fact, he may or may not be wearing a hot pink shirt as we speak. Excuse me while I reach for my sunglasses. There’s another inherent difference between us: I can pull off pink. We can’t imagine being anywhere else. We are on top of the world. We are worker bees in a microcosm of science. You could say we like undergrad at Huxley. -J.B.