Tech boasts student body of cool nerds

It amazes me that I've made it this far, but here I am three weeks from graduation writing my last ever editorial for the Technique. Actually, my subject is something very familiar to those of us who work for the South's Liveliest-nerds.

As a general rule, we all spend four or more years complaining about the workload at Tech, or the sheer pointlessness of half of our assignments or the lack of student socialization on campus. But deep down inside, we love it.

You don't believe me, do you? I can sense the raised eyebrows and shaking heads of readers as I write this. However, we all chose the path we've taken. We spent our younger years studying more than our peers or making those good grades through natural intelligence. In any case, we could have chosen not to capitalize on our intelligence, but we didn't.

And in American society, that just makes us nerds. It also makes Tech the perfect place for us.

I started thinking about this recently when I read an article online entitled "Why Nerds are Unpopular" (www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html). It was written in 2003 by Paul Graham, a programmer and essayist who claims to have experienced both ends of the social spectrum.

He explores the seemingly inescapable correlation between unpopularity and intelligence in American schools. Why do the more intelligent young students always seem to band together as outcasts from the popular crowd? Graham argues that it's because they're not willing to sacrifice their intelligence for popularity.

It's not that he's calling all popular kids dumb. Popularity is just something that takes a lot of work, and nerds can't put in enough effort to be popular when they're more driven to get all As. The more you work at something, the better you get; that's why popular kids become more popular and smart kids learn more.

So these poor little nerds grow into adulthood as the unpopular demographic because the popular ones need someone to pick on. After all, nothing builds group unity like ostracizing the "others" and drawing a clear line between "us" and "them."

However, once all those kids escape the fish bowl of middle or high school and get into the real world, nerds suddenly become less unpopular, something Graham attributes to the sheer size of the real world. He goes on to describe the effect this trend has on society, but what I want to focus on is the move away from the impenetrable dividing lines between the Homecoming queen and the Math Club president.

It seems to me that Tech has a lot of students who fit Graham's theories to a T (if you'll excuse the pun). Many Tech students were probably the "nerds," "losers" or "freaks" in their secondary school days, but upon entering college they quickly left those labels behind. How does that happen so quickly?

While it may seem like its own little bubble sometimes, Tech really is a step toward the real world-and away from the sheltered days when parents supervised their children fairly closely. Tech draws the nerdy crowd because, as Graham indicates, it's the smart kids who get that "nerd" label.

But here, in a community full of "nerds," we have opportunities that we never would have had five or 10 years ago. For instance, it's the students who are involved in many activities and maintain a good GPA who are most likely to be nominated for Mr. and Mrs. Georgia Tech.

And not every nerd who comes to Tech stays a nerd for very long, at least in the stereotypical sense of the word. Sure, a lot of us have some unusual interests compared to other students our age, but those interests (from computer programming to watching sci-fi incessantly to building robots and any other odd hobbies that I'm not familiar with) are more "normal" here.

That's one of the reasons-okay, maybe the only one-that I think Tech is so great. It is a haven for other people our age to whom we can relate. Some-like our backwards rivals in Athens-may call us nerds, but we lose that label at Tech, for the most part.

Eventually, our adolescent struggles with nerdiness and our intellectual struggles through Tech will pay off in the end. Once graduation finally rolls around and we escape to the real world, all that studiousness should mean better careers, preferably ones in which those once-popular kids who called us nerds are working for us. Oh yeah, and we'll be making more money too.

Besides, do you think Bill Gates started middle school as the most popular kid in the class? I don't think so. We've almost reached adulthood now-and it's okay to be a nerd.