Nerd-dom

First of all, excuse part of this post. I literally copy-pasta'd it from my Tumblr, only because I want to share it here as well. I made some minor edits to the beginning. I also want to say, I'm not waiting for Willy or Arty to make an introduction, because I have this to post for the evening, and I thought I'd share it with you all. Too bad I didn't take the time to read the entire essay; perhaps I would have had a long critique to the essay. Doesn't matter - I really don't have that kind of time. Anyway:

I am a nerd and proud, and I found it both appropriate and inappropriate to find in my Facebook Notifications that I was tagged in a note "Why Nerds Are Unpopular." My friend posted on Facebook this copy of an essay about why nerds end up not being popular. I’m not going to copy the entire thing, but you can read it here. I didn’t even read all of it. After the first few paragraph I just started to briefly skim.

There was something about it though that somewhat summed up my philosophy on popularity and nerdiness: “So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.”

I think this is very true. It says somewhere later in the part that I did read that one can only really be good at something if one works at it. Kids who want to be popular work on being popular; kids who wants to do well academically, study. However, you never have to be on one side of the spectrum - jack of all trades, master of none, as the saying goes. I, personally, feel I am one of those kids.

My school never really fostered very exclusive cliques because of the size and the setting. I went to a private Catholic school, and we were only about 500 in the entire school. Yes, there were cliques, but it was never so exclusive or extreme. I was not UNpopular in any sense; I got along well with most people, and I didn’t have any real enemies. I studied and did my extra-curriculars and clubs, so I was social enough with upstanding academia. My group of friends was a good blend of the same people.

There was also another point somewhere in the section I did read of the article that sometimes the nerds choose not to be popular because they don’t want to be part of what “popularity” stands for. I do not want to sound elitist, but my friends and I knew some of the things that the “popular” kids were doing, and those things never interested us. Of course, we didn’t look down on the popular kids; actually, I was friends with a lot of them. It was the stupid actions and things that some people did that I tend to frown upon. Now, this is my opinion, and you can think otherwise.

I commented the above on the note my friend wrote, and he can see where I come from, coming from a very small school. He also did note, however, wondering about the community at Stevens. There are various demographics (I’m trying to avoid “cliques” because I believe as college students we should be past that stage, but it is still that in a base essence) apparent at Stevens, but many are those nerds. He was intrigued that many of us get along so well, if we were to base our backgrounds on a lose skin around that “unpopular” nerd skeleton. It is probably because of our sense of priority being learning and friends instead of what the trends were that we get along so well.

It is an interesting topic. I’ll have to read the entire essay sometime. I most likely won’t, however, so I’ll just sign off with this: I enjoy my nerd-dom and my current level of socialness. Although popularity contests exist, one’s competence and character become the deciding factor on whether or not people take pleasure in your company.

Signing off!

~ Caroline