My kids are going to college in a couple of years. How do I avoid sending them to places like this?
People expect (and should expect) to be treated better than this by their employers. But by their vendors?
I accept without reservation that this is how this person perceives the interaction with the administrator. But before accepting that this is how Penn's administrators believe they interacted with the person, or how a third party would perceive the interaction, I'd like more information. Being ill enough to be in the hospital -- even for non-psychiatric disease -- can cloud the sensorium. And this is a grave allegation.
I went to a <1000-student college, and when I had some trouble at home I had an hour-long session with the school counselor, who referred me to a nearby professional. I was also on a first-name basis with some of the deans, and they were able to help accommodate me.
tl;dr Go somewhere that you're a person and not a statistic.
And while the faculty was very strong, I sometimes felt jealous of friends from the University of Washington (the nearby Huge Research Institution) and what seemed like a more extensive CS program with more resources. I heard about some of the classes my friends took that our program didn't really have any equivalent for. I would read about some of the problem sets that sounded amazing, like a security class where you're given a VM image and the problem set is to compromise some of the programs inside the VM. Advanced curriculum like that seems difficult to develop without a lot of grad students around. A part of me has always pined for that experience I didn't get to have.
I guess it's hard to have it all.
If that's something that's still interesting to you, check out http://microcorruption.com.
I was very excited to see that for just that reason. :) I think I peaked at #24 on the day it was announced, but I'm sure I've slipped quite a bit since then.
Fundamentals are important; agreed, but the difference between knowing the theory of buffer overflows and having actually exploited one is a huge to me. Now I can say that I have actually done that, thanks to you having packaged everything up so nicely on microcorruption.com, but even that isn't 100% of the experience I would like to have, because the environment is a lot different than what I program on day-to-day.
For example, I know that I shouldn't map any memory wx (and I explained this rule in my article about JITs: http://blog.reverberate.org/2012/12/hello-jit-world-joy-of-s...), but I don't really know why. I don't actually know what an attack would look like where having wx memory around makes an exploit easier.
In either case, having that kind of memory around can only make things easier for an attacker, while by itself not being exactly a vulnerability.
If a person threatens suicide and gets nothing but attention and sympathy, this can trigger a cyclical, escalating pattern of threats and sympathetic responses that can sometimes trap the person into going through with the suicide.
Here's a true story -- many years ago one of my brothers committed suicide. After a few weeks, another brother told me he was compiling a list of people he felt were responsible for the suicide. My first comment was, "Is [the suicide] included on the list?" Of course, he wasn't. My next comment was that the list was dangerous -- the suicide's son would see how attentive and sympathetic everyone was being and he might begin to think suicide was a good idea. My brother didn't really understand what I was saying, the list got created and passed around, and a few years later, the suicide's son committed suicide also.
True story.
I'm sorry about your brother. I've lost close friends to suicide. For what it's worth: I don't blame them, anymore than I would blame someone who died of leukemia for their illness. But a suicide has many victims, and I can't blame you for being angry either.
It's not a "sentiment", it's a case history. My brother created a list of guilty parties, people responsible for a suicide, but didn't include the suicide on the list. My nephew drew the obvious conclusion -- if he killed himself, this would place him outside any notion of responsibility, and he would get massive sympathy as well.
It was unbelievably irresponsible to portray suicide that way, and it had a predictable effect. But the responsibility for suicide rests solely with those who kill themselves.
> I've lost close friends to suicide. For what it's worth: I don't blame them ...
I do. To me, if suicides understand that they'll be held responsible, that they will be judged to have ungratefully thrown away the gift of life, they shouldn't expect sympathy, that might have a beneficial effect on the suicide rate.
But I can be clinical about a case I read in a blog post by a stranger, and I remain interested in your response to that case.
I didn't say it that way, either here or at the time. I only warned my brother that the list might provoke my nephew to kill himself, not that this would make my brother responsible. The actual suicide was, of course, solely the responsibility of the nephew.
Treating a suicidal person harshly because you don't want to encourage suicidal behaviour is a sub optimal strategy if your aim is to reduce the numbers or people attempting suicide and dying from suicide.
Suicide is a significant cause of death so it's probably a good thing to better understand suicidal thinking and behaviour.
Wait, what? That's not what I said. I'm saying it's a mistake to give too much attention and sympathy to suicidal ideations.
It's more constructive to think of a way to get the person to imagine something other than suicide, but in a way that doesn't encourage a repeat performance.
College students everywhere are cruel and callous (which seemed to be one of the big factors in the story). And my school did not have the kind of therapist support described in the article---seems like Penn is probably ahead of 99% of large US schools in that regard.
The general dismissive attitude of higher-ups and admins is that pill overdosing is attention-seeking behavior and that things like kids jumping off high locations is communicable behavior. So that's what suicide prevention folks are up against in terms of enlisting help from those on campus.
I would guess if this is a significant concern to you then you'll want to make sure the college has an active, directed, intentional position for a suicide prevention specialist or group whose sole responsibility is identifying, preventing, and treating potential suicide cases.
Because unfortunately admins and even RAs aren't always going to be the most attentive about this issue on their own.
And the other huge factor to me is what your kids want to study. A big factor in this person getting into this situation in the first place was the crushing sense of loneliness she felt at Penn due to the fact that she couldn't have real social interactions with her friends. There was always some secondary motive (studying most often) that didn't allow her to just relax and be comfortable. I went to a large state school where people certainly valued doing well at school, but where socializing and being there for each other was paramount. There just wasn't such an ingrained culture of '4.0 GPA or death' that seems to come up in these more competitive schools. I had a bunch of friends with minor to severe mental health issues and there was never any doubt about what came first - grades or friends, and this seemed to be the way I saw most people interact.
However I was also lucky to be in a field where my side-projects and initiative counted for more than anything else. If I had been trying to become a doctor, or a lawyer, or some trader on Wall Street, my choice in schools could have been a serious detriment to my career. But to me becoming a well adjusted person and learning to deal with all the world can throw at you were perhaps the most important things I got out of college. Just my 2 cents.
Another person suggested small teaching colleges. Seeing as Butler is a 4000-ish person college, maybe there's something to this. But I'd like to think that even in big colleges, the student-health-oriented administrative staff would be on their game. I dunno.