the path that splits from one to many

graduation is coming within less than a year, so that leaves me less than six month to start and finish gradschool application. to avoid the panic that happened four years ago in highschool (honestly i still have no idea how i got accepted into UCSD), i thought i'd start looking at my options and do the usual thing.

the usual thing involves picking a few dream schools, a few more target schools, and a lot of backup schools.

backup schools are the ones that people never heard of, and therefore less competition for me to get accepted. did i mention i hate competition? the only thing that comes out of a competition is the inclination, if that's even the appropriate term since it comes under pressure and not naturallly, to do more and more work, and that's something that i've always been trying to avoid.

creed #2: i shall never move quickly, except to avoid more work or find excuses.

only then i realized that the backup schools that i've picked are so not well known they don't even offer a PhD program in physics. shit.

then i looked at the remaining schools on the list, and thought to myself: what have i done with my life?

the list goes like the following:
UCSD
UCSB
STANFORD
WASHINGTON
PRINCETON
CALTECH
BERKELEY
HARVARD
MINNESOTA

with the exception of minnesota, these are the schools that i've never even thought of ATTEMPTING to get in in the first place. UCSD and UCSB are reasonable targets, but the probability of getting in the rest is infinitesimally small. not zero, but still infinitesimally small.

tony gherghetta told me: "when you finished your undergraduate studies and go into a grad school, you are no longer competing based on intelligence, because the process of weeding out the high-intelligence people from the medium-intelligence people has already been done. in the grad school, your peers have about the same level of intelligence as yours, and the only thing that can distinguish one from the other is the level of determination, motivation, and the hardwork."

well, shit. isn't that comforting?

oh, and if you're wondering why the hell MIT and UCLA aren't on the list, don't even ask. hell would freeze over before i would even think about going to any of them. personal reasons, really. or rather, personal hatred. if i don't get accepted to any grad school i want to go to, and UCLA or MIT begged, crawled, and offered me a shitload of money to go to them, i would still rather go get a master from a shitty unknown school, and try again for the PhD after i get my master's.

why the hatred? why not?