On WIHI

In some ways, the graduation speech I wish I could give

This is a work of (weird) opinion, and it’s not intended to allege any sort of mistreatment, illegality, or wrongdoing by WIHI or individuals associated with it. Let me know of any inaccurate factual statements and I’ll remove them. No defamation!

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1.

My school is a very weird place.

To be clear, I really hate it. I’m about to write a bunch of seemingly nice things about it, but I want you to be sure to note that I’m writing the nice things about my classmates and not about Washtenaw International High School, which I consider about as pleasant a place to be as Guantanamo Bay, only with much less capable administration.¹

The student body is a pretty even mix of run-of-the-mill public high school kids, and some of the most talented and cleverest young people in southeast Michigan. It’s best described as a public magnet school (thanks to the IB curriculum), but entrance is determined by lottery instead of admissions test or middle school grades or anything like that.²

Anyway, the lines between the two factions are pretty clear. There’s some jock overlap—nerd athletes hang out with normie athletes—but most social circles are shockingly segregated.³

I tend to run much more with the nerdy crowd (cue gasps), and I’m not an athlete, so don’t see much crossover. My experience of WIHI’s student body, then, is of a bunch of people who are really strangely good at a ton of different things.⁴

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2.

The most obvious of these things is school itself. There’s rampant grade inflation, sure.⁵ But WIHI’s nerds tend to just be really good at school. Our 75th 87th percentile SAT score is above 1400. For reference, the 75th 87th percentile SAT score nationally is somewhere between 1250 and 1300. A 1400 is in the top ~5% of scores nationally. WIHI nerds are very smart!

Similarly, we’re very good at getting into college—around half of each graduating class earns admission to the University of Michigan. And we even send three or four kids to an Ivy each year—it’d be more if not for the low cost and convenience of U of M. Lots of fully-capable middle and upper-middle class kids don’t apply or choose not to go to an elite private school to save some cash or stay close to home.

These days, to be good at getting into college you have to be good at picking up awards and doing extracurriculars and so on. A fairly striking example is the Presidential Scholars Program. This is a Department of Education⁶ initiative which starts with the nomination of about 4,000 high school seniors across the country.

This year, four of them go to WIHI—0.1%. Our graduating class size is 120—in other words, we account for about 0.003% of US high school seniors. WIHI’s overrepresented in the PSP by a factor of more than 30.

If we were a representative sample of the US poulation, then we should expect to have one student nominated every ten years. But we have four this year, had one last year, one the year before that, and one more two years before that. In fact, over the last ten years, WIHI’s averaged 1.2 nominations annually. 12 times the expected rate.⁷

This year, one of the WIHI nominees was handpicked by the Michigan Department of Education. Her political and extracurricular involvement was so impressive that she was one of just twenty Michigan nominations not based on standardized test score alone.

WIHI students have done countless internships in DC and Lansing. Founded countless non-profits (some of them even real!) and won countless awards in Model UN, DECA (some entrepreneurship thing, I dunno), HOSA (some medical thing, I dunno), and a bunch more activities.⁸

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3.

WIHI nerds are also very good at some very weird things. We’ve got a world-class Tetris player, for instance. I’ve also written briefly before about my speedcubing friend. He solves a 3x3 in around eight seconds, sometimes faster. He’s top 2000 in the world.

I have a Very Successful Blog with Dozens of Readers, but also do pretty well at real philosophy writing. And another friend of mine has presented repeatedly at genetic microbiology conferences. He also was a very capable nurse to me when I threw up a lot last summer. And does Mixed Martial Arts at a high level.

Also, there’s one WIHI nerd who’s very good at Minesweeper. She’s not anything close to world-class, but fast enough that it’s kinda mesmerizing to watch, and I can’t quite keep up with her logic.

And that’s fucking insane! Literally all of freshman year, all I did was play Minesweeper. And I really thought I’d gotten pretty good at it, but apparently not, because my best time is something like two and a half times worse than hers. So now I’m practicing Minesweeper a lot.

We also had an 1800-elo chess player the year above me. Not a master, but really nothing to sneeze at. She beat me repeatedly and handily, and probably is singularly responsible for me giving up on my pandemic dreams of getting really good at chess.

And that’s the thing about WIHI’s incredibleness: there’s just always someone better than you at whatever you’re trying to do.

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4.

When I was younger, I was really good at two things: tennis and math.

I would take these online accelerated math classes, I’d walk into the testing center about twice a year to take my exam, and there would always be one or two kids who got a slightly higher score than me. And I would think to myself “well, at least I’m better than them at tennis!”

Then I would go to my evening tennis class, and I would always be among the best, but there were two or three kids who could reliably beat me. And after I got whupped, I’d think to myself “well, I’m probably better than them at math!”

And at some point, a kid I recognized from the testing center joined my tennis class. And he kicked my ass. And I didn’t know what to think.

I think it was around that time that I started getting into coding and into politics. Trying to find something I could be better at than him.

Diversifying my interests worked! At WIHI, there’s probably no one who’s better at doing math and philosophizing and making websites and blogging and playing chess and playing Minesweeper than I am.

But I don’t have a ton of breathing room. And I’m nowhere near healthy enough to take the ego hit if someone I know masters a large enough selection of those skills.

So, I’m going to get better at Minesweeper. I will bring my fucking time down.

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5.

There’s a version of this post that ends with some uplifting message about how “being around smart people makes me want to be smarter” and whatever. But fuck that, I got Minesweeper to practice.

1. Most of the teachers I also like, honestly. But the architecture and layout of the place, its admin, and the very idea of “school” all sorta make me want to throw up.

2. There’s also a middle school attached, called WIMA (“Middle Academy”). WIMA’s not as weird as WIHI—it’s just a normal underfunded public middle school. Kids from Ypsilanti go there because there’s no other school for them to go to. And then admin seemingly focuses most of their time and resources on WIHI since it has such great metrics, they overfill the middle school classes, presumably to get more state dollars, and the WIMA kids suffer for it.

3. I don’t mean to imply anything race-wise, but that’s possibly a component too, as is class. WIHI’s nerds tend to be a highly-self-selected bunch from richer, whiter, and more Asian places like Ann Arbor, while a lot of its normies are from the poorer and blacker Ypsilanti. These lines are much fuzzier than the nerd-normie divide itself, but worth noting.

Clarifying my point, since the above is framed pretty harshly and poorly: racial and economic prejudice may also contribute to the extreme social stratification at WIHI.

4. Nothing to add, just wanted to keep the footnote streak going.

5. Check out the school profile here. Headline is the GPA quartiles: 25% of students get a 3.994 or better (unweighted!), and even the 25th percentile GPA is 3.45—a B+ to A-!

6. Yeah, we’ll see if it actually ends up happening…

7. So not only has WIHI been an exceptional place for a while, but my senior class is extra exceptional, even by WIHI standards…

8. Including Ethics Bowl! We won States five years ago, and very much not this year.