Oh, wow. Scheherazade has a great post on the advantages of being at an Ivy League school (in a nutshell: you meet people who will go on to do awesome things, and you realize those people are normal people, just like you, and if they can do great things, so can you), on which I place only one caveat. People from everywhere go on to do great things, and I think her post really can apply to anyone who goes to college and gets to know people. I actually realized it more here at law school than in undergrad -- and I'm sure it'll become even clearer after a few more years out when my classmates start doing cool stuff. But I got here, and encountered some impressive people -- I'm actually probably talking more about my professors than my fellow students at this point, although of course lots of my classmates have already done cool stuff and many more will go on to do all sorts of astonishing things -- and realized they all started where I am now, and that really there are all sorts of possibilities in the world, and doors are there to be opened, not closed. (Of course, sometimes I find myself thinking about people my age who've already accomplished more than I have, and I start to think that people are getting ahead of me, and doors are closing, and I'm losing some sort of race I didn't realize I was in, and I'm running out of time to really do something important... and then I take a deep breath and decide I need a nice long nap.)