Tag: Education

The Library

RORY: The biggest library I’ve ever seen.
LORELAI: Uh oh. Brace yourself.
RORY: What?
LORELAI: This is just one of the libraries.
RORY: One of the libraries?
LORELAI: This building is one component of a thirteen million volume collection housed in more than ninety different libraries. It’s the oldest library in the United States and the largest academic library in the world. Breathe, breathe.

Rory and Lorelai are talking about the Widener Library, full name The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library. Housing 3.5 million volumes, it is the centrepiece of the Harvard College Libraries in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and of the entire Harvard Library system. It honours 1907 Harvard graduate and book collector Harry Widener, who was drowned during the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic.

As Lorelai says, the Harvard Library system is the oldest library in the US, having grown from a bequest of 400 books by John Harvard in 1638. It is not only the largest university library in the world, but the largest private library.

Rory and Lorelai Visit Harvard University

After examining the map, Lorelai surprises Rory by driving her to Harvard University, which is in the city of Cambridge in Massachusetts, part of the Boston metropolitan area. Why Rory didn’t think of it herself is really the big surprise in this scene – surely she knows where Harvard is, and wouldn’t she have been begging her mother to take her there? Apparently not, as they get all the way to the front gates before Rory seems to realise where they are.

Rory wants to get a guide to the university – Harvard offers free one-hour guided group tours of its campus, given by students. Lorelai opts for the self-guided tour: you can navigate yourself around the university with the help of a brochure. Rory already knows the foundation date of Harvard (1636) by heart.

Lorelai reads about important scientific discoveries made at Harvard. The idea for the pacemaker was first originated by John Alexander McWilliam from Aberdeen University in 1889, while the first pacemaker was devised by Mark C. Lidwill from the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and Edgar H. Booth from the University of Sydney in 1926. The brochure is probably talking about Paul Zoll (1911-1999) from Harvard Medical School, one of many who helped develop and refine the pacemaker during the 1940s and ’50s.

The other scientific advances mentioned seem to be referring to Sheldon Glashow (born 1932), a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. In 1964, in colloboration with James Bjorken, he was the first to propose the existence of the charm quark, which helped to solve a number of problems in quantum field theory. In 1973, in colloboration with Howard Georgi, he proposed the first grand unifed theory, a model in which the interactions of electromagnetism, radioactivity, and nuclear forces are merged into one single force.

Lorelai is disturbed to see that out of 18 000 applicants to Harvard in the previous year, only 2000 were accepted. It’s a piece of news she should already know by now, and comes as a stiff reality check. Possibly for the first time, Lorelai gets an inkling that Rory’s dream of going to Harvard may be out of reach. The odds are even worse now – although Harvard still accept around 2000 students per year, nearly 40 000 applied to graduate in the year of 2022.

The scenes of Harvard were filmed at the University of California, Los Angeles campus in Westwood, which doesn’t resemble Harvard University. The front gates that Rory and Lorelai enter were made for the show.

Brown

WOMAN (to Rory): We have a son just a bit older than you.
MAN: He’s not good enough for her.
WOMAN: Oh, Dave. He’s a freshman at Brown.
MAN: He majors in MTV.

Brown University is a private Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1764, and was the first university to accept students regardless of their religion. It became fully co-educational in 1971 when its women’s college, Pembroke, merged with the university.

Brown is well regarded in the liberal arts, and its students were rated the happiest of any at American universities. It has a reputation for being free-spirited and iconoclastic, which fits in with the son taking (what sounds like) self-directed cultural studies.

“You could go to a fancy school if you wanted to”

DEAN: I mean, I’m not going to a fancy school. I don’t have that kind of pressure. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like.
RORY: You could go to a fancy school if you wanted to.
DEAN: I don’t think so.
RORY: Why not? You’re smart.

Rory continues trying to make Dean into something he’s not – he’s an average student who likes playing sport and home mechanics, but she persists in making him read classic literature, and telling him he could get into a private school if he wanted to. On some level, she cannot be satisfied with Dean as a boyfriend if she won’t accept him not being a bookworm and not going to private school.

Dean is too polite to make the obvious comeback: that he doesn’t have rich grandparents who can bankroll his academic dreams. Even Rory, a very good student, couldn’t get into Chilton on a scholarship, so what hope does Dean have of attending a similar school with average grades and no money for school fees?

University of Toronto

LANE: Just don’t let her [Lorelai] change the date [of her wedding].
RORY: Not going to happen. Max is teaching a summer course at the University of Toronto, so if you’re back by the end of the summer, it’ll be fine.

The University of Toronto is a public university in the city of Toronto, Ontario. It is one of the oldest universities in Canada, and is the highest ranked university in the country, named among the best in the world. First founded by royal charter in 1827 and controlled by the Church of England, it changed its name in 1850 after becoming a secular instiution.

The university’s summer programs take place over 3-6 weeks, which fits in with Max being away until early August (so in fact the wedding could be moved up, causing Lane to miss it). Presumably Max is teaching classes in English Literature.

Gilmore Girls was first filmed in Unionville, on the outskirts of Toronto, so this seems like a gesture towards the show’s beginnings (at one time, they considered filming the show in Toronto permanently).

“I need to find a retarded kid”

DEAN: Well, Rory, it’s summer. I mean, summer’s the time to hang out and kick back.
RORY: I can’t hang out or kick back. I need to find a retarded kid and teach him how to play softball. Oh God, listen to me. I am horrible. I am under qualified and horrible.

This is the girl that Lorelai calls “the sweetest kid in the world”. Either Lorelai has rose-coloured glasses when it comes to her only child, or Rory has already been corrupted by her zeal to get into Harvard. Maybe both.

“I thought that was enough”

RORY: I’ve been studying my butt off my whole life and I really thought that that was enough, but then Paris tells me that everyone makes good grades and it’s the extras that put you over the top. And I thought that she was messing with me like she always does, but she’s right. I mean, it makes total sense.
DEAN: What does?
RORY: Good grades aren’t enough. I need to do things. I need to volunteer. I need to work for charity, I need to help the blind, the orphans, I don’t know. I just need to do something.

Rory has been truly naive in thinking that all she needed to do to get into Harvard is to study hard and get good grades. Her teachers should have given her far greater guidance on getting into college; it seems as if they are leaving it all until senior year. Both Rory’s grandparents went to university and could have given more help, but then again, their knowledge of college applications is out of date.

Rory herself has not given the reality of college much thought at all, so going to Harvard is almost purely a fantasy for her, where she strolls around historic buildings and gets to feel smart and important. At some point, surely when she started at a private school, she should have come to realise what would be needed to get into college.

Because of this gap in her knowledge, Rory believes Paris implicitly that she needs thousands of hours of volunteer work to apply to Harvard, and panics. She should have at least checked with her teacher and her mother’s boyfriend, Max Medina before freaking out, or done a bit of research on the subject.

Paris and Volunteering

PARIS: When you apply to an Ivy League school, you need more than good grades and test scores to get you in. Every person who applies to Harvard has a perfect GPA and great test scores. It’s the extras that put you over the top. The clubs, charities, volunteering. You know.
RORY: Oh yeah, I know.

Paris explains to Rory what she should already know – to get into a top university like Harvard, you need something to set you apart from all the other excellent candidates.

Paris has been volunteering since she was about nine, and began by handing out cookies at the local children’s hospital (possibly the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford). By the age of ten she was running a study group for teenagers, probably through Chilton. She has also been a counsellor for a children’s summer camp, organised a literacy program for seniors, worked at a suicide prevention hotline (a truly terrifying thought), and a residential centre for runaways and homeless youth.

She has also adopted dolphins (you just send money to an organisation like The Oceanic Society), taught American Sign Language (perhaps through the American School for the Deaf in Hartford), and trained guide dogs (volunteers raise puppies and give them socialisation and basic training before handing them back so they can be trained as guide dogs; Paris may have done this through Guiding Eyes in Hartford.) We know Paris likes dogs, because her dog Skippy is said to have had a litter of puppies on Lorelai’s mini-dress that she borrowed: weirdly (or perhaps lazily by the writers) her dog has the same name as Rory’s unfortunate hamster.

Paris has done an insane amount of volunteering for a 16-17 year old girl, but in fact choosing this as a good method of getting into Harvard is almost certainly wrong. Colleges don’t seem to be really be that impressed by you doing huge amounts of random volunteer work (probably because anyone with half a brain and no life can rack up hours of unpaid work fairly easily).

What they really want to see is how your extracurricular activities demonstrate the kind of person you are, and the unique skills and interests that you have. For example, Paris wants to work in medical research, so the children’s hospital was a great start, but she didn’t stick with it. It would have been better to continue volunteering with just one or two organisations, and demonstrate that she had gained a leadership role and given real help to the community – maybe even won an award of some kind. Paris’ volunteering CV looks as if she’s desperately taken any role offered (and sending money to dolphins doesn’t look impressive to anyone).

Furthermore, it depends on the university how highly they rank volunteer work when assessing applications. It doesn’t seem to be extremely important for Harvard, which makes Paris’ efforts even more pointless.

Rory’s Summer School Classes

RORY: Oh, Henry, hi. Nice to see you.
HENRY: You too. What classes are you taking?
RORY: Shakespeare, physics, obscure Russian poetry.

Rory got a D for her first English Literature assignment, so it makes sense for her to enrol in two Literature classes to improve her grades further. One is the ubiquitous William Shakespeare, while the other is “obscure Russian poetry”, which doesn’t sound like a real subject. Possibly Rory is being facetious, and the subject is actually Nineteenth Century Russian Poets, or Modern Russian Poetry, or something like that. It may seem obscure to Rory, but probably isn’t – Chilton seems to cover the classics rather than anything left-of-field.

Rory has also enrolled in Physics, quite possibly towards credit in the next academic year, as she didn’t study Physics at Chilton in her sophomore year (Biology and Chemistry were her science subjects).

Henry is taking Trigonometry at summer school – just like Lane, this is his worst subject (an aversion of the stereotype that people of Asian heritage are gifted in mathematical subjects). Rory offers to help Henry with Trig, but we never see if she actually does so. It seems plausible enough since they’re both at summer school and Rory has experience in helping Lane with the subject.