Caroline Sacks’s problem isn’t that she’s too unintelligent to attend Brown. After all, she gets a B in chemistry—a perfectly good grade, all things considered. However, she’s used to standing out as an excellent student, the kind of person who everyone else admires as incredibly smart. Now, though, she’s surrounded not only by people who are as smart as her, but also by people who are even smarter. Since she’s never experienced this before, she finds it incredibly discouraging. Worse, the entire atmosphere at Brown is highly competitive, which only makes things harder for her. That she finds herself so demoralized by this experience suggests that she really
would have been better off at the University of Maryland, where she would most likely feel just as intelligent and high-achieving as she always did in high school, and thus less discouraged.