The Ivy league can be and was very intimidating for students from small high schools, particularly if they are the first from their school or family to ever go there. Here are a few stories about similar Freshmen entering Princeton in 1956. We all wondered if we were smart enough.
First yours truly. The first intimidation was the guy next door who built a tesseract, a 3 dimensional model of a 4 dimensional cube. The second was his story about another guy in the class so smart that he looked at the Freshmen Herald with 700+ pictures and names, and knew everyone in the class by name by the next day. He wound up in the top 7 members of the class (Junior Phi Beta Kappa). Fortunately at an assembly during orientation, a dean told us not to worry, that they knew we would be able to do the work, and that only emotional trouble or misbehavior would get us out. This happened to a member of the class, schizophrenia often presents in late adolescence (one name for it used to be dementia praecox), and another member was expelled for stealing stuff from other rooms. Then there were the preppies (about 50% of the class back then) who basically had the first month of classes and appeared to know it all. After a month or two I knew I would make it, but the first few months were scary.
Then there was the guy who was recruited because of his character. He went to a small high school in New Jersey and played on their basketball team, which was getting creamed by an affluent suburban school. At nearly the end of the game, they slacked off and he ran through the whole team and scored a basket. An alum came up to him and asked him why he did it. He said he wanted to show the other team that they beat his team, but they didn’t beat him. The alum promptly recruited him to Princeton. His father was a factory worker, and took him down, and my friend was impressed, saying to his father that he didn’t think he belonged there. The father said something to the effect of give it a shot and don’t tell them. Subsequently he got a PhD in ceramics and worked at Los Alamos.
Then there was a guy from a little town in Maine, whose school was so proud when he got in, that they announced it over the intercom (as did my high school). Similarly intimidated at the time, he became an endocrinologist and was involved in drug development writing 45 papers in the process.
Another guy was recruited by an alum from a larger school in western New York, and went through on a ROTC scholarship, becoming a naval officer, joining the state department and becoming an ambassador to a central American country.
None of us knew any of this at the time. It came out 50 years later as we gathered after Princeton football games. Although we were intimidated we didn’t let on and did fine — and you will too.