@scholarlymom asked a question (here) about the Monroe Scholars program, and about how W&M might compare to UCSD as a possible school for her son. I ended up writing a small novel, and then realized I was about to post on the “results only” thread, so figured I’d pull it over here.
First off, congrats to your son! The Monroe Scholars program is great. I was (many years ago) a Monroe scholar and knew several W&M alums (Monroes and not-Monroes) who went on to go to great law schools (U Penn, UNC, W&M, Richmond). Although I can’t speak to law school topics, I can speak a bit about the Monroe scholars program. I’ll also speak a bit about W&M in general, and my thoughts on it vs. the UCs.
There are three main benefits that I associate with Monroe. The first one you encounter as a student is the opportunity to live in the Monroe dorm (apparently there are two now). You certainly can live in other freshman dorms, but I really enjoyed the experience of building community with the others in Monroe Hall. It’s not in the most convenient location compared to some of the dorms, but W&M isn’t that large of a campus, so it’s maybe a 20 minute walk at most, to pretty much anywhere on campus. The people are all great, though. Earnest, charming, sharp. In the very, very best interpretation possible, and with all the love in the world, I describe W&M as a place of “friendly nerds”, and Monroe has some of the friendliest/nerdiest.
After the freshman dorm, the next benefit I think of are the regular lunches that we had with guest speakers. These were small gatherings where a professor, visiting lecturer, or other friend of the college would come and give a brief talk and socialize with the students. To be honest, I don’t actually recall any specific lectures that I heard during these lunches, but I remember enjoying them very much.
Finally, the stipend. Unfortunately, my own research project was stymied as I was in a near-fatal car accident the summer before senior year (spoiler: I lived!), and almost didn’t make it back to campus for the fall … but I was researching C.S. Lewis, and had been planning to go to Ireland to spend a week with his son and to go to Oxford to spend a week in his old stomping grounds as I did that research. My now-wife (also a Monroe) used her stipend to travel to Siena, Italy, where she learned how to make (and restore) stained glass. A good friend of ours retraced the steps of Lewis & Clark (and also went to a lot of baseball games along the way). There are a lot of really cool projects that students do, and there’s a “fair” in the fall where students share their research.
But! As cool as the Monroe program is, I really want to emphasize that the best opportunity before your son isn’t Monroe, but W&M itself. Having grown up in Virginia, I didn’t really appreciate how special it is that there’s such a thing as a small, public liberal arts university. I probably heard those words on a tour or information session, and then as a student saw them on banners, but it was very much a fish-asking-“what-is-water?” moment: I completely took the intimacy of the school for granted. But the relationship the students have with the professors is really something special.
Once you declare your major, your major advisor is a professor. In all cases I’m aware of, your freshman advisor is also a full professor (mine was, as was my wife’s). And relationships with professors transcend the classroom. I was invited to a government professor’s home for Super Bowl parties, to a history professor’s home for holiday parties, and to a sociology professor’s home with a small group from class for just general socializing (he served us Alaskan crab legs?!). (Important to note: I wasn’t even majoring in any of those departments!) The professors deeply care about the students, and make a point of connecting with them. The ease and naturalness of those relationships was something I didn’t appreciate until we started looking into college for our own kids.
But my favorite story isn’t even any of those. So I had a car at school for a semester, and managed at one point to completely kill the battery. I knew that my sociology professor (a different professor than the crab legs one!) was a car guy, and figured he’d know what I should do. (Buy a new battery? Jump start it? I had no clue.) After class I go up to him to ask him for his advice. He replies, “where’s the car?” “Oh, just off campus.” “Let’s go!” So we hop in his car and drive over to where mine was parked. He has me pop the hood and try starting it up. Total silence. By the time I can even get out of the car to come around front, he’s unscrewed the terminals and is hauling the battery out of the car. He then says “I’ve got a battery charger at home. I’ll charge it up!” I’m both shocked and grateful, of course. But it gets better! At the next class session, I go up to him afterwards to ask him about it: “So, um, should I come by some time to, uh, get the battery?” He replies “Oh, no need. It’s already back in the car!”
Moments like that don’t happen every day, but they do happen at William and Mary.
It’s a really special place, and I didn’t fully understand at the time what was so incredible about it being a small public liberal arts university, or how rare it is to have the combination of factors that make W&M the place that it is.
My oldest is now at Berkeley (we’re California residents now, and focused on in-state options), and while there are many upsides to universities at the scale of the UCs, and while she’s doing what she can to connect with professors (office hours, asking lots of questions in class), it’s just a completely different animal. Her major advisor is … fine, but definitely not a professor. Her fall semester was pretty heavily disrupted by the grad student strike, as many of her classes had heavy GSI involvement. It would be quite remarkable to hear of her getting invited over to a professor’s house … invites from multiple professors in different departments (especially professors outside her major) would be unthinkable.
I’d be happy to answer any other questions you have, but have probably written too much for now. My DMs are open, though, in case anyone has questions I can help with!