Hello,
I have been accepted to become a part of Wellesley’s Class of 2019, and I can’t even express how thrilled I am!
I have heard so many amazing things about Wellesley, and I really enjoyed my visit, but I do have a few concerns.
As much as I think Wellesley is an excellent academic fit for me, I’m a bit concerned about the environment surrounding academics and in general. I have heard from many that Wellesley is the most internally competitive of the Seven Sisters (ie. the women are competing with one another).
A bit about me:
I’m an intense and passionate person, and I’m very passionate about my studies. I’m very liberal and a lesbian as well as a feminist, although I can often be caught in a dress and pearls, so I’m kind of an anomaly in that aspect.
I’m looking to attend a school where I will be challenged academically but where there is an atmosphere of collaboration among students. I want to be surrounded by people who are passionate as well as compassionate.
Is Wellesley a good fit for me or should I look further?
Thank you so much for any insight you can give me!
Congratulations on your acceptance! I’m a Wellesley junior and it sounds like you’re a great fit. While students at Wellesley are very committed to their studies, I think people are more competitive with themselves, if that makes sense, than with others. Usually, if I have a question, others in my class are happy to help and vice versa. The only possible exception is the Economics department which tends to curve down and have quite harsh grading standards; even there, though, I’ve only heard of a couple anomalous instances of overt competitiveness. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank you very much for your reply! I totally understand and appreciate the idea of being more competitive with themselves than with others. I’m kind of hoping that Wellesley isn’t as pre-professional and uptight as I’ve heard.
Wellesley is very intense academically, and students take their work quite seriously. But I would say the pressure is more self-imposed than anything else. If you are a person who tends to compare yourself to others, you will probably need to recognize that tendency and control it so that it does not trouble you. It’s not as if students sit around and discuss or compare their grades, or try to sabotage each other in some kind of zero-sum game. There are study groups, etc. Most people end up finding a major department that is a good fit for their interests and academic personality. Some departments, as @hopeforit suggests, are more pre-professional in nature than others, but that’s true at every college.
I have never felt like I was competing with anyone in my classes, but there is usually at least one person per class who is definitely a Wendy Wellesley and is kind of scene like a teachers pet. While most people in the class find that pretty annoying, it usually doesn’t cause people to become competitive, except in Econ courses like @hopeforit mentioned.
^^^LOL on the “Wendy Wellesley” comment! My daughter says the same thing. She doesn’t like a few of her classmates because of that, but the majority of her peers are hardworking perfectionists who compete with themselves and really don’t pay attention to what grades their friends are getting. This isn’t to say that it’s not a stressful environment, because it is, but it’s also a supportive one.
D says she never discusses grades with any of her friends, and yet she does help them with essays. She’s studying abroad this year, and says that the W women on her program are a lot more “chill,” either because they’ve mellowed with age, or because they are drinking more wine.
My D considered minoring in econ (she took micro, macro, and stats) but found it to be very competitive and relatively uptight. Her comment, FWIW: “everyone wants to work at Goldman Sachs, or the World Bank.” She probably would have gravitated toward a business major at another kind of college. She reads the paper and enjoys talking about markets. She ended up with a humanities double major and spent a year abroad. She’s taken some accounting and marketing classes in the summer at a local university near home and found them easy in comparison to anything she’s done at Wellesley. But economics is a very strong department at Wellesley and traditionally students of many majors have taken macro and micro (just like many of them take the two-semester art history sequence) as part of their well-rounded education.
