<p>I’ve been seriously considering Bowdoin as my ED, but there has been this one thing nagging at me. There is clearly plenty going on around campus, and beyond it, but is there any one thing around which the student body unifies?</p>
<p>I guess at many schools this would refer to support of a given sports team. What role do sports play in the school? Do people frequently attend games/matches/etc? Is there a strong sense of school spirit?</p>
<p>For me, this has become a major factor in my application decisions. I’ve noticed a significant lack of such a unifying factor at my high school, and I’ve recently come to realize that this is something I strongly dislike about my high school experience.</p>
<p>I’m completely in love with every other aspect of Bowdoin, but I think I really do need this sort of spirit/unity as part of my college experience.</p>
<p>sports teams certainly don’t play a unifying role at bowdoin, although on occasion certain games or matches might. that said, i didn’t attend a single football or hockey game (!) the entire time i was at bowdoin. </p>
<p>but it’s erroneous to assume that a factor in one circumstance will have a similar effect in another, different circumstance. bowdoin is a pretty realized place. by this i mean it has traditions, a strong history, a full sense of itself as an entity. (i would say most high schools, because they are predominantly functional, cannot claim the same). being at bowdoin as a student is itself a unifying experience. a few liberal arts colleges share this feature. they are small enough and exclusive enough to endow their student body with a sense of “chosen-ness” that serves as a kind of glue. beyond that, the commitment to the common good, in my experience, was very much a part of the air of every course i took and part of how i understand my bowdoin education, retrospectively. (this is different from my sense of the undergraduate experience at stanford, where i was a graduate student). basically, bowdoin already has well-grounded sense of unity, but it doesn’t (at least in my experience) stem from athletic events.</p>
<p>The common good- which is all over the Bowdoin website- is probably the most obvious unifying theme and its a moderately big deal, with speakers weekly, multiple volunteer and alternative break projects, etc. Sports play a role but not at like D1 schools like Notre Dame.</p>