Thanks @TheGreyKing for the shout out. Coincidentally I was waiting to be seated for dinner with my family including my Bowdoin son (back for the long weekend “Fall Break”) when i got the email so we chatted about it a bit at dinner. So thanks for the dinner conversation topic everyone…
For context, my son is a Junior at Bowdoin. He is the opposite of sporty or preppy. He didn’t do any sports in HS at all, and he mostly wears old t-shirts or clothes from H&M or Target, and wears them until they wear out. He’s smart, but not an intellectual per se. In HS he was into music, theater and journalism. He got turned off on one of Bowdoin’s peer schools on accepted student day because he got too much of a sports culture vibe and another because he got too much of a you-have-to-be-a-protestor-or-you-don’t-fit-in vibe.
Bottom line, he loves it. Professors have been great. Bowdoin is extremely generous with paid work opportunities doing activities you like and paid summer research opportunities (“research" even being defined even as writing your own fantasy novel, for example). Most of his classes are small, sometimes even single-digits small. Largest was 30-something. He’s double majoring in a science and humanities.
When asked if there’s any dominant culture or a sense that jocks or whoever control the school activities or the social scene, etc, he said definitely not. In fact, when I told him the stat on the % of Bowdoin student who do a sport he was shocked and said you get no sense of that there at all. There’s very minor examples of sports-cliquey-ness, like it being generally understood certain teams always use particular tables at the cafeterias (though he added they weren’t the best seats anyway, so they self-selected tables that others wouldn’t want. But it is trivial — nothing like my experience at UCLA decades ago. As for preppy-ness, he says the opposite is true. Statistically, we know there’s a lot of kids from affluent families there but almost everyone goes out of their ways to hide it, dressing basically, not throwing money around, not driving fancy cars (if they even have them), etc. He couldn’t even tell you in most cases whether the people he knows came from money or not. There’s no class divide or haves and have-nots that he’s experienced.
Politically, the campus leans liberal like almost every LAC, but is less of a hot bed than many of it’s peers. Around the same time that Middlebury was having riots and injuries when a conservative speaker came to campus, a Bowdoin student conservative club hosted Dinesh D’Souza (who I would argue is far more controversial than the Middlebury speaker) who spoke without incident. Some students published editorials and a small group quietly held signs outside, but no one disrupted the event. 95+ percent of the students on campus were likely opposed to D’Souza but they abjectly civilly.
Beyond that, he said some of the social houses organically become kind of cliquey but only in that people all go to the same parties and hang out together by choice, not that they have any cultural influence over the campus vibe. Overall he thought someone could be into almost anything and find their people there and not be put off by others who were into something different.
Personally I suspect this is true of most of Bowdoin’s peers — they are great schools with varied cultures and most of their “reputations” are probably over-stated. I’m sure you can’t go wrong either way. Good luck.
