Choices for a gay student...

<p>It sounds like Penn, Stanford, and Berkeley sound like great options. Do I want to mention being gay when I apply to any school or should I leave it off?! I mean does it have any sort if pull?</p>

<p>No, being gay is not a hook or counts as any type of ‘pull’. There are A LOT of LGBTQ individuals involved in higher education, so you’re not ‘unique’ in that sense. </p>

<p>What made you favor Penn, Stanford and Berkeley over some of the other options?</p>

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Yes, yes, and I was younger when I lived in the south so I don’t remember specifics, but we had gay family friends and they lived together so in my opinion it wouldn’t be a huge deal.</p>

<p>I think if you are a transgendered individual, or a very flamboyant gay then you may prefer the “ultra liberal” areas, but for the average gay guy I honestly don’t think it matters. Most people college aged won’t care.</p>

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I don’t think this is only ultra liberal schools, most people I know wouldn’t tolerate this. At Rice University in Houston, TX when one of the coaches made a homophobic comment hundreds of students bought t-shirts that read “We are not Homophobic” and wore them to a football game.</p>

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Probably wouldn’t matter. It’s not that rare. It would be fine if you make it the topic of your essay or something, but it wouldn’t make a huge difference.</p>

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<p>I don’t think such anecdotal evidence counts for much. Nor do official police statistics on hate crimes, because there are parts of the country where police aren’t trained to identify hate crimes as such, or don’t bother to classify and report them as such when they occur, and where there’s enough intolerance that most LGBT people remain closeted or at least extremely cautious about how they act in public. So, for example, FBI hate crime statistics for 2009 show that California had 222 bias crimes based on sexual orientation, New York had 114, more than half of them (61) in New York City, and Massachusetts had 66, nearly half (32) in Boston.</p>

<p>In contrast, Alabama reported 2 and Mississippi reported 0. Are we to conclude, then, that Alabama and Mississippi are the most gay-friendly states in the county? I don’t think so. It probably means many gay people avoid those places if they can, or remain closeted if they need to be there, or if not completely closeted at least take pains to be very discrete about how they act in public (no public displays of affection, etc.). It may also mean that crimes that really are bias crimes are just not reported as bias crimes, because the police don’t recognize it, or don’t care enough to report it. For that matter, some of the victims of such crimes may not even report it. And to be perfectly candid, I don’t think any LGBT person in their right mind would tell you that they’re moving to Mississippi or Alabama for the gay-friendly climate. Atlanta, Miami, Austin, Chapel Hill, even Houston are different. But these tend to be, at the end of the day, fairly small islands, even major cities like Houston, Atlanta, and Miami.</p>

<p>On the other hand, I don’t doubt for a minute that there are a lot of sexual orientation bias crimes in Boston and New York City. The LGBT culture is much more open in those places, yet there are still some pretty retrograde attitudes in some nearby neighborhoods.</p>

<p>So come to Minneapolis. The Advocate says we’re #1.</p>

<p>@NYU2013 I guess that they have campuses and they are sort of in the area that I am looking at. They also have the biology that I want.</p>

<p>Thanks for the help everybody, when I posted I never thought I would get such helpful advice or the number of informed responses as I did!</p>

<p>zedman, at Penn it probably won’t give you any sort of admissions boost. But if you have overcome discrimination/bullying/whatnot that happened because of sexual orientation and feel that’s a compelling essay topic, go ahead and write about that. It just won’t give you any advantages.</p>

<p>Oh well, I mean it doesn’t matter, not that I’m so exceptional that I will get in, it’s just that it’s almost impossible to get in anyway. Just to check, Penn and Berkeley have campuses right, they’re not urban are they?</p>

<p>You can take a look at the campuses on the satellite view mapping web sites to get an idea of how distinct the campus is from the surrounding area.</p>

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<p>I’m sure many posters have stated this before, but I would like to reiterate that this isn’t an issue of “I can only choose a few colleges, because only those few are gay-friendly.” The majority of US colleges are gay-friendly and dominated by liberals. This trend is even more pronounced at “top” schools. Even top schools that 10-20 years ago were known as “more conservative”, like Princeton and Dartmouth, are dominated by Democrats and are gay-friendly.</p>

<p>When someone says that X college is really gay-friendly, what they means is that while Y college is also gay-friendly, X college is slightly more gay-friendly. At a certain point, the degree to which a college is gay-friendly becomes irrelevant because you start comparing very gay-friendly colleges with very-very gay-friendly colleges.</p>

<p>That being said, I will actually go ahead and state that Stanford, and Penn, while gay-friendly, are not known for being especially gay-friendly (relative to all the other gay-friendly schools).</p>

<p>That also being said, Brown is especially/unusually gay-friendly, as is Yale. Some LACs are also especially gay-friendly.</p>

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<p>Why do you say that? I’m not sure how often Penn is ranked high on the “most gay-friendly” lists (though I’ve heard it called the “gay Ivy” many times), but Stanford almost always appears on them; e.g. in Princeton Review, it’s ranked second, after NYU, and has usually ranked high in previous years as well. Given its location, it’s not uncommon to hear in the gay community that certain students chose Stanford specifically for its gay-friendliness, and many apply to Stanford for that reason. Penn has the oldest LGBT center in the country (probably the world), and Stanford also has one of the oldest. Not sure where your perception comes from, but from what I’ve seen, the LGBT-friendliness of Penn/Stanford is well-known.</p>

<p>I wouldn’t say that the majority of colleges in the US are LGBT-friendly, either. There are some 4,000-5,000 colleges, and we have no idea how most lean. Given the preponderance of lower-ranked religious colleges, I would not be surprised to hear that there are more against it than for it.</p>

<p>terenc to state “Princeton and Dartmouth, are dominated by Democrats and are gay-friendly” implies that democrats are gay friendly and republicans are not and that is a fallacy. it may appeal to your personal beliefs about good and bad right and wrong…democrat and republican. however I assure you that a large chunk of the democratic base is very gay unfriendly! and most republicans are not against gay people.
generalizations about whole groups of people are sadly often wrong and very hurtful.</p>

<p>^ well, to say that there are Republicans who are gay-friendly and Democrats who aren’t is being pedantic: of course there are, and nobody is making a blanket statement about them (you’re drawing too much from his statement). But it’s undeniable that the Republican ideology and the Democratic ideology are divided on this (it’s even explicit in their official party platforms). For example, according to [a</a> CNN poll](<a href=“http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/06/cnn-poll-americans-attitudes-toward-gay-community-changing/]a”>http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/06/cnn-poll-americans-attitudes-toward-gay-community-changing/), 7/10 of Democrats are in favor of gay marriage, while 7/10 Republicans are against it.</p>

<p>Sorry for the “political post” - I just didn’t see any offensive or fallacious claim made by terenc (he never indicated a causal relationship, either); it’s just a simple recognition of the state of affairs today, which we need to be honest about when helping prospective students in their college search.</p>

<p>Phantasmagoric is correct; to try to deny that the majority of Republicans are against LGBTQ rights is simply naive and factually incorrect.</p>

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<p>Probably a lot of those thousands of colleges are commuter schools (community colleges, trade and technical schools, state universities catering to local populations) for which campus life outside of class is non-existent. It could very well be that many of these schools are neither LGBTQ-friendly nor LGBTQ-unfriendly – although the surrounding areas that the students commute from can be.</p>

<p>I’m just pointing out the the majority of youth (including college-age people) are for gay marriage. By extension, one can infer that the majority of colleges have a gay-friendly student population.</p>

<p>Furthermore, in my opinion, at many colleges the “conservative” community is dominated by libertarians - people who are fiscally conservative but are liberal when it comes to foreign policy / social policy.</p>

<p>I admittedly made the claim about Penn and Stanford solely out of what I’ve heard. The fact that Stanford is in the Bay Area means little - the only similarity Palo Alto shares with San Francisco is that both areas have many techies and startups; even the weather is fairly different. Stanford also has a reputation for having a lackluster dating scene. The fact that Penn has an old LGBT center also does not tell anyone much about the student body itself. Whereas Yale has a reputation for having many gay students (<a href=“http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2009_07/gayivy_033.html[/url]”>http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2009_07/gayivy_033.html&lt;/a&gt;), and Brown also has a reputation for holding wild parties sponsored by their LGBT club (<a href=“Brown University - Wikipedia”>Brown University - Wikipedia).</p>

<p>ucbalumnus, you’re probably right. In the case of nonresidential colleges, the ‘default’ ideology would be that of the surrounding area. Given that the general population has a negative attitude toward LGBT people, that somewhat supports my statement: the majority of colleges in the US are probably not LGBT-friendly. In fact, I would guess (though I have no data to back this up) that of the non-commuter schools, the majority are still not LGBT-friendly.</p>

<p>terenc,</p>

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<p>Not exactly - that’s assuming that both types of students (those in favor and those against) are at least somewhat evenly distributed among colleges. It could just as easily be the case that a minority of colleges ‘capture’ most of those who are for it, leaving those who are against it to the majority of colleges. I’d place my bet on this being the case.</p>

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<p>As someone who is gay and has attended Stanford, I can tell you that’s not true - that fact means quite a lot. I know many students who were attracted to Stanford for that exact reason; it’s common to hear LGBT students at Stanford cite the Bay Area as a big reason for their choice. Campus LGBT organizations capitalize on that advantage by fostering connections with the Bay Area, esp. SF (so whether SF and PA are similar doesn’t really matter in the end). And it’s probably the most important part of their pitches.</p>

<p>Anyway, the main point in mentioning the Bay Area is that it’s helped Stanford to establish a reputation for gay-friendliness. Even SCU, which is a religious university, is pretty gay-friendly, and that’s the result of its location in the Bay Area (which of course has a huge LGBT population, at the highest concentration in the country).</p>

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<p>Not sure how this is relevant, but that’s the case at almost every university: students constantly complain about the lackluster dating scene. College students in general have a reputation for not being focused on dating, even though everyone says they want to date. ;)</p>

<p>While dating is probably not prevalent at any top school, my generalization was based off the answer here: [Monica</a> E. Miller’s Answers on Stanford University - Quora](<a href=“http://www.quora.com/Monica-E-Miller/answers/Stanford-University]Monica”>http://www.quora.com/Monica-E-Miller/answers/Stanford-University)</p>

<p>While Stanford is probably very gay-friendly, my point is that it is not any more or less gay friendly than most other top schools. Harvard, for example, is located in Cambridge, which is known for its gay population (and Stanford is not even located in SF). The list goes on.</p>

<p>My point is that for the OP, when you start comparing a school that is very-very gay-friendly to a school that is very-very-very gay-friendly, it stops being an extremely important factor.</p>

<p>You all make hood points, when you are comparing schools at that level I need other factors to determine my feelings about the school. To the debate about dating, it would be pretty nice to have a good dating scene since in suburban Ohio there is none at all.</p>

<p>terenc, so a Quora answer was your basis for deciding that it has a ‘reputation’ for a lackluster dating scene. FWIW, here on CC, you’ll find threads where students discuss the drawbacks of X college, and often students mention the dating scene.</p>

<p>Of course, I agree that there are other schools that are just as gay-friendly as Stanford - I never said otherwise. Rather, I was wondering where you got the notion that Stanford/Penn are not known especially for being gay-friendly; as far as I’ve seen, those two in particular (in addition to others) are known especially for it. Stanford usually makes the ''LGBT-friendly" lists, and Penn has a very long and well-known tradition of LGBT support, not to mention it’s one of the first universities (if not the first) to actively identify and seek out LGBT applicants. If you’d said the same about, say, Northwestern and Cornell, it’d be different, but Stanford/Penn are ironically among those that are known especially for this.</p>

<p>zedman95, unfortunately, to my knowledge, there isn’t a university that’s known for a good dating scene. Dating is pretty hit-or-miss in general, and in college, that’s magnified by the nature of college students. To maximize the likelihood, you’ll definitely be better off if the university and/or the surrounding area have LGBT people in abundance. To that end, cities are great, but some are stronger than others; see [url=&lt;a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States]this[/url”&gt;LGBT demographics of the United States - Wikipedia]this[/url</a>].</p>

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<p>Apparently, there is rather active dating scene at BYU, but it is most suitable for LDS members and very unsuitable for LGBTQ students.</p>

<p><a href=“https://byustudies.byu.edu/showTitle.aspx?title=7866[/url]”>https://byustudies.byu.edu/showTitle.aspx?title=7866&lt;/a&gt;
[BYU</a> NewsNet - BYU marriage rates higher than national average](<a href=“http://nn.byu.edu/story.cfm/56823]BYU”>http://nn.byu.edu/story.cfm/56823)</p>