Hello! I am a prospective applicant for Williams and a couple other liberal arts colleges like Williams or Middlebury, as well as a few Ivies (Dartmouth, Brown). I’m trying to figure out which places are likely to have an atmosphere that prioritizes cooperation over competition. I’ve heard that Columbia is nastily competitive. I’d like to avoid that.
Essentially, can somebody tell me how competitive the Williams student body is with each other, and what that looks like relative to schools of similar stature, like the ones I’ve mentioned? Thanks!
My daughter feels the same way - she wants a collaborative environment. When we toured Williams, Dartmouth, and Bowdoin, the tour guides noted that no one ever asks about or talks about grades. Also, we found Rice to be very friendly and collaborative.
As a current student, I can confirm that there is literally no competition over grades. If you feel like sharing your grades, that’s great, but asking someone what they got is pretty much taboo with all but your closest friends. The general feeling is that since we already got into Williams, our grades really don’t matter that much because no matter what we do we’ll be fine in life (to an extent, obviously). Collaboration is also huge here, with most of the campus study spaces being group-study areas with the obvious exceptions of the main floors/open areas of libraries. You’ll always have a laboratory partner or group, problem sets can almost always be worked on with others, and professors will constantly assign group work in general. Academic competitiveness is very low at Williams.
I definitely never experienced an iota of competition in my time at Williams, nor have I ever heard competitiveness to be a problem on campus. I think the tutorial program being Williams’ defining academic experience (and something which is unique among all U.S. college and universities) helps in this regard – tutorials involve two students paired up with a professor, and the success of any tutorial depends on how well the students involve collaborate / cooperate / work together. So the core Williams ethos is very much of students working closely together. Also, the architecture of the new library provides a wide array of collaborative study spaces, further cementing, via physical space, an ethos of student collaboration.