Did your son contact any of the folks in the music departments at these schools yet? If not, he should. My DD wanted to play her oboe in college…and she contacted the private teacher, department chair and orchestra director at EVERY school she was interested in attending. They were wonderful…and she really got the lay of the land at ea h school regarding music opportunities.
Unless your son will have a car…it is NOT all that easy to go to Portland from Bates on any regular schedule.
Examples of:
one of Boston’s jazz clubs…
http://www.scullersjazz.com/attractions.html
one upcoming jazz festival…
http://www.jazzboston.org/about/jazzweek2016.asp
one of the music schools that teaches jazz…
Tufts has Music Engineering Minor that is a great way for liberal arts majors to learn about technology…
@thumper1 Yes, we are setting up meetings with professors when we visit. Thx!
@Mastadon Thanks for your Boston/Tufts suggestions!
The Tufts ultimate team has been around since the origins of the sport (early 70’s). Around 100 students participate. It is a fun, close knit group that tends to stay in touch after graduation and even has their own reunions…
http://skydmagazine.com/2012/08/tufts-ultimate-celebrates-40-years/
The current team (with bios)
http://www.tuftsmensultimate.org/roster/
Pax et Frisbus!
Where does you son fit on the political spectrum?
W&M skews very hard to the right, Wesleyan very hard to the left and the other two are a mixed bag.
Surprised to hear the claim that W&M skews right. That counters our observations, and more importantly DD’s and her friends’ experience. She’s hard left and fit right in.
Might there be a significant regional variation in what’s considered left and right?
Virginia is very different from New England.
Northern Virginia is not that different. W & M of course is not in the north, but does take students from all over the state (and country).
Everyone I know who went to Wesleyan majored in music and was interested in world music.
Even though W & M takes students from all over the state and country, it does tend to skew more conservative than many NE LACs and universities.
Especially Wesleyan* which tends to lean closer to schools like Oberlin or Antioch in terms of being radical progressive left.
Tufts also has a progressive left-leaning campus culture…though much more centrist(think mainstream Democratic
party) than schools like Wesleyan, Oberlin, or Antioch.
Wesleyan certainly has a reputation for being hard left, but its actual student body is a lot closer to center than one would think. Really, I think, what it has is a vocal minority of left-wing students, a vast majority of students who are willing to tolerate the group on the left, and not enough students on the hard right to make the kind of noise anyone would notice. Wesleyan, Tufts, and Bates are all very popular in my neighborhood, and you would not be able to tell who went where by their politics. You would definitely notice some difference in GPA and intellectualism, though, with a small edge to Wesleyan over Tufts and a more substantial edge to the two of them vs. Bates. Which is not to say that the Bates kids are chopped liver by any stretch of the imagination, but they tend to be smart kids who are slightly less formed, less glossy in 12th grade than a number of the kids who wind up at Wesleyan or Tufts.
Wesleyan has enormous strengths in ethnic music and musicology, and that’s one of the areas in which it awards the graduate degrees that make it a university. None of the other three schools has anything equivalent to that, but it’s only valuable if it dovetails with your interests, or if you want to hang out with people who care about that a lot.
Other well-known Wesleyan music alumni include Dar Williams (who is parent-aged at this point) and Das Racist.
My younger son thought the dominant very pro-Israel attitudes at Tufts were tiresome and he got impatient with a lot of the current PC culture. He went into college pretty much a liberal with shoulder length hair and came out ready to join the Navy. So take what he says with a grain of salt. He’s still a liberal - he’s supporting Bernie - but he’s also a bit of a pragmatist.
He didn’t apply to W & M because he thought the kids pictured on the website looked too clean cut and preppy. (I think they’ve actually made an effort to make it look more diverse since then - and I don’t mean just racially.) The kids I know who went to Wesleyan were nice arty kids, liberal, but not political.
Sounds like in recent years Wesleyan’s student body, like Oberlin’s after around 2002 or so has substantially mellowed out on the radical progressive activism compared to when my HS classmates and I attended college in the '90s. The way the HS classmates and colleagues who attended Wesleyan back then sounded very similar to what I experienced at Oberlin or some friends seen at Antioch.
Sounds like a HS alum friend who has just pinned on his Captain’s bars in the Army Reserve unit. In his signal corps unit, he’s known among his officer colleagues as the “resident hippie/radical” of their unit.
Incidentally, there was an Oberlin alum who commissioned into the Marines after doing PLC some time before 9/11. Not sure about his politics, however. He could have been one of the minute few resident conservatives/mainstream Democrats* or not.
@JHS It doesn’t take much to be considered “hard left” these days in the United States! Labels like “socialist” and “communist” are thrown around with little attention to what those labels even mean. I also happen to know a number of military personnel that are far from conservative. Indeed, as a friend of mine (an commissioned officer) said, “few people who command troops love war”.
All four universities mentioned are excellent. They also differ in size and cost. Tufts is expensive and very urban. Wesleyan is just the opposite. Of the four, I’d go with Wesleyan if only because of the intellectual rigour and ability of its student body, and the fact that “pastoral” care there is very good. Then again, I didn’t apply because it was too small for me.
For what it’s worth, my daughter ended up with W&M and Wesleyan in a dead heat. She ultimately chose Wesleyan and never looked back. She had no specific musical interests, but had plenty of friends who did, and I know that they loved being smack dab between Boston and NYC, able to get to either in a couple of hours on the train. They also went to concerts and clubs in nearby New Haven.
She had a friend who was on the Ultimate team all 4 years, and travelled all over the US playing. She loved the Wes combination of a laid back social scene and an intellectually rigorous climate of learning.
W&M does not “skew very hard to the right”
It is true that kids at W&M will probably not be complaining to the administration that their school work gets in the way of their ability to protest, like at Brown.
Tufts has the advantage–on top of its stellar academics, supportive and welcoming student body, and accessibility of profs/ advisors/ internships–of being located in arguably the best college “town” out there–Somerville/ Davis Square. The ease of access to Cambridge and Boston is a plus, too. My D considered Bates and W&M and chose Tufts in a heartbeat for its rigor, reputation, friendliness, beautiful campus, and urban-suburban flair.
The food is super from the few visits I made to a friend’s dorm at Tufts during and after my undergrad years. Definitely the best dorm food I’ve had.
Brown, like Bowdoin, is a lightning rod for criticism. I’m not certain however that “hard left” is a valid description unless you are far to the right. I’d venture that all Ivies and similar colleges are very liberal overall, though Harvard did produce Ted Cruz!