<p>I am a potential transfer.. I just wanted to know about this school... if it is academically rigorous and so forth. Especially with that cross reg. with Brown. It seems like a powerhouse liberal arts school. A silent giant.. but that could just be my impressions. I would love to talk to anyone who knows anything about this place... Especially if you went/are going there!</p>
<p>much love,</p>
<p>MN</p>
<p>while pretty unknown, its a great school definitely on the rise.</p>
<p>Hi I was accepted to wheat for the class of '10 but I untimatly wound up withdrawing my deposit because I was accepted off the wait list at mount holyoke college.</p>
<p>Anyways, I was really impressed with wheaton. They also have an excellent study abroad program if your interested. I was accepted for spring admission and they wanted to send me to London to study though NYU in the fall. The campus was very pretty and everyone was VERY friendly at wheaton. As far was the cross registration, it is cross registered with 12 colleges. Wellesley, Dartmouth,Brown, and Williams being a few. My tour guide said hardly anyone ever cross registers though. The academics are challenging at wheaton from what I heard on the campus tour.The professors also make themselves very available to you ( giving cell numbers/email) to answer any questions.</p>
<p>Bump..........</p>
<p>bump bump bump</p>
<p>Hi I am a current Senior at Wheaton College. Wheaton is a great place to come as a freshman for a lot of reasons:
First, our academic advising here is great. There is a lot of support for first year students in adjusting to the college life both academically and socially. One of your first classes at Wheaton will be a First Year Seminar and your professor will double as your advisor until you declare a major. Also, you will be assigned two student Preceptors, which are student advisors that are willing and ready to help you along the way.</p>
<p>Second, even as a first year student, there are many opportunities that are available to you. You can join/create clubs, start doing research alongside faculty if that interests you, and really take advantage and explore all of what Wheaton has to offer. The great thing is, that this can begin right away when you first get to campus. Wheaton has a great location halfway between both Providence, RI and Boston, MA. Students go to both places for either entertainment or internships. We have a strong Advising and Career Services Office that helps students find great internships during both the school year and summer.</p>
<p>Additionally, I thought I would mention that Wheaton does have great academics and although they are challenging, the professors are always available during office hours or via email. Please let me know if you have other questions.</p>
<p>Wheaton College in Massachusetts is a very good to excellent school. Don't count on cross-registration privileges without reading the "fine print" of any in place agreement as it may be subject to space available & limited to less than a full load per term. It may also be limited to courses not available at your home school. While enticing, cross-registration may not be practical unless it permits you to be a visiting student for a full term or year.</p>
<p>Wheaton is filled with mediocre students who think that the school is an ivy and have no idea about where the college is actually ranked (it is about 60th in liberal arts..it has dropped from 30 since 2006 and continues to rapidly plummet.)
The admission's team does a wonderful job of blatantly lying about the school (smartboards in every room, five dining halls, etc) and the smart students they trick into attending leave before they are juniors. By the time you are a sophomore half of your friends will have transferred to a better school and 3/4 will have at least applied. The students who are left are usually soccer, lacrosse and baseball players or locals from Massachusetts who are all loud and dumb. The school is completely dysfunctional and is quickly running out of money. The new science center that they always brag about has taken over fifteen years to fund(it takes normal schools about two years to raise 50 million) and they still do not have enough money to complete it (ever wonder why they have pushed back the completion date three times?) I would suggest anyone who likes to be challenged and isn't an average or slightly below average student from MA, NH or ME to look elsewhere.</p>
<p>^ omg. о_О are you a current student?</p>
<p>Again as a current student , I can attest to you that Wheaton is by no means an institution full of mediocre students, or lying Admission Counselors. I hope to address some of the inaccuracies of the above post. First off, Wheaton College is among the top liberal arts colleges in the east coast. Since 2000, students have earned over 100 prestigious awards, which include Rhode Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Fulbright Scholarship winners and Truman scholars. Currently Wheaton is ranked 4th in the U.S. for the number of Fulbright winners. Secondly, In response to Wheaton's percentage of students that return after freshman year, the retention rate is roughly 84-86%. Wheaton has a rather diverse student body as well, considering only a quarter to a third of the student body are athletes, and the rest are heavily involved in student government, theatre, arts, and other student organizations and clubs. Thirdly, regarding the financial situation, roughly 60% of the student body receives financial aid in some form including merit scholarship funding, and roughly $250,000 a year is given to students through scholarship competitions to fund internships locally and overseas, and even for independent research opportunities. Also, as a side note, the science center is currently under construction and planned to be open and in use by 2012. Lastly, Wheaton is a rather selective college where the current freshman of the class of 2012 have an average GPA of 3.50 and 39% of those who students who applied were actually admitted to the college. Don't underestimate the college by its small size, but appreciate that students are given resources and opportunities to grow and change.</p>
<p>My sense is that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Wheaton is a good school, but certainly not particularly prestigious. </p>
<p>According to PR, the average (mean?) gpa is 3.5, but that distribution includes nearly 20% w/ gpa below 3.0:
% with GPA 3.0 - 3.24: 17%
% with GPA 2.5 - 2.99: 17%
% with GPA 2.0 - 2.49: 2% </p>
<p>These numbers suggest students w/ solid, but by no means stellar, profiles. The RR profile also indicates that the campus is somewhat racially diverse (about 10% non-white - - only 2.5% Asian). Not bad, but in both cases, Wheaton is lagging behind peer schools (Skidmore?), and far behind the prestigious LACs.</p>
<p>Lyonpride, your post confuses finaid (need based) and merit money (unrelated to need). But many of the stronger LACs tend to offer very little or no merit money b/c they don't have to discount tuition to attract top students - - so the availability of merit money undermines your argument re: Wheaton's academic prowress. And most LACs (1) fund internships and (2) ofer independent study opportunities.</p>
<p>But, who cares? The fact that most hs grads do not prepared to succeed at top LACs/unis doesn't mean that they are unprepared for post-secondary education. And it is great that Wheaton is among the many LACs/unis available to those students with more modest academic profiles or unevenly developed skill sets.</p>
<p>Academically, my concern is that Wheaton does not offer the variety - - debth or breath of courses - - as LACs with similar admissions profiles. And socially, I worry that the school is quite preppy (not a good fit for my D).</p>
<p>Are these two impressions correct? I haven't been on campus or looked at the course catalog during the past four years, so maybe things are are a bit different now.</p>
<p>I'd be very interested in other people's impressions of this discussion. My son submitted an application to Wheaton on the advice of a college counselor who suggested that he needed to "round out" the list of colleges to which he was applying. (I hesitate to use the term "safety" but I think that's what we're talking about, here. The other schools he has applied to all fall into the "elite, New England LAC" category.) She mentioned Wheaton in particular, describing it as a school to which he would be very likely to be offered admission, if he applied. She suggested that it's an amazingly happy place, one that closely matches his athletic and musical interests, and one that elitist snobs (yup...I bred one) tend to overlook, at their peril. She mentioned a few other schools in this category: Dickinson, Trinity, Kenyon, Colorado College.</p>
<p>We visited Wheaton in early January. He found it pleasant, if distinctly smaller and noticeably less well "equipped" (in terms of amenities, public workstations, facilities, smart classrooms, dining facilities) than the other schools on his list. He was very impressed with the sense of intimacy and the way the student guides spoke of the relationships with faculty. The Science Center is very worrisome -- a big hole in the middle of campus and the look and feel of a site that is more in mothballs than nearing completion.</p>
<p>But his bottom line was clear: the place looked and felt like the kind of school where he could be very happy and well taken care of for four years. He doesn't even like to think of it as a "safety".</p>
<p>If he hates the school, it's not worth much as a safety. </p>
<p>Kenyon and Trinity are stronger academically than Wheaton, which is still living down it's finishing school image. If Trin and Kenyon are indeed safeties in terms of his stats, he might be happier at one of them than at Wheaton. D1, now attending a top LAC, loved Kenyon, even though it's in a pretty rural community (and even though D was seriusly into track and Wheaton fields one of the strongest D3 track team).</p>