Downsides to Bowdoin

<p>First of all Bowdoin is DI for nordic skiing as DIII does not exist.</p>

<p>There are plenty of problems with Bowdoin:
The weather
Food gets old
A lot of people got in as sports recruits and the student population as a whole is really not as intellectual as advertised.
Party scene is repetitive
A large amount of the population comes from privilege and has a sense of entitlement
The student body is politically apathetic
Grade inflation (at least for B’s)
The hard liquor ban</p>

<p>That being said I love it here. You just have to take the good with the bad and realize no where is perfect.</p>

<p>I visited a friend at B in the fall. It’s a very pretty place, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it felt like a New England prep school, not a college. Small, preppy, very white bread (Pepperidge Farm) and more like high school than college. Everyone appeared to come “from just outside of Boston”. YMMV.</p>

<p>“Small, preppy, very white bread (Pepperidge Farm) and more like high school than college.”</p>

<p>Small: That’s not just Bowdoin; that’s any liberal arts college.</p>

<p>Preppy: Only in appearance (mostly).</p>

<p>‘White Bread’: Thirty-percent non-white. That’s not bad for a New England liberal arts school.</p>

<p>Everyone’s from Mass. : I think the stat is that 35% (maybe40%) of kids are from New England. They’re good people, lol. As someone from New York I can honestly say I’m not worried.</p>

<p>I’ve got to be honest, the lack of diversity thing was something that might have been true a decade ago, but is no longer the case. Here’s just a quick example:</p>

<p>My floor freshman year consisted of 18 people.
8 of those people were non-white.
5 different ethnicities were represented.
3 or 4 different religions were represented.
14 different states were represented.
There were people from New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Southwest, Midwest, and West Coast regions.
There were people from every imaginable economic position. Some were paying full price, some were paying nothing.</p>

<p>Even more, all of these people bonded closely together and did not form cliques based on their ethnicity/region/religion.</p>

<p>While this may not be entirely representative of the campus, it is far from an exaggeration. If you’re trying to think of a reason not to come to Bowdoin, lack of diversity should not be one of them.</p>

<p>Yeah I just visited and Bowdoin is SOOO much more diverse, racially, geographically, economically ,ethnically, than I ever expected a little liberal arts school in New England to be. </p>

<p>But more important than just having diversity is embracing it. Bowdoin students love different cultures and revel in activities from other groups. For example,
lots of the members of ethnic clubs are not from that ethnicity at all.
That kind of exchange and curiosity makes Bowdoin one of the most diverse colleges I’ve ever seen, including lots of universities where races and groups are present in greater numbers but seem to settle into cliques that cling onto each other.</p>

<p>Seriously, and I’m a minority from California. I felt completely comfortable.</p>