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Neither my Ss would have been happy at a party school or one that was dominated by sports.
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I can see some teensy college fitting this sort of generalization, but I have a hard time seeing how one can apply it to a large university. I know that the UC I attended had very active sports programs, because there was a sports page (or section) in the campus newspaper.... but I never went to a college sporting event and I don't remember anyone who participated in athletics other than intramural sports or going to the campus bowling alley. It makes good copy for the Princeton Review book to rank "party schools" -- but there is a lot of other things going on at schools with those reputations.</p>
<p>(Actually, I think one reason for this is that athletes might tend to be placed in different housing... which would explain why everyone in my dorm was very distinctly un-athletic. I think I was living in the artsy / pothead/ vegetarian / treehugger dorm on what is perceived by outsiders as a fairly conservative campus. At some point along the line we even went to "war" with a dorm where all the students dressed a lot better than we did; it involved the theft of various insignia and a lot of water balloons).</p>
<p>I do think that its a good idea for a student to scout out the reputations of various dorms before signing up for housing; there definitely does seem to be a dorm culture, with some dorms trending more toward "Animal House" -- so it can be a problem if a student goes to a college that doesn't give much of a choice in housing. </p>
<p>Other than that my experience is very much in line with Mombot's. Large universities are incredibly diverse places.</p>
<p>I will say that there is an area of "fit" that I found was very important in college, but is not something that I have ever seen mentioned on CC or explored by a high school student in looking at colleges. That is, I found that each department had a very distinct internal culture -- some were very rigid and authoritarian, some were very loose. I would have been a poli sci major but for the stone-age attitudes of the people who ran the department (among other things, they fired my favorite teacher because of his unorthodox but very popular teaching style -- he engaged and challenged students, which must have violated some official department policy requiring that all lectures be delivered in a monotone). I found that the coolest profs were over in the rhetoric dept -- you know it was a great place the minute you walked in the door -- but the college didn't actually offer a rhetoric major. So I ended up off in the write-your-own-major department where most of the free-spirited, independent types with undefined academic goals tended to find themselves. </p>
<p>So I would encourage students who are fairly certain what they want to major in to actually visit the campuses where they plan to study and try to meet some profs or students in their prospective major. It wouldn't have worked for anyone in my family since we all ended up switching to different majors than what we had originally intended ... but it was pretty amazing to me at the time how very different the atmosphere could be from one department to the other. My d. also has had some opportunity to observe the same thing, especially because she is on a shared campus and can see the differences among departments at 2 separate colleges where the same subject is taught.</p>