Just graduated from Amherst - Ask Me Anything

Colleges and Universities A-Z Amherst College
1

Hey everybody,

So I haven’t been on College Confidential in eons, but I’m a senior who just graduated from Amherst College (I only got back home today, in fact). This website was quite helpful to me back in the day, so I figured I’d try to pay it forward, and answer any questions about Amherst that parents/incoming students/prospective applicants might have.

Whether it’s questions about classes, social life, the college community, job/grad school prospects, admissions, or whatever else, I’m willing to be 100% candid in all of my responses!

A little bit about myself: Double majored in history and economics at Amherst. Not an athlete or a URM, though parents were immigrants. Working in finance after graduation. Originally from outside of New England. Oh yeah, and Amherst has unequivocally been the best four years of my life.

2

A couple of questions:

  1. Can you talk about social life/ the party scene? Did Amherst ever feel “too small”?
  2. How’s interpersonal competition? I’m thinking about premed and I’m a bit worried it will be too cutthroat.
  3. How’s the food? lol

Thanks for your help!

3

@sxw310

1. Social life: Great question. I guess this has already been discussed on other CC threads, but in summary, the party scene isn’t great. That said, I wouldn’t say that a bad party scene = bad social life, which is a point that I think a lot of people miss.

Personally, I’ve had a great social life at Amherst. Most of my friends from high school (I attended a major public high school that was twice the size of Amherst) went to large public universities/Ivies, and compared to them, I’d say that I’ve had a much easier time making friends. It just sort of happens when you see certain people over and over again over the course of college, whether in Val, at classes, at random social gatherings, etc. For instance, I met my current girlfriend during my first week at Amherst. We initially became friends just because we kept randomly bumping into each other over the course of my freshman year (we started dating later on).

Throughout the course of college, me and an extended circle of 15-20 friends would literally meet up three nights a week, and just hang out. Sometimes we went to random campus events, sometimes we went to the mall and saw a movie, other times we got together and walked to a bar (the town of Amherst is small, but it’s not that small), or oftentimes we might simply drink and socialize in my dorm’s common room. At the end of this past year, we went go-karting, visited an arcade, went bowling, went to an escape room (we totally failed at that lol), and even had a picnic, all in the course of our last month at college.

That said, if you want to go to college to party, I probably wouldn’t recommend Amherst. The college tore down the “social” dorms last year, and that’s where most of the raging parties used to happen. Now, parties tend to be more scattered (usually sports teams host a few in Jenkins/The Triangle), plus some official college parties that honestly aren’t very exciting. In other words, the party scene is really where you see the oft-touted divide between athletes and non-athletes at Amherst.

Frankly though, I never really had a problem with this. I don’t think Amherst is right for everyone, especially those who appreciate a thriving party scene, but Amherst was undoubtedly the right choice for me, as someone who wanted to be able to meet lots of people without having to constantly party/join a frat or whatever.

To answer the second part of your question, Amherst never felt too small to me. While you tend to see the same people over and over again, I personally found this to be a plus: it just made it a lot easier for me to make new friends in my freshman year, and to keep up with existing friends in subsequent years. And it’s not like you’ll ever meet everybody on campus-- when I was walking in the graduation ceremony last week, I realized that I still didn’t really know, like 2/3rds of my class. And this was a class of only 470 people!

2. Interpersonal competition: Let me state this clearly-- I have literally never seen interpersonal competition manifest itself in any form throughout the course of my studies at Amherst. It probably helps that almost no courses at Amherst are grade-capped, aka in most classes, it’s possible for every student to receive an A. The only exception is a few core classes, e.g. Intro to Econ (which mandated a B+ average in my freshman year). But even then, interpersonal competition hasn’t really been a thing that I’ve been aware of.

That said, the pre-med track here is difficult. People should be aware of this. I probably knew 25-30 pre-med students when I was a freshman, and by the time I was a senior, only 10-15 of them had finished the whole track. The difficulty with the pre-med track at Amherst isn’t intrapersonal competition, but rather the sheer academic rigor of the track itself. Amherst doesn’t have “weed-out” classes like what you might see at large public schools, but all science taught at the college is just… hard. To an extent, this is probably a good thing, because I know that med school definitely doesn’t get any easier. So most people realize by the end of their freshman year that they don’t want to do hard science for the next 11 years of their life, and they drop the track.

3. Food: Ok seriously, people need to stop complaining about the food at Val. The food has improved A LOT in the last 5 years, to the point that it has become solidly… average. Nothing to write home about, but also nothing to really complain about.

The main problem here is that the food at Amherst was really, really bad in the past, and now this historical memory continues to drive campus discourse on the subject, despite that fact that this discourse no longer reflects reality. For instance, I’ve been to the dining hall at Hamilton College, and the food there was probably worse than at Val! Yet people don’t really complain about the food at Hamilton, because there’s no historical memory of it. I’ve also been to the top-notch dining hall at Claremont McKenna/Pomona (which supposedly offers the best food of any U.S. liberal arts college other than Bowdoin), and while the food there is definitely better than at Val, it’s not light-years ahead as some people imply.

As a sidenote, I also think people really undersell the town of Amherst, when it comes to food. For instance, the Asian food and Middle Eastern food in town is phenomenal. I interned in Boston a few summers ago, and the Asian and Middle Eastern food in Boston was probably worse than at Amherst.

4

Thanks for the thread!! Do you have any advice for admission, or anything in particular that you feel was a reason for your acceptance? :slight_smile:

5
  1. Can you give more info on your work after graduation? Are you working on Wall Street? How easy or difficult was recruitment?
  2. What extracurricular activities did you do?
  3. There was a recent post about Amherst and someone mentioned that there is an anti-STEM mindset. Any comments on that?
6

Congrats on graduation!

As a recent grad, it would be interesting to get your comments/thoughts posted on this thread. :slight_smile:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/1994543-im-concerned-college-is-too-easy-for-my-daughter.html#latest

7

Can you talk about whether their is an athlete/non athlete divide? If so, is it all athletes, or just some teams?

8

@volleyball8120 Regarding admissions, my own admission story was a largely an unexceptional one. I applied early decision, had high standardized test scores (2300 at the time, so like… 1550 now?), wrote decent essays, and had pretty strong extracurriculars (I was the captain of two academic teams at my school).

That said, don’t take my admissions experience at Amherst as evidence that you should also follow the cookie-cutter “top student” model. A surprising number of people at Amherst actually fall outside of this mold. From what I’ve seen in the last 4 years, the school truly does emphasize diversity more than most other colleges. So while many students are admitted on a more generic basis (i.e. top students like myself, recruited athletes, legacy admits), I’d estimate that anywhere from a third to half the students at Amherst were probably admitted because they had interesting life stories, and could contribute to the “diversity” of the campus, and not just in a racial sense.

Mind you, all of these students were academically qualified as well. But once you reach a certain threshold (say, 1450 - 1500 on the SAT?), academic stats really don’t matter that much anymore. From there, all that matters is that you’re an interesting person with something to say about yourself, especially in the essays. One of my friends lives on a farm, so he wrote about farm life in his college essays-- he’s white, but that still counts as diversity in Amherst’s eye. An Asian friend of mine wrote about his efforts towards increasing political participation among Asian-Americans in his hometown, which is something that I know he’s truly passionate about. Another friend wrote about hunting, which is fun because it’s not something that a lot of students at top liberal arts colleges might be inclined to do. And so on.

9

@Dontskipthemoose

1. Work after graduation: Yep, Wall Street. After graduation, I’ll be working in a “front office” role at a well-known investment bank in New York-- I’d get more specific, but that’d probably make my identity too obvious.

My job recruitment experience at Amherst was quite interesting, and I could probably write a 20-30 paragraph spiel on the matter if I was so inclined. But to keep it brief, the finance recruiting opportunities at Amherst are quite good, if you know what you’re doing from early on. When I start work next month, my investment bank group will have four first-year analysts: a Harvard grad, a Wharton grad, a Columbia grad, and myself. In terms of recruitment, I probably had at least 90% the same opportunities at Amherst as my peers had at these other three colleges.

People are surprised by this, by professional firms apparently love liberal arts graduates. As far as I can tell, my lack of a formal business education has never inhibited me in the recruiting process. I had to learn some basic financial account independently, and I also had to habituate myself with reading the Wall Street Journal regularly, but otherwise, I don’t really feel like I was at a disadvantage versus students at undergraduate business schools. Scores of top financial firms recruit on-campus at Amherst-- Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Bain are the perennial favorites, but the list is long. Even when firms don’t recruit on campus, the Amherst name seems to carry a fair amount of heft in most business circles, at least within the Northeast.

I’ve also found the school’s alumni to be extremely helpful in a recruiting context. Over my four years at Amherst, I have probably networked–either spoken over the phone or in person–with nearly 100 alumni (it’s not normal to speak with this many people, but I had somewhat extenuating circumstances). And I’m happy to say that the vast majority of these alumni have always been eager to speak with me, as an interested student from their alma mater. In fact, I literally wouldn’t have the job I have right now, if it weren’t for an alumni passing along my resume back in October. That’s the benefits of going to a small school like Amherst, I suppose. I imagine that alumni at places like Wharton and Stanford must always been inundated with networking calls. In contrast, there’s probably only 60-80 people interested in finance at Amherst every year, so our alumni haven’t been worn out by a flood of student calls just yet.

That said, I don’t want to overstate the ease of recruiting at Amherst. In general, undergraduate recruiting for top-of-the-top firms is always a numbers game, even at the very best colleges. To give an example, I’d estimate that there are probably 50-60 students every year who want to get into investment banking at Amherst. Out of that 50-60, approximately 20-25 succeed. Relatively speaking, those are phenomenally good odds (compared to the recruiting lottery that characterizes many undergraduate business schools at major public institutions), but it’s definitely not a sure shot.

2. Extracurriculars: By my senior year, I was the president of two clubs at Amherst, one of which was recreational/vaguely academic, and other of which was semi-professional and related to business. For extracurriculars, I definitely emphasized quality over quantity; one thing I’ve noticed is that college is very different from high school in this regard. While high schoolers tended to join clubs/teams in order to pad their college applications (hey guys, you all know it’s true!), college students tend to join such organizations because they truly want to. Which is a nice change of mindset.

As a side note, I want to give the Amherst College administration a shoutout for the incredible amount of resources they put into supporting extracurricular activities on campus. While leading both of my clubs, I literally never had to worry about funding: if I ever needed $1000 to attend some event in New York (i.e. registration fees, hotel rooms, etc.), I could simply request it from the student government, and they would approve that funding for me nearly 100% of the time. If I ever needed a campus facility to host some event for my organization, I could book any building in the entire campus for a whole day, and for free. Having spoken with multiple friends at other colleges, I don’t know of any other college administration as generous with this stuff as Amherst’s.

3. anti-STEM mindset: This really depends on the groups you associate yourself with. I will be the first to admit that I’ve maintained a very “anti-STEM mindset” in my time at Amherst. Thanks to the open curriculum, I haven’t taken a single science class since I stepped foot on the freshman quad. Instead, I took a million classes in the social sciences, and I’ve loved every moment of it.

However, it’s somewhat misleading to claim that the student body is “anti-STEM” on a whole. The open curriculum merely exacerbates already-existing tendencies among certain groups of students. What this means is that there’s a large number of Amherst students who are anti-STEM, but there’s also a remarkably large number of Amherst students who are… anti-anti-STEM? I guess that would be called pro-STEM. For instance, there are a lot of science majors at Amherst, which apparently surprises people. Intro Biology and Intro Chemistry are the two largest regular classes taught at Amherst. A majority of my friends in freshman year were actually science majors. And my younger brother (who began attending Amherst this year!) plans to only take STEM classes throughout his time at Amherst, bless his heart. I think he’ll crack eventually and take a history class, but we’ll see.

I suspect that claims of an anti-STEM mindset at Amherst are the result of individual students’ friend groups. For example, students who are English majors tend to associate with other students who are also English majors. And since most English majors (understandably) aren’t huge fans of linear algebra, they soon come to believe that their friend group is representative of the entirety of the campus. Amherst’s open curriculum merely exacerbates such mindsets. But it’s probably misleading to extrapolate a single mindset onto the student body as a whole.

10

@57special

Yeah, there’s definitely an athlete/non-athlete divide at Amherst, and I think it’s somewhat disingenuous for people to claim otherwise. However, I also think the seriousness of this divide is somewhat overstated.

The divide happens on two levels: 1) athletes tend to hang out with their teammates, and 2) athletes tend to hang out with other athletes.

I think the first phenomenon (teammates hanging with teammates) is pretty understandable, because as an athlete, your sports team basically serves as a preexisting friend group. When students first arrive on campus in their freshman year, they don’t know anyone yet, unless they’re on a sports team. In which case, they start hanging out with their teammates, and suddenly that becomes their permanent friend group. As a result, guys on the lacrosse team tend to associate with other guys on the lacrosse team, guys on cross-country live with other guys on cross-country, etc. I don’t really think this is a super big problem, and I also don’t think there’s an obvious way to prevent it, since it tends to be something that just happens naturally.

The second phenomenon (athletes hanging with athletes) is a bit more pernicious, although also less widespread. For instance, the far room in Val is notorious for being the location where all of the athletes eat, whether they’re on the lacrosse team, the football team, or whatever. I think there’s a couple reasons why this sort of thing happens, but I suspect it’s partly because athletes at Amherst are relatively homogeneous, compared to the rest of the student body. In other words, Amherst athletes are more likely to be white and affluent than the average Amherst student.

However, although the divide is real and problematic, I also find claims about it to be somewhat overstated. For one, the divide largely appears to be voluntary to me. Honestly, Amherst athletes tend to be really friendly and approachable, and I haven’t observed team-based friend groups to be any more cliquey than your average college friend group. It’s not actually hard for non-athletes to befriend athletes, as I know lots of people who have done exactly that. It’s more the case that neither athletes nor non-athletes really try to befriend each other, probably because they’re comfortable with the friends that they already have. Unlike what you might see at Division I schools, the average Amherst athlete is largely like any other Amherst student. For instance, most of them are just as academically focused-- in the past, I’ve been especially impressed by some of the guys I’ve met on the lacrosse team.

So why do people make such a big deal about the divide? I suspect it’s because of demographics. I think that an athlete/non-athlete divide will naturally manifest itself in most schools. However, it’s more obvious at Amherst because we have a relatively small student body with a lot of sports teams, to the extent that 40% of our campus consists of athletes. When you’re at a large D1 school where 5% of the student body consists of athletes, nobody really notices when that 5% mainly socializes among themselves. In contrast, a lot more people notice when 40% of the student body does that.

11

Very useful, thanks, OP. As far as STEM at LACs, I agree with you. My kid attends a well-known LAC with an excellent and relatively new neuroscience program. If I mention this to people, they are amazed. People seem to have it in their heads that kids at LACs all study anthropology and macrame. Drives me nuts.

My D would also agree about the athlete/non athlete divide at her school. Her school has no Greek life. The athletes tend to fill the party void.

12

Thank you so much, all of your answers are extremely helpful and informative!!

13

Thanks for the non judgemental but informative post, OP. S1 is a very good student athlete of mixed race who likes to hang with a variety of people, not just athletes. Since we have family who lives in Amherst we had wondered if Amherst was a possibility for him.

On a more mundane level, glad to hear the food is getting better.

14

@57special Glad to be of help!

I’ll reiterate: at Amherst, there are no divides except the ones that people construct on their own volition. If your son is interested in hanging out with a wide variety of people, Amherst will absolutely give him the opportunity to do so. As an example, my first year roommate was on the swim team, but he literally never associated with any people from his team. Instead, my understanding is that his friend circle mainly consisted of chemistry students that he met in lab, and a bunch of Asian international students (of all things!).

Like so many other things at Amherst, your friend group is only what you make of it.

15

Thanks for the objective and informative posts. And congratulations on graduating and securing a top job!

16

OP, what area were you from originally, and where is your job? Are you staying in the NE? Did you find it a difficult adjustment to the Northeast. I know that it can be quite competitive and cliquey compared to the midwest where S1 is. BTW, he would probably enroll in Econ/Politics, etc., with maybe a bit of Stats thrown in.

17

@57special

Regarding the location of my job, I will (almost) literally be working on Wall Street in New York. Regarding my hometown, I’m originally from… somewhere warmer than the Northeast, that’s for sure.

In my first year of Amherst, my main difficulty was adjusting the weather, as I had never lived with snow before. But since your son is from the Midwest, I’m sure he’ll have no problems with that!

Culturally, I didn’t find it especially difficult to adjust to the Northeast. Broadly speaking, I think people tend to overstate cultural differences between varying parts of the U.S.; to be honest, one of the only distinctive cultural traits I’ve noticed about the Northeast is that people here tend to dress preppier. Also, Uber drivers here never try to talk to you, hah!

Specifically focusing on Amherst, I think it’s more important to consider the cultural idiosyncrasies of the college itself, than to consider the cultural traits of the Northeast region as a whole. Remember, Amherst is a pretty cosmopolitan place. So the culture of the campus doesn’t necessarily reflect the culture of the broader region (and again, I don’t think the culture of the Northeast region is actually that bad). Of the 15-20 friends within my immediate circle, only 5-6 were from the Northeast, and practically zero of them fit the preppy, competitive, “Type-A” stereotypes that one might imagine.

In general, most people at Amherst tend to be very friendly, and perhaps a slightly nerdy on average. As mentioned in my prior post, I’ve never witnessed academic competition between students-- to be honest, I don’t even know what that would look like. On a related note, it’s not very hard to make friends on campus. Unlike in high school, for instance, you rarely meet straight-out “jerks” at Amherst. As uncouth as that might sound, there’s actually a lot to be said for that.

18

This makes so much sense. I think the food at Val is great (based on 3 or so meals, granted), my D thinks it is just fine…and her diet limits her to mostly not-meat dishes. She’s 2 years in, by year 4 she may tire of it, I admit.

IDK how many colleges run their own food service instead of contracting it out, and have their own adjacent farm supplying it.

…and there are SO MANY events with free food from Amherst town restaurants. Dorm parties, speakers, lunches, club stuff - I think D has tried every restaurant in town just from on-campus events. We’ve gone to a restaurant or two on my visits that she found out about that way.

19

Hi, I just wanted to jump in here in response to @57special’s question regarding the athlete/non-athlete divide. As a current undergraduate student at Amherst (rising senior) and non-athlete, I have to say that your answer is a bit misleading. As someone who has been heavily involved in clubs, institutions (like the Center for Community Engagement), and admissions, it is impossible to disregard the structural elements that allow athletic membership to be divisive among the student body at Amherst (and I am speaking in regard to varsity athletics-- the cliquishness of club sports like frisbee are another story). While sure, your first-year roommate is a prime example of someone who was able to step out of the athletic circle and navigate through the plentiful social groups that exist within our diverse student body, I regret to say that in my experience, as someone not interacting with his team at all, he sounds like an anomaly. That being said, I know quite a few athletes who have managed to navigate social lives in and outside of their team, but there is still a large athlete population that interacts chiefly amongst themselves (or selected NARPs who have broken into their social circle). Having interacted with (an even befriending) athletes during my first year, and second year as an orientation trip leader, it is impossible to disregard the fact that the moment athletes step on campus, they are socialized with their respective athletic teams, creating little incentive for them to completely branch out and socialize with the rest of the student body. Additionally, the time constraints of practices, meetings, and organized team meals that encourage bonding among teams leave little time for varsity athletes to branch out with the non-athlete population. Moreover, I’d be remiss to disregard that the D3 recruitment process has been slow to accept recent diversity initiatives to open their recruitment pool (this varies by sport, of course). It is clear that attention to race/ethnicity/class diversity is not prioritized in the same way as the general student recruitment process, and while I do believe this is beginning to change, there is still a long way to go. That is not to say it is impossible to be friends with athletes as a non-athlete, or that the athlete/non-athlete divide is experienced linearly throughout one’s four years at Amherst (people change, interests change, friend groups divide and converge, of course), but it is not enough to say that divides exist out of one’s own “volition.” While Amherst does a great job of bringing students of all backgrounds to campus, it struggles structurally with its efforts toward inclusion, and this is something reinforced by the athlete/non-athlete divide.

20

@amherst_gal18 I don’t think you and I necessarily disagree on this matter.

Like you say, people respond to incentives. There are definitely structural factors within Amherst College that encourage athletes to befriend their teammates, by making it the “path of least resistance.” And once a sports team develops its own “clique,” non-athletes are disincentivized from breaking into that clique, because it’s naturally hard to make friends with people who already have a set group of other friends. It seems like both you and I recognize this.

The reason I say that the divide is out of students’ own “volition” is because most students choose not to break from this path, because doing so would be inconvenient and annoying. Athletes already have their own friends, and non-athletes already have their own friends. And so most students don’t see any point in shaking things up. However, if a student wishes to the cross the divide (i.e. my 1st-year roommate), I don’t think it’s especially hard to do at Amherst. In fact, I’d speculate that it’s easier at Amherst than at most other colleges. Yes, there are structural factors to consider, but I also think it’s important to account for the agency of students themselves.

As an aside, I didn’t care much for student athletics during my time at Amherst; to be honest, I would’ve preferred that we had no sports teams at all, but I recognize I’m probably in the minority there. So don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of the structural factors that underlie the divide.