<p>Middletown = the only bad thing about Wes lol. It’s not the worst location thought. But interesting that this thread was bumped after a year, and monydad has ventured over from the Cornell thread. :o</p>
<p>Let’s face it, dormitory life can get pretty stale after sophomore year, and I don’t care how good a particular college’s cafeteria food is, there is nothing quite like getting off the meal-plan grid and planning and preparing your own meals to suit your own tastes, in your own living space. Travel to any other SLAC and the towns are either too small or too expensive to have any housing stock available for students. That makes up for Middletown’s disadvantages, IMHO.</p>
<p>…mentions Wesleyan and its relationship with downtown:
[Creating</a> a friendly place for business | Hartford Business](<a href=“http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/news20200.html]Creating”>http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/news20200.html)</p>
<p>We greatly enjoyed Main Street in Middletown during our short stay this week…loved the Asian Noodle House and Tavern we had dinners at, loved the homemade ice cream place, were glad to see many convenient businesses for the college kids (drug store, market etc), and there were several additional restaurants we wanted to try. There were also some lovely historical buildings and older churches that added character. We were there one night till well after dark and felt completely safe; lots of people around. </p>
<p>My family actually lives in a college town that usually gets great kudos for the main street area, and we thought that Middletown compared very favorably to it (by the way my family LIKES that most of Main Street is small businessed and not chain stores…for us at least, nothing worse than a Main Street made up of the Gap and Old Navy and fast food outlets).</p>
<p>I agree that Middletown’s Main Street today really adds a very positive addition to the Wesleyan experience. In addition to sampling some of the fancier restaurants that for the most part will be outside my freshman son’s budget, this week we got him signed up at the Rite-Aid pharmacy, and he noticed a number of shops that he would want to explore some time, along with a couple pizza joints and coffee houses that he will no doubt visit (and which accept WesCard for payment). When I attended Wes many years ago–when the school was still overwhelmingly male and half the size of today–Main Street was a much grittier place, but even then not at all unsafe. It is exciting to see how it has evolved and how it offers Wes students a way to easily escape campus for awhile when it starts to feel like a bubble. This really stands in contrast to many of the other northeastern liberal arts colleges which either have no nearby downtown or one that is unsafe or unpleasant.</p>
<p>^^An article in yesterday’s Middletown Press illustrates a number of your points, morganhil. Forty years ago, The Community Health Center was the brainstorm of a local resident who enlisted the help of some Wesleyan students. If Middletown were any smaller, it would have been a typical college town populated mostly by faculty and wealthy professionals; any bigger, and interactions with non-students would have been a lot more problematic and with a lot more baggage attached. Yet somehow, it was just the right combination of stable, small town life and enough “gritty” reality to serve as the political incubator for a future governor:</p>
<p>[Community</a> Health Center officially opens new facility in Middletown - The Middletown Press : Serving Middletown, CT](<a href=“http://middletownpress.com/articles/2012/05/07/news/doc4fa755117b9b1010483081.txt]Community”>http://middletownpress.com/articles/2012/05/07/news/doc4fa755117b9b1010483081.txt)</p>
<p>You are right on target, JohnWesley, with the article about the Community Health Center and Wesleyan’s involvement in this Main Street institution. My son worked there this year as a freshman, and it is emblematic of the deep–and growing ties between Middletown and Wesleyan. The Center is as supportive to Wes students as Wesleyan is to the Center. This work experience allowed him and several of his peers to integrate into the Middletown community and in fact, begin to understand what are the citizen’s responsibilities to the community. Relationships like this are also part of the University’s new Certificate in Civic Engagement, which is similar to an academic minor, with a defined set of courses that rolls up into the awarding of this Certificate at graduation. One aspect of this is the Practicum, which is typically a fairly significant volunteer experience in Middletown. I will say it again, and repeat it frequently every time a new poster asks about this, but having a dynamic–and safe–Main Street just a short walk away from campus is nothing but beneficial to the overall Wesleyan Experience. You won’t find this at Williams, at Middlebury, at Hamilton nor at many other of the top liberal arts colleges. It helps prevent many students from living in the “bubble” while at Wesleya n and it is one factor among many that helps students, if they elect to become involved, become better prepared for the world beyond the university.</p>