<p>Do these places exist? Are there colleges where people are both intellectuals and party animals?</p>
<p>Stanford, Dartmouth, Duke.</p>
<p>Wesleyan, if you’re looking for LACs.</p>
<p>MIT…best parties.</p>
<p>Penn</p>
<p>Sent from my ADR6300 using CC</p>
<p>I second the Stanford, Dartmouth, Duke, Penn and add Mich and UVA.</p>
<p>Damn, should have gone to Wesleyan</p>
<p>To add to the list, Cornell, Vanderbilt, and Northwestern.</p>
<p>Years ago, Playboy used to disqualify UVA and Dartmouth from its annual drinking school rankings on the grounds that the competition was only open to amateurs, not professionals.</p>
<p>I would not call UVA, Dartmouth, Duke, Penn, Vanderbilt or Stanford ‘intellectual.’</p>
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<p>If Dartmouth and Stanford are not intellectual than I cannot conceive what your criteria is.</p>
<p>As someone who lives near Duke and has friends who go there, I will agree that they are QUITE the partiers. I’d also add Wake Forest to that list.</p>
<p>^ schools like Chicago and Columbia heavily market themselves as “intellectual,” implying that other universities like Stanford, Dartmouth, Harvard, etc. are not as intellectual as they are. It’s complete BS. It’s largely (but not exclusively) predicated on the idea that a core curriculum - specifically, an emphasis on the humanities, philosophy, classics, etc. - makes a school “intellectual.” Meanwhile, Stanford just eliminated its required three-class Introduction to the Humanities and replaced it with a class that focuses on college-level inquiry in any discipline, not just the humanities. This doesn’t make Stanford less intellectual - just a different kind of intellectualism. Most prospective students who are hoodwinked by those absurd claims by Chicago, Columbia, etc. don’t understand that there are different kinds of intellectualism (that of MIT is very different from that of Stanford, of Yale, of Duke, etc.), and none is better than another.</p>
<p>I’d just like a school where people care about ideas and learning, but also like to get plastered. Is that too much to ask? My college experience has found that it’s nearly impossible to find that combo. Hell, it’s nearly impossible to find kids who are actually intellectual, and not people who just study for the sole sake of having a good GPA.</p>
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<ol>
<li>OP asks for advice</li>
<li>OP is given advice</li>
<li>OP disregards advice</li>
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<p>Did we not answer your question?</p>
<p>You’re not going to get good responses unless you define what “intellectual” means to you. “Party” is also variable, but most posters get what you’d mean by that. Not so for “intellectualism,” which is highly variable and arbitrary.</p>
<p>Do you just want a super smart student body that parties like a state university?</p>
<p>I heard Vanderbilt is somewhat of a party school. It really depends on your definition of “party” as well, though. UChicago students have told me that there are parties there, but they really differ from those at public schools or larger private schools.</p>
<p>And in response to the comment made by Ghostt, if Dartmouth and Stanford are not, by your criteria, categorized as “intellectual,” what is? I’m just curious to know–I’ve actually heard something along those lines regarding Dartmouth, but why do you say that?</p>
<p>My S is highly intellectual. And a student at Dartmouth, which–to everyone’s surprise–he picked over the U of C. </p>
<p>As a former U of C grad student, I can testify to the fact that people do in fact party there.</p>
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<p>I would counter this question with a question I find more appropriate: Why *would *you call Dartmouth or Duke or Stanford intellectual? These are schools that offer pre-professional majors, opportunities and preparation; whose alumni networks and career services are especially good at finding recent grads high-paying jobs in finance, the tech industry and the like; whose student bodies are heavily engaged in sports and other non-academic extracurriculars; where the average GPA is 3.4-3.5; etc. etc. etc.</p>
<p>These aren’t bad things; in fact, for some people, these can all be great things. But they certainly make it hard for me to call Duke or Stanford intellectual. I mean, granted, ‘intellectual’ is a fuzzy label and could potentially mean anything. What I mean when I’m applying it to a college, however, is a school where most students are interested in knowledge for its own sake, like to challenge themselves and to be challenged (i.e. academic masochism where you create extra work for yourself and actually enjoy the stress of being perpetually buried under a mountain of homework), regard grades and gainful employment as secondary concerns, think and talk about what they learn in class all the time, spend most of their time in the library, etc. And then there’s the other side of it: an intellectual school’s curriculum would be one based on primary sources (i.e. no textbooks), extensive/excessive writing assignments (no easy As), and student-teacher interaction (limited use of lectures and TAs). It would also have to be, well, impractical (no business classes, credit awarded for internships, separate science classes for majors and non-majors, etc.). Intellectualism is all about doing mentally exhausting stuff that has no tangible, readily apparent benefits.</p>
<p>Again, I’m not saying the type of intellectual school I describe is superior. It’s just that the term ‘intellectual’ implies a preoccupation with learning for its own sake rather than as a means to an end, and that is not something I would ever attribute to the student bodies of Stanford, Duke or Dartmouth (in general–of course there must be plenty of brooding intellectuals at these schools, but they do not dominate the academic culture, which is one where self-assured, career-oriented go-getters stand out).</p>
<p>As for my sources: friends and ex-classmates of mine who go to the aforementioned universities, as well as people at my own school who turned down Dartmouth and Duke because they did not find them sufficiently ‘intellectual.’ They are reportedly soaked in beer, however, so that’s one thing the OP should be happy about.</p>
<p>Well Ghostt has completely and accurately described my definition of intellectual.</p>
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Is there truly no interaction or connection between the two? You are either an intellectual academic devoid of professional goals or a grade-grubbing pre-professional student with little serious interest in academics? I think not. </p>
<p>A quick rundown of my closest friends at Duke:
[ul][<em>]Theatre major. Heavily active in musical theatre, animal activism, Model UN. Wrote and directed his own play. Now working for a stage company in DC.
[</em>]Classics major. Spent every summer digging in Sicily. Knows 7 languages, 5 of them dead and 4 of them learned at Duke. Now in law school at Stanford.
[<em>]Linguistics major. Did field research in SC working with the Gullah people and Chile working to document and preserve an endangered language. Now working as a Turkish expert for the CIA. Wrote and performed slam poetry, tutored local kids in English, and published his senior thesis.
[</em>]Biology major. Arrived at Duke with zero lab experience. Mapped the genome of a dangerous fungus and was published in two top-notch science journals. Won Goldwater and Marshall scholarships. Now a researcher at Cambridge. Tutored local kids in math/science and was president of the Biology majors union.
[<em>]Sociology/religion double major. Organized literature readings on campus, wrote a thesis on kinship terms in early Semitic languages, had taken several graduate (not undergraduate/graduate) courses by graduation, volunteered in the women’s center and Hillel. Won a fellowship to study gender roles in rural Thailand after graduation.
[</em>]Art history major. Studied art history in Italy, China, and Mexico. Curated her own exhibition in the campus museum and contributed extensively to a museum catalogue. Volunteered in the children’s wing of the Duke Hospital by offerings crafts workshops. Also did debate and dance. Now working as a museum registrar in Cairo and applying to PhD programs in art history.
[li]Environmental science major. Did research on turtle tracking and the effect of pesticides on crabs. Spent as much time as possible at the marine lab. Helped organize Earth Day. Member of Duke Sustainability, Duke philosophical society. Lived in the Smart Home. Picked up a history minor for fun and combined his two interests with an independent study on the impact of Rachel Carson on the environmental movement. Now working on a MS in fisheries management. [/ul][/li]Are these people “intellectual”? I don’t know. I do know that they were very passionate about their interests, which included academic, social, and activist aspects. I do know that they took their schoolwork seriously, spoke highly of their classes and professors, and were willing to talk your ear off about their majors, current issues, or something fun they’d come across. </p>
<p>You can be pre-med and still be fascinated by biology, still want to research and learn, explore and publish. You can be a pre-law political science major and still want to read Aristotle and Machiavelli in the original. </p>
<p>Sometimes I wonder if the differences between the top colleges are that great. Do they truly vary in intensity and passion? Do all of these students, who worked so hard in high school to get where they are, suddenly lose interest in academics in favor of sports and flip cup? References to books being read, difficulty of course load, and obscure majors – one wonders if they are markers of intellectualism…or sciolism.</p>