<p>I was recently doing research on UVa, because it's currently my first choice school. However, I was a little worried to find that most people felt UVa was a very preppy school. Yes, I know the greek scene is very large at UVa (which I like..I hope to rush if I go here!) yet I'm not overly preppy or rich...ie I don't walk around waving daddy's plastic everywhere. I also read people get very dressed up for class and football games. Anyway, the point I'm getting at...is this what it's really like? Is the student body truly diverse? I tend to have a variety of friend types, I can get along with all types of people and hope to find all of these people in college. What is the scene/student body really like at UVa?</p>
<p>You have to take some of those college guides with a grain of salt. There are subsets of the UVA population that dress up and prefer to wave daddy’s credit card, but I don’t think they are the majority. Neither myself nor my close friends fit into that category. Even as dressing up for games goes, that too has seen changes over time. Many students dress casually in school colors/t-shirts/jeans for games since the whole “Sea of Orange” movement.</p>
<p>Being preppy doesn’t mean that they’re spoiled or rich, it’s just their choice of clothing and style. I don’t dress preppy and neither do my friends, so there is a lot of diversity. As for the plastic part, a lot of the students are really rich, but there are a lot of middle class too, and a few people on full aid.</p>
<p>I’m not going to lie though, half of the white(some other races I’ve seen too but mostly white from what I’ve seen here) guys here almost wear the same thing and they look alike too. Salmon colored shorts with a dress shirt. The game today had some guys in ties and girls in dresses and pearls but there were a some people that didn’t even wear a shirt and just wore a tie just to make fun of the people who dressed up. Most people were dressed in an orange/blue shirt.</p>
<p>You can definitely tell Hoos a first year and Hoos not by what they wear. A lot of the first years wear casual shorts and just a t shirt but then as they go up the years, they begin to get preppier and preppier(what my RA told me too).</p>
<p>This is a public school with 14,000 undergraduate students. It’s impossible to use any single word to describe the “style” of the student body.</p>
<p>If you assess your comfort with your classmates by the clothes they wear, I bet you’ll be comforted by my unscientific assessment of student wardrobes:
[Notes</a> from Peabody: The UVA Application Process: Fitting in at UVa](<a href=“http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2010/12/fitting-in-at-uva.html]Notes”>Notes from Peabody: The UVA Application Process: Fitting in at UVa)</p>
<p>“Preppy” seems to imply “neat” sometimes. I think it’s only natural to want to appear more mature as you are getting ready to step into the real world, which is why you can notice a difference in appearance between first years and fourth years.</p>
<p>I will say that I was a little sad when a tour guide I first met as a second year cut his wild, huge hair as a fourth year. One of our offices student workers used to experiment quite a bit with hair dye and he went with a simple, brown color around the time he started interviewing for jobs. It made sense, though. They were probably going to lots of interviews.</p>
<p>The student body is truly diverse, and you will notice that immediately. However, a lot of people do choose to dress “preppy.” It is just a trend, and by no means should one feel like they have to go buy a pair of boat shoes and some Polo dress shirts to fit in. I used to subscribe to that style, but I like changing it up now to be different. Just because someone wears nice looking clothes doesn’t make them rich; there is a wide variety of people here from every economic background imaginable. On a side note, I personally hate our tradition of wearing ties and pearls to football games (not that a majority do it, but it still is considered “tradition”). It doesn’t help the perception that we’re a soft program. If we were consistently going to bowl games then I think we could get away with it.</p>
<p>We were at the game on Saturday. Son started there in 2005 and noticed much more of the dressing up back then by the guys than I did this time. Still lots of guys dressing up but seemed to be much less. The women seemed like they still are dressing up more( saw lots of short dresses) but in general the whole vibe seemed less formal/dressy. More informal/diverse vibe but that is just my observation . Lots of t shirts, etc.</p>
<p>Since beginning at UVA in 2010, my son has acquired purple hair, an eyebrow ring, and multiple cartilage piercings. So YMMV.</p>
<p>My S is a very artsy, hipster kid. UVA has all types of students and that’s what makes it so fantastic. You can always find a nitch. He is a 1st year and loves it so far!</p>
<p>Thank you to everyone for your insight! It’s very helpful :)</p>
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<p>Not enough of those folks in science. =(</p>
<p>He’s double majoring in Physics and Fine arts, so there’s at least one! :)</p>
<p>also the girls in physics, though outnumbered by boys by a ratio of about 2:1, are usually girls-in-pearls or hipsterish or California-cool. They seem to have a genuine love for their subject, as opposed to the rising tide of premeds in chemistry.</p>
<p>I approve.</p>
<p>It’s not really about the Greeks, because the Greeks in physics are awesome and cool (I’m talking about actual Greeks you might see at Boylan or Elliewood, not members of science fraternities). Yet their crowd in biology, and to an extent, chem, is awful. And I say this is as a biochem major.</p>
<p>^^ See, it’s this variety that makes it so great! I just think the college guide books are repeating discriptions that are a bit out of date. There’s obviously a lot more variation in the student body than is realized to the outside world. I bought into the preppy thing too. And as to my S, he had no chance of being “normal”, lol! Raised by hipsters, and his grandparents were hippies…he never had a chance :)</p>