<p>Hello,
I'm looking for a school full of wonderful, creative weirdos. Preferably science nerds, but not necessarily. Somewhere with an MIT feel to it, but not quite so hard to get into. I'm trying to find a place where drinking and frat parties aren't the main weekend activities. I'm also looking for an excellent physics department. Can you please give me a list of schools I should look at?</p>
<p>Thanks for your help!</p>
<p>Definitely look into UChicago. If you're open to LACs, Swarthmore especially is known to be very academically-oriented. </p>
<p>Also, be sure to give MIT and Caltech a shot, even if you don't think you'll get in. You never know. :)</p>
<p>Take a look at Carnegie Mellon.</p>
<p>Swat, Chicago and any engineering school.</p>
<p>Case Western</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd's something you should look at.</p>
<p>"I'm trying to find a place where drinking and frat parties aren't the main weekend activities."</p>
<p>"Harvey Mudd's something you should look at."</p>
<p>im gonna disagree here, HMC is probably not somewhere you want to look at if you dont want drinking to be the main focus of the campus.</p>
<p>Really? The stereotype is that studying is the main focus on campus, and that students rarely do anything else.</p>
<p>I think anyone out to find a school w/out drinking is going to be massively disappointed.</p>
<p>From Princeton to a fourth-tier community college, 18-22 year olds consume alcohol.</p>
<p>That's exactly right. People drink at practically every college. And that doesn't mean you have to drink or that they cease to be interesting people because they drink.
In any case, St. John' College (<a href="http://www.sjca.edu%5B/url%5D">www.sjca.edu</a>) is an extremely nerdy school.</p>
<p>Lots of kids party pretty hard at MIT too. Being nerdy does not preclude drinking. Unless you go to a conservative religious school, there will always be a drinking crowd.</p>
<p>Drinking's not a bad thing, but having it be the only thing people do for fun is. At some colleges drinking is the primary form of entertainment. I'm sure every college has some groups of students for which this is the case, but what I'm looking for is colleges that have large subcultures of students who have better things to do than drink excessively. Not straight-edge people, but just normal people who drink once in a while but can have fun without relying on alcohol. I'm looking for a student body where a large number of people like to build things, explore the nearby town, teach themselves a new skill from a book, play video games, and talk about physics and philosophy. Does this make sense?</p>
<p>I think it's difficult to ascertain which colleges would have this since student bodies change and such, but I'd say Case Western and Carnegie Mellon have good "scenes" for what you're looking for. I've been searching for similar colleges myself, but I think it all depends upon the type of people you meet. There are party animals, boozehounds, video gamers, MMORPGers, and philosophers at basically every college. I'm sure even conservative religious schools have "underground" drinking networks because their students are bored of conformity. That's quite a wide assumption to make, but I guess it depends on how conservative of a college you're talking about. Is it more Newt Gingrich conservative or Joe Lieberman conservative? :)</p>
<p>"I'm looking for a school full of wonderful, creative weirdos. Preferably science nerds, but not necessarily. Somewhere with an MIT feel to it, but not quite so hard to get into. I'm trying to find a place where drinking and frat parties aren't the main weekend activities. I'm also looking for an excellent physics department."
Sounds exactly like harvey mudd. HMC competes with MIT, and its students are just as smart (about same avg SAT scores and such), but it has an acceptance rate 3x as high, around 36%. It has its weirdos. I read in NY times awhile back it had a unicycle club, with many avid members. Another article in LA times magazine, about a child prodigy who goes to HMC, said people do "crack" alot, that is, board games. It's got an excellent physics dept, and has the other claremont colleges around it. I dont know about social life. Check their brochure, its not the typical pretentious college brochure.</p>
<p>(Mudd's social life <em>is</em> inclusive of some heavy drinking, but it's by no means required. Natural eccentricity is the name of the social game, not drunkenly-inspired eccentricity.)</p>
<p>Amherst and UChicago? i mean judging from what you said maybe you should just go to Brigham Young haha.</p>
<p>um, msd, why are you asking if you are already at MIT, according to one of your posts? Different person, or asking for someone else?</p>
<p>"Drinking's not a bad thing, but having it be the only thing people do for fun is. At some colleges drinking is the primary form of entertainment. I'm sure every college has some groups of students for which this is the case, but what I'm looking for is colleges that have large subcultures of students who have better things to do than drink excessively. Not straight-edge people, but just normal people who drink once in a while but can have fun without relying on alcohol. I'm looking for a student body where a large number of people like to build things, explore the nearby town, teach themselves a new skill from a book, play video games, and talk about physics and philosophy. Does this make sense?"</p>
<p>Caltech then. 1/3 of student body abstains (contrasted with 1/5 national average), and they build wacky things and play video games REALLY REALLY well...(midnight DDR party! yeah!)</p>
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Caltech then. 1/3 of student body abstains (contrasted with 1/5 national average), and they build wacky things and play video games REALLY REALLY well...(midnight DDR party! yeah!)
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<p>But the OP wanted somewhere easier than MIT to get into. I do not believe that would be Caltech. :)</p>
<p>Me: Accepted to Caltech, rejected from MIT
(Illogical) conclusion: Caltech is easier to get into than MIT is</p>