<p>umcp11 - But what if I have an appointment at 6:45? I’d have to take the 6pm bus and sit around for a while. Etc. If the bus ran every 10 minutes, I might feel differently about disregarding a commute-required factor.</p>
<p>FYI, people who dislike cities are usually the same people who don’t like taking buses.</p>
<p>In this particular case, Smith’s immediate town is larger than Wellesley’s immediate town. Some posters have argued that Boston “counts” as part of Wellesley’s immediate surroundings; it may for SOME people.</p>
<p>Not sure while Keil is getting involved in this discussion. She is going very far from Smith and Wellesley, to Swarthmore.</p>
<p>My D will be going to MHC this fall and I have visited Smith, MHC and Amherst many times. They are located in a very pleasant place, with lots of nice stores and restaurants. Smith has more close to it than MHC, but I still envy my D, as everything is no more than a free bus ride away.</p>
<p>As I went to MIT and visited Wellesley quite a few times over the 4 years (and even knew a few Wellesley girls), and we visited Wellesley last year on a college road trip, I can also speak about Wellesley to some extent. The town of Wellesley is (now) nice too – stores, etc. Getting to MIT & Harvard is easy with the cheap college bus. It does take about 45 minutes or so, and you end up in Cambridge. Maybe it also stops in Boston too, I dunno. You can also take the trolley into boston from a stop (Riverside?) nearby Wellesley (I did that after the great snow of January 1978 when cars were prohibited in the Boston area). I had a car in college for the last 2 years which enabled me to visit Wellesley lots. The ride was not too long, especially if one was in “party” mode with a few friends.</p>
<p>At MIT, Boston was across the river and within sight. In the 4 years I was there, I can count on my hands the times I went to Boston for fun. Most of my college life was on campus (or at Wellesley). It ultimately didn’t really matter that Boston was so close.</p>
<p>So, from my personal experience, the most important factor is the life on the college campus, and most colleges have a very active life on campus to keep students entertained at low cost.</p>
<p>^I’m involved because I was reading it–I read a lot of threads unrelated to what I’m going to do myself–and I have strong opinions regarding people who automatically assume that big city nearby > eclectic town within walking distance.</p>
<p>“…let’s say you want to go into Boston to study at your favorite coffee shop or the Boston public library or whatever. Then you find when you got there that you’ve left your key text at school.”</p>
<p>This would apply to a Smithie, too :P. Say you wanted to go to X town not within walking distance for your favorite coffee shop or the public library, then you realized you forgot your textbook. Conversely, it’s not like there AREN’T libraries and coffee shops in the town of Wellesley. </p>
<p>Secondly, chronic disorganization and/or bad priorities are a character failure, so it seems to be misappropriation to say that it’s a bad thing we should attribute to Wellesley as a college.</p>
<p>“- But what if I have an appointment at 6:45”</p>
<p>Once again how is that different from anywhere else? Say you get out of class at 6, and your friend is meeting you for dinner at 7. Then you have to…sit around for awhile. Good thing most women’s college students have a lot of reading to do for class! What is wrong with bringing your textbook or poli sci theory print out along with you? Is it that inconvenient to throw a book in your backpack? (Something you might do even in Northampton at various times, I imagine). </p>
<p>So I guess the thread emerging here is if you don’t like buses, don’t like cities, and are chronically disorganized, Wellesley may not be in a good location for you. Fair points.</p>
<p>^Because I don’t want to sit around in a city. I’d much rather sit around in my dorm room or the library or on the lovely campus quad, where I might meet friends and strike up conversation, etc. You could, of course, make the argument that coffee shops offer similar conversational opportunities, but THAT requires a specific type of personality (about the same level of specificity as being “chronically disorganized”).</p>
<p>“Because I don’t want to sit around in a city. I’d much rather sit around in my dorm room or the library or on the lovely campus quad”</p>
<p>Well, I find the dorm room and the library horrendously boring and would never “sit around” in there if I could sit around in a city, instead.</p>
<p>Campus quad, perhaps, in the summer months (too brief as they are in the Northeast). </p>
<p>I see what’s emerging then is that the plus of small schools in cool, albeit small, towns is that they are in a “bubble”. The bubble is good because you’re seeing the same faces…a cool college town has a different sense of community than one where you might want to be traveling to a nearby, larger city more frequently.</p>
<p>I find this wholly unadventurous, but then, there’s a downside-upside to everything. I consider UMCP similar to Wellesley in crappiness of college town (well, Wellesley is probably a lot more awesome, not gonna lie) versus distance from city (College Park is probably closer to DC than Wellesley is to Boston). And it’s true that the College Park culture could use a real boost, and if you travel into DC to get your culture, it can be a lot more of a solitary experience (ex. you’re not bumping into people you know in DC all that much, whereas you would in the college town). </p>
<p>I’m the type of person that doesn’t NEED to be seeing faces I know all of the time, and in fact, that annoys me, but certainly others would feel differently.</p>