<p>Hey! I am an international student and I hope you could help me out on choosing which school to attend! Thx~~~~ </p>
<p>Wesleyan and WashU both are great schools and I've been struggling ...</p>
<p>I'm interested in international relations/studies and other social sciences with some future interest in law, but I'm mainly UNDECIDED and I might be end up doing something completely different. (But I do know that I do not want to do engineering!)</p>
<p>I cannot do campus visit since I live abroad.Sad...</p>
<p>Things I'm considering:
-Academics!! (I really care about this, whether I could get enough attention from the professors, how intelligent and hard-working are my peers,the flexibility to choose courses/majors, name recognition for future jobs/graduate school(really important for me since I have to pay for my tuition after graduating!!))
-Quality of life (social life(really care about it...is students friendly toward international students??how's the peer pressure...nervous about it..), city(is it easy to get to other places/internship opportunities..))
-Study Abroad programs/career center/alumni network</p>
<p>BTW I am a girl who loves music, good food , traveling and making friends~I really hope to find a place I am comfortable with in the next four years~</p>
<p>I'd appreciate some comments on the strengths/weaknesses of each of these schools and I'm grateful for any and all insights or comments you can give! </p>
<p>Thank you everyone!!</p>
<p>This is a classic case of big school vs. small school strengths and weaknesses. Academically, I think Wesleyan and Washington are on a par with each other. Washington U. boasts a lot of Nobel Prize affiliations, including a role in the Manhattan Project that developed the nucear bomb during WWII. It has top-notch facilities and a fund-raisinng capacity which is matchless, but, it’s attentions are divided between, arts and science students, an engineering school, a business school and a design school - and that’s just the undergraduates. </p>
<p>Furthermore, in reading about Washington U. one gets the feeling that it suffers from many of the same insecurities of a small liberal arts college: lack of name recognition, no big-time sports and a student life that is largely limited to campus and its immediate environs. Despitre great strides made within the last twenty years to attract students (as late as 1995, it’s acceptance rate was a whopping 68%), I’d say its main competitors are still Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Emory and to some extent, Tufts.</p>
<p>Wesleyan, despite its university moniker, is only about one fifth the size of Washington. But, it has a very sharp image among those who are familiar with American colleges and universities. Ninety percent of its resources are devoted to a small, restless, often brilliant, community of arts and science majors. Although, Middletown is consdered a fairly large town with its own share of social problems, compared to St. Louis, MO, it is practially bucolic. Indeed, you could probably fit the entire main campus of Washington University inside Wesleyan’s sprawling footprint and still have room left over.</p>
<p>In summary, I don’t think either place is going to be jaw-droppingly familiar outside the United States, so the real question is going to boil down to whether you want a small community or a bigger one.</p>
<p>QUOTE]a small community or a bigger one.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you for your reply!!I think I will be comfortable in a small environment, I am kind of shy and I will be overwhelmed by the large campus…
Are you currently a Wes student? Can you tell me more about the academics in wes…as in research opportunities since I might consider major in something like cognitive science or psychology! Thx!
@circuitrider</p>
<p>@blackcherry
No, I’m an ancient grad. One of my classmates is on the board of trustees and has made studying and analyzing Wesleyan’s science footprint part of their life’s work. According to them, there’s almost nothing out there that can quite compare to the research and scientific community at Wesleyan; a small number of doctoral programs garner so much outside funding (Wesleyan was the #1 recipient of government sponsored research among small colleges over a recent six year period) that undergraduates aren’t merely tolerated as at most larger universities; they are an absolutely crucial component. </p>
<p>Here’s an interview with someone who was only a rising junior at the time and he was already involved in an interest very similar to yours:
<a href=“Ribner ’14 Studying Spatial Navigation, Early Number Knowledge”>http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2012/07/31/ribner/</a></p>