<p>What do you love about Barnard?</p>
<p>Carolinebillet, just a slight highjack of your thread. This is a good question because eventually you have to like the place where you are going to spend four years. Often this decision is made at a gut level very much like falling in love rather than a conscious decision base on stats and reading about the place.
Our D fell in love with New York City during a choir tour in her freshman year in HS. This was rather suprising to us because we had pegged her as an introvert. (This is in the Meier-Briggs sense of finding large gatherings tiring rather than being quiet. She is a "talkative introvert" while one of her best friends in HS is a "quiet extrovert".) We took the college tours and thought she would prefer Wellesley or Bryn Mawr, because of the architecture and suburban atmosphere. The reason she looked at so many women's colleges is that she went to a girls HS that had a common campus with a boy's HS with a coordinate structure, so the idea of a women's college and women's issues was not foreign to her. On the accepted student tour she and two other accepted students skipped the lectures and rode the subway to go shopping. So her decision was as are many made on a basis of feeling at home rather than stats or prospective major.
Being at Barnard is largely about being in New York and the distractions of the city. D saw 6 operas, 5 Broadway musicals, and 2 plays in the first semester. Other girls worked on TV and RAdio. Some were into going out others not. There are abundant intership and job opportunities.
The campus has the curious feel of being suburban while right out the front gate you're back in New York.</p>