<p>Whitman belongs on this list I think. My son noticed it right away when he went on an admissions visit and now in his first year confirms it is consistently true. I have been struck each time I've been there with how generally happy, warm, relaxed and friendly everyone is. Definitely nice kids--and definitely not dull. Academics are demanding but spirit is very collaborative and kids have a lot of fun.</p>
<p>Villanova has a good Engineering College, and the students are a happy bunch, for the most part. One anecdote fwiw: my dd (freshman) is taking an engineering math class, although she is a liberal arts kid, and found the professor fantastic, and the engineering students she met quite nice.</p>
<p>Also, WPI and RPI are worth checking out.</p>
<p>"At the moment she is looking at small schools that teach engineering, in the places where it snows."</p>
<p>Smith. Only 4-year engineering program in the country that guarantees graduate admission to Princeton, Dartmouth, UMichigan, Notre Dame, JHU, and Tufts with a 3.5 GPA. Small (and very competitive for engineering), and it DOES SNOW!</p>
<p>I thought smithies were nice--and it snows in western MA, and they have engineering. there's less snow in VA, but Sweet Briar is the 2nd women's college to offer engineering, and i've liked the few people i've met from there.</p>
<p>Maybe also look into schools in Minnesota--definitely have the snow, and "minnesota nice" is more than just a cliche, from the people I've met who come from the state. I know state Us have engineering, but am not sure about Carleton, Macalester, St. Olaf's, etc.</p>
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So the question is, where do those kids we all meet go to college? You know the ones I mean, the ones that have natural exhuberance combined with an innate likeableness and decency. The ones that make you smile before you've met them, just by the way they carry themselves.
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<p>That describes by S who goes to Berkeley. They have a great Engineering school (my niece is a first year there too). Of course, it doesn't snow in Berkeley, but given this winter's weather (cold in Berkeley, warm in New York), that may be changing.</p>
<p>There is a range of students at Berkeley - friendly, enthusiastic, competitive, struggling, searching to find themselves, etc. I'm not sure what the OP is trying to find, or more possbily trying to avoid, but I would think twice about a school that has a very homogeneous population. If OP is just looking for a 'happy' place, then it may be better to know where to stay away from, as I think many schools have friendly, motivated students.</p>
<p>On another note, welcome back to CC</p>
<p>We found really great kids at both Lafayette and Muhlenberg; unfortunately,my son #2, who is a high school senior, decided these schools were just a little too small for him. However, my son #3, a sophomore like your daughter, has put both of these schools on his early list because of what his brother has said.</p>
<p>We also found really nice kids at the University of Denver (very good merit money there) and at George Mason, two schools son #2 is seriously considering, and also at Indiana. He's in at all three and will have to decide among them. He's waiting for a few more decisions, but these three have been his front-runners all along. They are about as different from one another as night and day, but he has reasons for liking each of them, and all of them will let him do a double major in public policy and business (of course, subject to change!)</p>
<p>It's been so different this time around--son # 1 fell in love with Emory (nice kids there too), applied ED at what was basically a match school for him because he was applying ED, and that was the beginning and the end of it for him. </p>
<p>Enjoy the hunt!</p>
<p>We really liked the kids we met at Villanova and Tufts. But the kids we've met at Dartmouth through our son are just great -- friendly, not pretentious, polite, bright etc. All of these schools have engineering programs.</p>
<p>Denison, Colgate, Sewanee, Lehigh, and Vanderbilt are probably the schools where I encountered the friendliest students.</p>
<p>As for not so friendly students... Wesleyan was by far the worst, followed by UVa</p>
<p>Denison, Colgate, Sewanee, Lehigh, and Vanderbilt are probably the schools where I encountered the friendliest students.</p>
<p>As for not so friendly students... Wesleyan was by far the worst, followed by UVa</p>
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I'm always impressed by the friendliness and lack of pretense of the Caltech kids.
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<p>I had much the same impression. Good natured teasing of our tourguide. Things like that. It's a place worth visiting - I think you can very easily tell if it's your kind of quirkiness or not.</p>
<p>We have liked schools we read about in Lauren Pope's book Colleges that Change Lives. We've checked out various happiest kids lists too.
The issue we've run across is happy high income money/cars/clothes values type kids vs 'the rest of us'.
This DD has applied to Fordham, Holy Cross, Eckerd, St. Mary's Maryland -that's a public btw, Dickinson, Skidmore, Rutgers (not sure on happy but fine engineering and she can live in all girls science dorm) and St. Michael's in Vermont. For $25 you can snow all winter at Smugglers Notch. Of course first we'd need some SNOW! That seems to be the truely friendliest one out there, and they do have engineering, of a sort..</p>
<h2>We offer students a choice of two five-year cooperative programs, one with the University of Vermont and one with Clarkson University. </h2>
<p>It seems to me, from engineering majors I've known that it is such an workload that the department attitude is more important that just how the kids are on campus. Also, keep mentioning WISE programs Women in Science and Engineering. A school with this program wil offer her lots more support in the major.
The other very kind and friendly campuses we heard about were Tulane, U. Scranton, W&M, Emory and Sewanee.</p>
<p>There are "nice" kids at every school really -- I mean, I can't think of a single school that is completely comprised of ax murderers, rapists, and gangsters. They tend to be otherwise occupied. :) And friendliness is often a matter of feeling like you "fit" with the overall vibe of the student body. For example, some of the schools mentioned as being "Friendly" and "full of nice kids" above felt exactly the opposite to my daughter -- and I'm sure some kids would have the same reaction to the school she currently attends, where she constantly comments about how "nice" and "friendly" everyone is. That's not to say that her school or the schools mentioned above aren't full of nice and friendly kids, it's just that individual perceptions vary so much.</p>
<p>So, I think it's a futile effort for everyone to list schools with "nice" kids because each of us is likely to have a different definition of what constitutes "nice" and "friendly" and, well, there really are "nice" and "friendly" kids everywhere, depending on how well you "fit" with the prevailing campus culture.</p>
<p>Instead, I would encourage the OP to get her daughter to to focus in a little more on the type of kids that the OP's daughter is looking for -- what is her personality like? What are her high school friends like? What are the people she considers "nice" in her high school like? How would she describe herself? What type of people make her uncomfortable? What type of people does she consider "her" people? And, then I'd go from there in finding schools that "fit" HER definition of nice and friendly. There are plenty of schools for every kid. :)</p>
<p>That said, I agree with OldinNJ - I've also found the schools in the Colleges that Change Lives book to have a certain "friendliness" and "niceness," even though there is a huge variety between their campus cultures. And, both my daughter and I also found that colleges in the mid-west seemed to be the most welcoming and more down to earth than those in other parts of the country. But again, that was OUR reaction to "friendliness" and "niceness." Your mileage may vary. :)</p>
<p>I just wanted to suggest Olin College in Needham, MA. The students were the nicest I met by far on a massive college tour extravaganza. Some even invited me to eat lunch with them.....</p>
<p>Having just done the visit of schools with ski teams, I second the post about Whitman. By far the friendliest school we visited (I started to wonder if every student was an admission's plant). Kids from our town that go there are great, involved, outdoorsy, smart, people-person type kids. No engineering, but good environmental science.</p>
<p>Really nice skier from here went to Mich Tech in Houghton to study engineering and she loves it. They (usually) have tons of snow. Spring break when we were there, but the town was very friendly.</p>
<p>Certainly Tufts!</p>
<p>Carolyn- great post. I completely agree. Especially with the larger schools, there are going to be "nice" kids and perhaps some "not so nice kids". Some of what you find is up to chance- who your roommate is, who is on your dorm hall etc. Other things you can control- don't go to a school with a huge Greek scene if those type kids aren't your idea of "nice".<br>
Having lived in several different parts of the country, I would rate the midwest and the south pretty high in overall "niceness"- especially my awesome new hometown of Nashville.</p>
<p>Carleton. Earlham. Harvey Mudd (GREAT for engineering!). Davidson. Dennison. Grinnell. Rose-Hulman (also exceptionally good for engineering). </p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>If she's looking for a small school, for engineering, with "nice kids," she really should look at Olin.</p>
<p>Junior and I set out to find a smallish college with an engineering school that is long on friendliness and short on political zeal. At larger colleges (like UW) the sense my son got was that no one in particular had anything against him, but that he was just another face in the crowd. He received a really warm and friendly greeting at Harvey Mudd and the University of Portland. (My son has a "special" set of high school resume items that make him a reasonable candidate for everything from the local JC to MIT, so I encouraged him to cast a wide net.) Caltech was full of interesting folks, but didn't generate the friendliness vibe. Caltech is probably my son's first choice anyway, but that wasn't the question.</p>
<p>So, "friendly" environments that we have even a little personal experience with includes those two colleges.</p>
<p>Thank you, carolyn. I am just simply agog that people are seriously trying to separate the places where there are nice kids from the places where there aren't. Or even the places where more kids are nice than aren't nice. </p>
<p>Really.</p>