<p>I’m a Yalie who works in the finance world. I’ll tell you one thing I have noticed – Williams grads really, really pull for each other and go out of their way for each other in a way that Harvard and Yale grads do not. I have noticed this throughout my career.</p>
<p>Only the loyal Dartmouth network rivals Williams for its camaraderie.</p>
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<p>^^^^^the tight knit Princeton Alumni “network” would disagree with this</p>
<p>I would advice you to visit the campus. Williams is in the middle of nowhere. There is really no comparison with Dartmouth or other schools that are in small college towns. Great school but after a weekend visit we decided that it was too remote and did not have as frequent public transportation as we would like. Plus driving the last 30 miles through all those small roads definitely not my cup of tea.</p>
<p>It all depends on what one is searching for and what sort of student you are–Williams is very close knit, and because it depends upon itself for all its entertainment, is its own small town-- which means you will not be a stranger but there will be few secrets. It has a culture of smart jocks-- probably less than 20% do not do some sort of organized athletics (V/JV/Club/IM) and probably a lot of those are outdoors types. It may not have Hanover, but it is 1 hour from the five colleges area of the pioneer valley and Dartmouth while in Hanover, is hours from --well, anywhere–. </p>
<p>I am a Yalie and I have a sone at Harvard (where I have taught/advised for over 20 years) and now a D who will be at Williams and it is already Williams that has the tightest sense of community–and she hasn’t even started (she is going to be on a team so that probably helps…). Williams, like Harvard (and Yale) is not everyone’s cup of tea nor should it be…but my D thought she was going to go Ivy until she visited and immediately felt like she was “home”. Where ever you end up–you should have the same gut feeling. All of the reasons in the end are ways to rationalize what your gut has already told you…</p>
<p>etondad - regarding the athletic culture at Williams, will a student who chooses not to participants in any athletic teams feel isolated?</p>
<p>I’m not sure–someone who is/has been there can speak to that, but you might be surprised to find yourself in the gym more than you thought you would (or did in high school) as there is so much athletic things happening. Then there is a thriving theatre and music scene too. It is a very “involved” place-- although, I’m sure that the introverted scholar exists, it is probably not the norm there… </p>
<p>Williams folks, care to elaborate?</p>
<p>Hanover is less than 2 hours, straight highway, to Boston and the highway is always open, snow or not as it connects Canada to Miami. The 30 miles rural routes off Masspike to Williams are not going to be the first plowed. When my sibling was an undergrad at the 5 college valley area-which is much closer to Boston than Williams- was so depressed, I had to drive every Thursday to pick her up and drop her off on Sunday. Everything depends what one likes and can withstand. That’s why I would definitely advice the op to visit the school and spend a couple of days there to get a good feeling. Not all are academics.</p>
<p>On the “gut feeling” thing, yes, that is a good way to figure out where you want to go. (And then one must take into account financials, but I feel like having a “dream world” preference list is helpful, and then you can more easily figure out if #1 is worth $2k/year more than #2 or whatever.) When I was personally making my list of colleges, it was between UChicago, Columbia, and Harvard. After receiving my acceptances, my gut said “probably Harvard, but UChicago is really tempting, but Columbia would be awesome too, I’m confused.” So I made a lengthy list of pros and cons for each, intending to attend the winner. After half an hour, Columbia had by far the longest list of pros, with UChicago in second and Harvard just barely behind. Then I squinted at the list for a bit, was like, “this is completely wrong,” tore it up, and committed to Harvard. Haven’t looked back since.</p>
<p>I’m sure there are lots of important differences between Hanover and Williamstown. However, when I took my son to visit Dartmouth (one of only two places he visited at my request, not his own), after we had been there for a few hours his main reaction was “Tell me again why this isn’t Williams.”</p>
<p>After getting a Dartmouth likely, I’ve been thinking…“hmm, got into Williams and Dartmouth” and my stress about getting into HYP has decreased exponentially. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Dartmouth is JUST AS GOOD for finance as HYP and backs it up with Wall Street results…</p>
<p>Williams is just too rural for me. A small, brilliant civilization amidst a forest.</p>
<p>I think that less than 20 percent uninvolved in athletics is a big exaggeration, EtonDad. I had plenty of good friends at Williams who were totally uninvolved in campus athletics. Yes, I played intramural sports, but I played in a “C” league basketball, basically for people who weren’t close to coordinated enough to play a sport even in high school, so I am hardly a super jock (though I do enjoy recreational sports). About half of Williams students are seriously engaged in athletics, either club, varsity, or jv. There are also some IM sports, but they are not really very serious, other than maybe the “A” league basketball, which tends to be comprised of other varsity atheltes. So half of Williams kids are not really heavily into the sports scene. </p>
<p>Now, Williams, as others has said, is a beautiful small town in the mountains with a surprising variety of artistic/cultural resources when you consider all that the Berkshires has to offer (MassMoca nearby, Clark, all the Williams artistic events, Williamstown Film Festival, and Williamstown Theater Festival in the summer). But it certainly is not an urban place with an urban night life, nor is it proximate to one. So as a result, as you might expect, it does attract a large share of outdoorsy people who enjoy nature, hiking, skiing, forresty, and so on. But that is hardly the same as a the jock culture Williams is often reputed to have. And honestly, sad to say, Williams has severely deemphasized athletics relative to its peers in recent years, both in terms of admissions (strictest standards for recruits in NESCAC), resources devoted to athletics, and facilities, which lag behind all other facilities on campus. The results vs. Midd, Amherst, and Wesleyan in team sports this year reflect as much. And while there are downsides to the relative isolation, there are upsides, too, as others have noted, namely a lot of resources and energy devoted to on-campus events and social life, and an incredibly tight knit bond formed among Williams students as well as with the institution itself, which is why, almost inevitably, I am greeted with a huge and enthusiastic reaction whenever I meet anyone else with a connection to Williams. </p>
<p>So, Williams’ jock reputation is in many ways a vestage of 20 years ago, and the campus demographics have changed radically since then (including a lot higher percentage of kids on financial aid and a near-doubling of campus racial diversity figures). Yes, the school is still a place with a large concentration of athletic or athletically-minded students, but there are also large concentrations of crunchy / outdoorsy, very intellectual and very artistically inclined kids, and really, most of the time, at least two of those categories overlap. So if you are, like me, someone who never played a varsity sport in high school, you really should not worry at all that you won’t find your niche at Williams, because the school is pretty evently split between those with a serious athletic interest and those without.</p>
Opportunities abound at Williams and kids are doing amazing things around the world really without limitation. Its like cable TV, more channels does not mean more choices of better content. Yes, its true the environments are radically different by nature of the urban vs. rural settings. But I can tell you my Daughter is one of the odd few who picked Williams over Harvard and Yale because she felt it fit her better in terms of a more intimate education and more diverse and ranging intellectual discourse where things like arts and sciences are viewed on the same footing and have deeper relations to one another, rather than being individual tracks. I think on a whole, I agree with her intuition that Williams provides a much more nuanced and deep learning experience. One gives you a shiny badge and the other a light from within. Also, I have encountered my own share of abject morons in business from Ivies and found myself scratching my head how the heck they got there in the first place. Conversely, I have had the pleasure of dealing with truly brilliant folks from “lesser” schools. It just makes one realize it is about the individual not the school. At the risk of being trite, life is a long race. Acing high school, the SATs and doing some community service or having some novel hook is not the end, nor even the end of the beginning. The litmus test is what you do once you leave the academic enclave and have to make it on your own resourcefulness, drive and creativity.
It’s really wonderful that your kid is thriving at Williams, after all that is what college is all about.
However, to state
.
and
is true in that it is about the individual, regardless of school. Your implication that Ivy kids are shallow and LAC kids are brilliant is incredibly myopic. LIke you said, it is about the individual, and the school where they thrive best, no matter where that is, hopefully would ignite that inner light. And if they also get the shiny badge in the process, I see nothing wrong with that.