http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html Life at GNC - Comments en http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html Amazing school. Hard, so very hard. Sleep will not be a frequent occurrence. Don't mess up your opportunities.... Wed, 06 Feb 2013 08:07:33 GMT StudentsReview 368-91836 Copyright 2013 StudentsReview, Ecliptical Technologies, Inc. 368-91836 368 33 Physics Male Undergraduate Class 2016 1st Year Positive Amazing school. Hard, so very hard. Sleep will not be a frequent occurrence. Don't mess up your opportunities. Wed, 06 Feb 2013 08:07:33 GMT http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html Reasons to go here: -Small classes* -Accessible professors* -Small campus; not a lot of walking* -Tight-knit social scene (notice I did not say community)* -Very small* -Some quirky, not annoyin... Wed, 02 May 2012 04:45:28 GMT StudentsReview 368-87048 Copyright 2013 StudentsReview, Ecliptical Technologies, Inc. 368-87048 368 42 Anthropology Female Undergraduate Class 2013 2nd Year Negative Reasons to go here:
-Small classes*
-Accessible professors*
-Small campus; not a lot of walking*
-Tight-knit social scene (notice I did not say community)*
-Very small*
-Some quirky, not annoying students*

Reasons not to go here:
-Cliquish
-Holier than thou attitudes, both among many students and the administration*
-Nothing to do except drinking & drugs, some decent lectures and plays to attend
-Annoyingly, you still have to take boring intro classes to qualify for more interesting, upper-division classes.
-Excessive workload-- Felt like some professors gave a lot of work for the sake of giving a lot of work.
-Laundry machines and printers need some work
-Annoying knee-jerk liberal self-righteousness/ political correctness*
-However (in reference to above point), not as politically active as anticipated
-Very small*
-Many very biased (politically) professors. Atheism and free love equals A if you write semi-well with some professors (not all). Anything less and you'd be trying your luck.
-A very, very modest number of good-looking girls (I know that's superficial, but hey, just putting that out there.)
-Not open-minded (I don't know what impression you've gotten from my previous comments...). If you choose to go here, do not defend any of the following: libertarian ways of thinking, laxer gun laws, not affirmative action, not radical feminism. You must always state that the administration is not doing enough for gays, bisexuals, and lesbians (though Grinnell is quite friendly in this regard...).*
-Sense of community seems strained, factious. A lot of people seem content with doing their own thing with their friend groups.

Asterisk by qualities that apply to all left-leaning LACs Wed, 02 May 2012 04:45:28 GMT http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html Grinnell is, well, a liberal arts college. Liberal arts colleges prepare you exclusively for graduate school, particularly in this economy. Going here "for the learning," like I did, is very much su... Wed, 18 Apr 2012 01:38:24 GMT StudentsReview 368-86678 Copyright 2013 StudentsReview, Ecliptical Technologies, Inc. 368-86678 368 9 Chemistry Male Undergraduate Class 2013 2nd Year Neutral Grinnell is, well, a liberal arts college. Liberal arts colleges prepare you exclusively for graduate school, particularly in this economy. Going here "for the learning," like I did, is very much superficial. You can learn at any college, and the classes at Grinnell are so demanding that you need to be aware of your true intellectual interests and work very hard. In this sense, the open curriculum is at once a good and bad thing. Left-leaning liberal arts colleges are also, unfortunately, full of hipsters and oftentimes extremely annoying, very self-righteous "activists" (and sometimes non-annoying, non-self-righteous activists). If you go, you can't say you weren't warned about this aspect, haha. You also need to weigh your desire for a social life versus your desire to immerse yourself in academia. If social life is equally important/ just as important to you as academia, weigh your options very carefully and do an overnight stay. Hell, do two overnight stays. If a fishbowl feel freaks you out, I'd be wary of coming here. Ditto for isolation. Ditto for drinking/ drug-focused social scene. It also helps to be mentally stable/ well-adjusted/ fundamentally happy as a person. Also, as a word of advice, read Ratemyprofessors before picking professors. This may go without saying, but even at a teaching-focused school like Grinnell (maybe particularly at a teaching-focused school like Grinnell), it is VERY important, especially if the class is challenging to you. I would also strongly encourage you to join a sports team, if you have ANY athletic ability at all (it's DIII after all...). My feeling of belonging at Grinnell would have been much more amplified.

Eh, I shouldn't bash Grinnell so much. If you like off-beat people (even if they're sometimes annoyingly or ingratiatingly off-beat), are extremely liberal (and don't like to argue positions for the sake of arguing lol), are confident in yourself and your abilities, can see yourself using 80% of your time working on your studies, and can deal with the small campus and small town in a very isolated location, I'd say to go for it! :-) Don't let a silly moderately liberal, oftentimes insecure city boy dissuade you! Wed, 18 Apr 2012 01:38:24 GMT http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html Seriously, don't go here if you want to form your own worldview and be your own person--which is what college SHOULD be about. At Grinnell College, if you're anything less than ultraliberal and ultra... Tue, 06 Mar 2012 04:38:35 GMT StudentsReview 368-85795 Copyright 2013 StudentsReview, Ecliptical Technologies, Inc. 368-85795 368 38 Psychology Male Undergraduate Class 2012 2nd Year Negative Seriously, don't go here if you want to form your own worldview and be your own person--which is what college SHOULD be about. At Grinnell College, if you're anything less than ultraliberal and ultratolerant, you'll be ostracized and often labeled as a racist/sexist/homophobe. Classes, for the most part, revolve around political correctness and leftist propaganda that the school likes to call "academia." And I say all this as a progressive liberal.

A lot of my fellow students were (I left the school after a couple of years) sociology and gender/women's studies majors, which, well, is pretty telling in and of itself. After all, the integrity of such courses mostly hinges upon intense political correctness and leftist thought. The political correctness and extreme intolerance of differing viewpoints extends outside of the classroom as well. If you are a moderate--or even, like I was, simply soft-spoken about your political views and the lifestyle that accompanies such views--you'll be a pariah here. Just so you know, the most popular event on campus here is Mary B. James, a cross-dressing ball where male students paint their nails and dress in women's clothing and vice versa. Yep. If you want to live a straight, relatively normal, yet accepting and welcoming lifestyle, it can be frustrating being at Grinnell.

As far as the non-political attitudes and personalities of the students, many of the students could be considered "bookish," "introverted," and "socially awkward." These aren't necessarily bad things ordinarily, but the fact that nearly the entire student body is this way makes for quite a stodgy and standoffish atmosphere. Especially when you're in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa, and the students at the college are your world. Oh yeah, and drinking and drug use is rampant due to the isolation and the students' tendency to imbibe in illicit substances to cope with social awkwardness. I drink myself and have no problem with it; however, this drinking is often not of the "fun" or "moderate" variety. It is of the "Well damn, I'm stuck in Iowa" and "Let's blackout because there's nothing to do" variety. Rarely is drinking at Grinnell truly about letting loose and having fun-- As alluded to earlier, many of the people at the school were beat up or lived under a rock in high school, so the kids just go dangerously out of control in college to compensate for it. I checked into it, and as it turns out, on a per-capita basis, Grinnell had more alcohol and drug hospitalizations than Penn State, often ranked as the #1 party school.

The professors, which theoretically would have been the only reason for me not dropping out of this place, are also quite overrated. I had some who were fantastic (Professors Hamlin and Lussier in the Poli Sci department were quite excellent)-- and some who couldn't teach or organize the class material in a meaningful manner to save their lives. All professors are accessible; however, accessibility doesn't mean a thing if the professors' explanations are not useful to begin with. The rigor is overrated as well. While it is true that you will write long papers here, any program in the liberal arts--even at large state universities--will make you do that. It is true that the comments on your papers are often more useful than the comments you would receive from TAs, this is not always the case (see: professors overrated bit).

To sum it all up, the Grinnell experience was a miserable waste of time and money that featured knowledge that could have easily been learned elsewhere. Run to somewhere else--hell, anywhere else--for college as if your life depended on it, because it probably does. Tue, 06 Mar 2012 04:38:35 GMT http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html Grinnell is a magical place in the middle of nowhere. It's a liberal arts haven for all those quirky, geeky, smart, motivated, enthusiastic about learning, and eager to have fun. The academics are fan... Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:47:08 GMT StudentsReview 368-85160 Copyright 2013 StudentsReview, Ecliptical Technologies, Inc. 368-85160 368 50 Sociology Female Undergraduate Class 2012 4th Year Positive Grinnell is a magical place in the middle of nowhere. It's a liberal arts haven for all those quirky, geeky, smart, motivated, enthusiastic about learning, and eager to have fun. The academics are fantastic--professors are SUPER accessible (have had dinner at several profs' houses), classes are challenging, and the academic environment is supportive and fosters learning for the sake of learning. The Grinnell community is also absolutely wonderful--people are friendly, eager to help each other out, and the study body is diverse in more than just the race/ethnicity stats sense. Students are involved in a hundred different activities and that girl you know from swing dance club is likely to also be your student government senator and a physics tutor. Grinnellians are interdisciplinary in the truest sense and so passionate about what we do. The social life is certainly what you make of it--we are in the middle of no where Iowa, and so weekends are usually spent on campus or grabbing a movie/coffee in town every now and then. The college does a great job of bringing people to the campus though and is very cognizant of the fact that we are in the middle of no where. We have bands, concerts, comedians, guest lectures and a ton of events going on every weekend and very rarely (if ever) is there *nothing* to do. Some of my favorite Grinnell memories include mattress sledding in the humanities/social sciences building after hours, building a giant snow dragon with friends out on Mac field, stargazing out in the cornfields (quite literally), trying out rock climbing on the climbing wall one random Thursday night just because, going cross country skiing for the first time with several grinnellians I didn't know until that day, Harry Potter week, Mel Brooks movie marathons, and a slew of other random, nerdy awesome experiences. The social life is what you make of it--there is a party culture and if you choose, you can certainly partake in it. If you choose not to, that is also completely fine and there are plenty of people to hang out with and things to do. Personally, I've found it really refreshing to be able to hang out with one group of friends that does party some weekends and do fun sub-free things with another group of friends on other weekends. There's the freedom and flexibility to be who you want to be here and the campus culture is very supportive. Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:47:08 GMT http://www.studentsreview.com/IA/GNC_comments.html