Bennington College

Date: Apr 03 2002
Major: Undecided (This Major's Salary over time)
Bennington College. Where do I start? I absolutely can't stand being here and would love to transfer. Let me try and explain why. Unless you value an extremely isolated environment with the lamest town in the world around you, self-absorbed pretentious hippies, a very white homogenous campus and a lack of a wide range of courses in one discipline.. Do not come to Bennington college. If you need to have a life instead of being imprisoned on a really dull, boring campu, do not come here! The bennington conception of a party is a really lameass band playing music that is absolutely undanceable while drunk women attempt to dance to it.

The strengths of this college lie in the small, seminar style classes and the amazing accessibility of the professors and most importantly the freedom to design your own major. The size ensures individual attention and a first name basis with administrators.

The problem lies in the fact that the school has huge financial problems, the lousiest facilities(if any to begin with) and is very random in the selection of courses available. The saddest example falls in the Social sciences where they only have one teacher for politics, one for anthropology and two for history. Economics? Sociology? World History? Keep dreaming. The present professors plan to leave and that does not leave much choice for social science students.

Bennington can drive a student into serious depression because students here are extremely cliquish white rich kids who think it is cool to look poor and most of them were misfits in high school which is fine except that abnormality becomes too conventional here and students aren't really open to other viewpoints. Students are fairly apathetic politically and it is fashionable for the predominantly female student body to be bisexual. There are barely any straight men here, so if you're a woman, count on having absolutely no sex life for 4 years.

Classes are either really challenging or for absolute morons who need to repeat high school again.. so its all a question of luck.

In short, very few types of people enjoy or stay in Bennington and you absolutely must visit so that you don't end up making the biggest mistake of your life.