Hamilton College

Date: May 11 2004
Major: Public Policy (This Major's Salary over time)
I am from Boston, I was a triple-Varsity athlete, I was smart, civic-minded, and I loved life. Hamilton changed that. It blows there. All the students were rich, it felt like they were all from private schools, they all had cars, and all we do is drink. Which is fine with me—the drinking—if it were with people I liked. I have great friends up there and I pledged, but it's almost like the relationships are drowned-out by the heavy cloud that sets over the dining hall: the fraternity life. Once you pledge, yeah you see people who aren't in your fraternity around and at the bars, but really- you don't get tight with too many others than the ones in your fraternity.

Obviously, everyone has different experiences wherever you go, blah blah, but i'm telling you, if you hail at all from a relatively blue-collar background or an urban atmosphere and are social, this is not the place for you. No city in sight, which makes a bigger difference than you could imagine, it's cold and gray and snowy all the time, and everyone is lazy except when it comes to their own lives and their own work. The people individually are great and all, but thenplace just sort of sucks the life out of many.

One of the good things is the learning. Education is real high-quality, at least from my experience. The professors are engaging the student body in the more sophisticated and challenging areas of each of these respective disciplines, from which my experience mostly comes: sociology, public policy, political science, government, economics, and history. The professors are great.