Calvin College

Date: Jul 23 2005
Major: Psychology (This Major's Salary over time)
Calvin is the ultimate Christian college. It’s large size allows it to have most majors, bring in great bands and speakers, and keep the place from feeling like a high school gossip mill. It is quite liberal for a Christian college, allowing students to smoke on-campus and drink off-campus (as long as you don’t live in the dorms). Despite certain restrictions on dorm life, Calvin’s environment is accepting of a wide variety of political, moral, and spiritual beliefs and lifestyles. The extra opportunities due to its large size and the open atmosphere create a great environment for exploration and growth. Odds are you will find your own niche and friends to challenge and support you. Despite all the complaints about the lack of ethnic diversity, I think Calvin has more diversity than most other schools because of its openness, which produces a much more balanced mix of conservative Christian kids and wild liberal partiers than you’d find at other Christian or secular schools.

In my opinion, the people are generally friendlier and more superficial than my friends from high school and at other colleges. This is probably in part because I come from a large city and over half of Calvin’s students are from West Michigan. Many of them went to the same Christian schools and have known/dated each other since high school, which results in plenty of cliques. The out-of-state students tend to be much more interesting/cynical, so the two types of student somewhat balance each other. Except for concerts and the outdoors, there’s not much to do either on-campus or off. A lot of people just sit around and hang out.

The academics are generally good and depend largely on which major you choose. Communications and sociology are arguably the weakest/easiest and the hardest are music, religion, and the sciences and engineering. The other humanities and social sciences are generally good with a mix of hard and easy classes. The work will seem difficult if you pick a hard major or are a typical Christian high school grad who’s not an idiot but certainly not destined for grad school. The work will seem easy (or manageable in the case of the sciences) if you were near the top of your class in high school, did well in several AP classes, or have any other indicator of past academic success.

The Christian element is always present but never stifling. I get the impression that the professors are far more religious than the students and do more to keep Calvin a Christian college than the students, many of whom never go to chapel and seldom go to church. The norm for a class is for the professor to pray once a week and occasionally relate the material to Christianity. The Christian presence is most obvious in the humanities, least in the sciences, and the way I described in the last sentence in the social sciences. Most of the public pontificating on Christianity is a rehash of neo-Kuyperian mantras that the most famous talking heads on campus like to recite at every opportunity to remind us of what they want our common vision to be.

Go redeem your corner of creation

pretty much sums it up.

The college will take you as far as you take yourself. There are plenty of opportunities to do research or internships both on-campus and off if you look for them. Pretty much everything depends on how much initiative and intelligence you have to navigate coursework, professors, and finding interesting resume-building experiences. The college admits anyone, and this produces a less cutthroat atmosphere but also leads to dumbing down some classes and majors. But even if your passion lies in an easy major like communications, there are plenty of opportunities in and out of class to make yourself stand out. According to the Franklin and Marshall report on Baccalaureate Origins of Doctoral Recipients, more students go on to grad school from Calvin than from any other college of our size. Every year Calvin sends plenty of students to places like Yale and Wayne State and which one is up to you.