Bard College Simon's Rock

Date: Jul 13 2011
Major: Other (This Major's Salary over time)
Knowing what I know now, I would have waited until normal college age and gone somewhere else. I just couldn't handle it when I was a teenager, and I feel like I wasted a lot of money and opportunities before I was old enough to appreciate the big picture.

Simon's Rock, for me, was a refuge from having to live with my parents and go to one of a small number of poor-quality public high schools in a rural state not known for its educational system. My first advisor was also a selfish jackass, to put it mildly, and I was nowhere near assertive enough to stand up to him then (thankfully, he's long gone). I'm grateful for the academic opportunities I did get here, but I didn't truly begin to appreciate what I had available to me until I was a second-semester junior. By then, it was time to thesis, graduate and hurtle into six years of un/underemployment without a clear purpose.

The truth is that while many mostly East Coast grad schools (including some very prestigious ones such as Columbia) have a very high opinion of SRC graduates, most places west of the Mississippi and pretty much ALL employers anywhere don't know who you are, haven't heard of Simon's Rock, and don't care. It doesn't matter WHERE you went to school, if you want a job after getting a BA in liberal arts, you have to be VERY good at selling yourself. This is something that nobody at this school wants to hear, and it's something that the school should push a lot harder than it does.

Don't believe the complacent propaganda from any steadily employed Baby Boomer that you can magically get a job with a BA in English and be set for life. Just because they could do it in 1970 doesn't mean you can now. Unless you have a connection somewhere, that door closed before you were born, and SRC is so insular that you get very few opportunities to make that connection if you don't have rich, well-connected parents or considerable social assets somewhere else.

Meanwhile, social life here consists of 2-4 years trapped on an isolated rural campus with 400 other crazed and often self-absorbed teenagers with 30 year old intellects, teenage bodies, and 5 year old EQ's, most of whom aren't half as smart or wonderful as they think they are. Petty emotional issues on this campus are particularly intense, and at some point you WILL feel trapped on this tiny campus if you get emotionally entangled with ANYONE (you will) and it ends badly (it will, and when it does you get to find out how depressingly few people on this campus are true friends.) For a socially inept teenager, this campus is the emotional equivalent of a war zone - either that, or it's heaven for you and the 3-5 people you will become close to after cliques are set, and reality is the war zone. Unpleasant byproducts of this often toxic social environment include a 60% alum-to-alum marriage rate and alum depression and suicide rates way above the norm. Everyone who went to that school is still coping with SRC social life in some way, or they're well-adjusted, heavily active alumni. There's no middle ground.

Bottom line: there are some people who go here and literally do change the world, but for every one of those, there are five who become more or less utterly ordinary, and two who still can't get out of their parents' basement by their late twenties. The whole "early college" Bohemian thing just makes the majority of undergrads here insufferably proud of the unremarkable accomplishment of acquiring a BA in English, thesis or no thesis.

Think long and hard before coming here. If you've truly got your shit together at 16 (which very few people do), and can pay for it yourself (which even fewer can, considering this is the 7th most expensive college in the country), it can be a fantastic boost. If you're a socially awkward male running away from life with your parents, however, this place is a living hell tempered only by outstanding academics, and it's not worth either wasting your college fund or being buried in $100k+ of student loan debt. For all of its social misfit bona fides, you need to have had a stable upbringing WITHIN normal society to do well here, just like anywhere else.

In 21st century America, real life IS high school, at least until you've found some way to get a professional-level job or successfully become self-employed. The sooner you learn this and accept it, the better you'll do in life. Going to a proudly self-deluding reality bubble like Simon's Rock is only an asset if you can ignore the campus culture, get the most out of the excellent faculty from the beginning, and go to grad school somewhere else, ideally without incurring too much debt along the way. Otherwise, you're probably better off somewhere else.