Grinnell College

Date: Apr 18 2012
Major: Chemistry (This Major's Salary over time)
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!