Franklin and Marshall College

Date: Apr 07 2019
Major: Undecided (This Major's Salary over time)
Well I'm your stereotypical F&M student on paper. White, rich, smart and an athlete. I was highly recruited for my sport but due to my stupid decision to slack off my first semester of senior year, Williams revoked their offer and my only option was F&M. When you visit F&M having not gone there, it seems like an awesome place. I said after my visit that it might actually not be such a bad consolation prize. Then first semester started. We found out we were not allowed to go out for the first week of school and not allowed to go to any frats for three weeks. I quickly found out the social scene here is very cliquey given how small/diverse the student body is. There are a lot of international or just weird kids who don't go out or try to—i'd say that makes up 50% of the student body. For the 1200 remaining kids, you pretty much have to be on a sports team or greek life to have social options. Even then, you're probably looking at around 3-4 nights a week where there's a place to go. I was on a team, so I get into my team's parties but as a freshman you're pretty much isolated with your younger teammates because our upperclassmen usually invite people we just don't know. I was hoping that maybe it would get better if I joined a frat. To put it in perspective, there are 6 frats here, but really 3 of them carry the "Benefits" of being in greek life—the others are kind of irrelevant. I accepted a bid from one of those three but dropped because the hazing was just brutal. I realized it's just not worth it for such a small school like this. Aside from this, F&M takes security way too seriously. For a school of 2400, they literally have 5 cop cars and one unmarked vehicle as well. You have to register all parties with the school (more than 20 ppl) and they set limits on how much booze can be there. This is part of the reason why it's hard to get on the lists of parties as a guy. To sum it up, the social scene is dominated by greek life and a couple sports teams with the most pull. Getting on lists as a guy is very hard. On top of this, the school is draconian with their policies. I'd recommend F&M to any attractive girls, douchey athletes/future greek members, or anyone that doesn't care about social life at all. For those in between who want to have fun but aren't your type A type people, don't go here. Back home, I never had problems with social life/girls etc. but here I am sitting in my dorm room most nights knowing I'd be having a better time somewhere else. I blame F&M for all the mental problems I have been going through this year, which I had never experienced before in my life.

On the bright side, academics are good here. Classes are small, profs are great and if you do the work, you'll be able to to well here. So many kids here complain about how hard the school is. My explanation for this is that F&M is an elite liberal arts school but they aren't really quite yet known as being a top school, so the quality of their applicants is much less qualified than that of NESCAC schools. If you're smart and did well at a good high school, it isn't hard at all. I think it's even easier than high school. However, tuition here is so high because F&M is in so much debt and they raise tuition every year to correct for it. That's why it's a divided school in that half the kids are super rich and paying for the reduced/no tuition for the other half on financial aid.

At the end all I can say is do not come here unless your are one of the types of people I mentioned above. Worse case scenario is you're not that smart, got in because you were rich, do poorly and end up with no job. And to top it off you didn't even have a good college experience at all. Franklin and Marshall is basically like high school part 2 but worse.