Vassar College

Date: Dec 13 2013
Major: Undecided (This Major's Salary over time)
Not a bad place, but overall a little boring. Very much a "bubble", almost totally isolated from the surrounding area, understandably given that there's very little of interest in the area. Social and extracurricular life is limited by that, and usually takes the form of drinking in people's rooms (especially senior housing) every weekend. Alcohol definitely a big thing as it is for all bored college students, drugs a little less than you might expect actually, marijuana fairly common but anything "harder" very difficult to find (I personally do use "harder" drugs occasionally and I'm the only one in my friend group that does). Different organizations exist and are definitely a big way to meet people-most common seem to be theater, a capella, that kind of stuff. Not a huge variety though, and as mentioned nothing that involves going outside of campus.

Students are generally intelligent, interesting people and pretty friendly. They are of course very privileged, overwhelmingly white, materialistic, sorta spoiled, in other words what you would expect from such an expensive private college, and if that atmosphere bothers you this isn't the place. Can be cliqueish at times, not necessarily based on the typical college stuff (no greek life for example). Most people fall into the generic New York hipster/future yuppie mold. People are definitely dedicated to work and driven, most seem to have some future planned out already, usually involving something like grad school, traveling abroad after graduation, etc. Definitely not a "nerdy" or anti-social place though, "work hard, party hard" is very much the attitude.

Academics are pretty good. Geared towards social/liberal arts over hard sciences but not to the point that the sciences are totally left behind, actually the school is spending a lot of effort to boost the sciences. Classes and work are definitely hard and grade inflation is not a thing. Also, class attendance is rather big here compared to other schools. Basically what you would expect of a place that is definitely "elite" and offers a quite good quality of education but not really leading the country in anything.

Overall, my biggest complaint would be that it can get boring-the "bubbly" atmosphere, the lack of diversity, the limited activities and few places to go can be tiring. Life tends to follow a predictable cycle of work really hard during the week, go get drunk in dorm rooms or senior housing on the weekends and hook up with someone, wake up Sunday and start working really hard again. I'd say there are plenty of things Vassar does well and plenty that it does terribly, but there are places that do all of the same stuff well with less of the bad, or that do better at any of the good than we do. Not terrible but not great either-I wouldn't recommend it but if you want to go I wouldn't try to dissuade you either.