Your going to every school forum and throw the same big set of questions without taking time to personalize the questions and read existing threads would not yield good answers.
- If you don't have money to visit campus: some schools do grant travel expenses; spend your time on reading popular topics in each school forum, for ex: Experience from a sophomore at Williams for incoming freshmen
or How rural is Williams?
- If you don't have time to read posts or to visit campus: you must be having a wrong mentality and work schedule - senior year is not the time to cramp in the 7-10 hardest classes but to make the last year of your high school career meaningful, i.e. enjoy studying hard and playing hard (not study hard and play hard).
Look, there is a search function on the threads, and the questions you asked are very general and had been covered on these forums over and over again.
Perhaps the responder is being a little harsh, but the idea is that these are very demanding schools academically, and if you can't find your own way through this research, you are going to have difficulty there. No one is going to hold your hand.
People just don't want to answer the same general questions again and again.
I'm sorry, you feel under attack. That's not very nice. But here's your opportunity to use the search function, learn how to use the site, and find out more information that you could imagine.
Good luck.
By the way, my son is a Williams grad and would never go on College Confidential. I think he found out what he needed to know about the school from really reading the website. He may have looked at a guide book, and then we visited.
If you can't visit, go to the website.
If you have a specific question, by all means, answer it.
Oh, and I am not criticizing you for using College Confidential. Sure. Use it, Use the search function. I think the consensus is that you need to do a little more of the work.
The people at Williams will. John Wesley, I'm not sure you understand all the motivations going on here. Get back to me when you are a mom and a college prof.
CC is not a short cut for doing one's initial homework on a college/university, Mr. Wesley. There are guidebooks both in hard copy and on line galore that can do the initial screening. What the rest of us are saying to the OP is that he or she should come to a thread/forum with a specific question to which the guidebooks are not able to answer or answer well. The OP's initial query struck, it seems, a number of us as, frankly, lazy.
Location: Williams College '15 Los Angeles, CA -> Williamstown, MA
Posts: 405
OP, the questions you are interested in getting answered seem to be something you can easily find on websites such as College P rowler.
When I used CC to research colleges, I had to refine my searches and still sifted through pages of threads. There are a lot of contributing voices here that may provide some insight, but it is clear that you might need to be a little more qualitatively thorough.
If you have more specific, meaningful questions about Williams, I can try to field them from a current student's perspective.
I'm not sure you understand all the motivations going on here. Get back to me when you are a mom and a college prof.
Well, since you mentioned motivation, here's my take on what's going on here: Team Williams would rather play defense. Let the OP suggest for a moment that the place may be "too rural" or "too jockish" and watch the detailed (and may I say, canned) responses come tumbling out. But, ask an open-ended question and the same people suddenly turn into grammar police and patronizing _in loco parentis_ proxies. It's very simple, where herd mentality prevails, no one wants to be the first to admit the place has any faults.
The OP has actually done a very canny job of getting more information about Williams than they could possibly have hoped for.
Last edited by johnwesley; 06-18-2012 at 04:36 AM.
Maybe we can update the old "do you have Prince Albert in the can?" routine to Prince William.
[The answer for those of you born after the glaciers melted, or who are not canny or candid or cando or cantankerous enough to figure it out, is "Well, let him out!"]
