<p>Oh, they made fun of the blue bus during a Swat admissions panel? How lovely. (The joke is that people call it the “**** truck” [the obscenity that will probably get censored by the board rhymes with “truck”]).</p>
<p>Bryn Mawr gets a bad rap from a lot of Swatties and even a lot of 'Fords. They tend to say we’re either all lesbians, all disgustingly unattractive (because seriously, how could beautiful girls SURVIVE on an all women’s campus?!), or “uptight,” because all we do is study (that is, unless we take a ride on the “**** truck” and become stereotypical Bryn Mawr whores).</p>
<p>Strangely, the people that hold these assumptions usually know about 1.7 Bryn Mawr students, and there are 1,200 of us, plus the grad school and postbac programs, which are co-ed. Bryn Mawr students are generally bright and love learning, but beyond that, make up a very diverse student body. Hey, some of us even came to Bryn Mawr because we didn’t get accepted to the .0007 spots open to us at Swarthmore as white, middle-upper-class females from the mid-Atlantic states interested in majoring in English with good grades and average ECs (that statistic being so small because people like us apply in hordes to Swat). And some of us are pretty happy that we get to take classes there and make friends there, because unlike the Swatties, our dream of studying at that institution didn’t exactly come true. And hey, we like Bryn Mawr, too. It’s a wonderful, challenging, character-building place where we learn a lot inside and outside of the classroom with a wonderful community of students and professors. We happen to all be women, because Bryn Mawr was started as an academic powerhouse for women in the 1880s and has decided to keep its enrollment single-sex in keeping with and out of respect for that tradition – so what’s the big deal?</p>
<p>C’mon, people, you’d think we’d be above fratty stereotyping – not one of the tri-co stereotypes is true. Haverford boys aren’t all short and hairy, and Swat students aren’t all depressed, wrist-cutting slaves of academia that never see the light of day. </p>
<p>People usually get over all this jazz after about one semester at one of these schools, but not always (as evidenced by the aforementioned student panel that was apparently trashing one of its academic peers).</p>