That sounds fine to me, I think. I don’t have any particular worries on that front; as long as I have a church I can plug into. Thanks:)
3 Likes
By the way, if this matters to anyone: My grades are all A’s, with a couple A- freshman/soph year. (That’s what I calculated UW GPA with.) Very high As Jr year. Positive trend.
3 Likes
Lots of beautiful churches in Middletown, and nobody is going to tackle and beat you up at Wes for having spiritual beliefs. Lol. You’d be just fine.
My D attended and loved her time at Wes. If you wind up interested in Wes, consider Brown as well. Lots of overlap with those two schools and I have another D who is there.
I second @circuitrider ‘s comments about Wes’ public policy scene. My D had many friends at Wes who went on to nice assignments in DC.
Lastly, I am in the group who thinks it’s just fine to be interested in and apply to a lot of schools of different types. It’s good to be flexible and open. You never know how it’s going to play out.
ETA: I just now noted your comments about debt. FWIW, Wes is a no-loan school, so any financial aid you’d receive there (of course, I have no idea what that would be) would not include loans.
2 Likes
I liked Wes before y’all recommended it, and having two strong recommendations for it definitely puts it on the list. Thanks!
Brown sounds cool! I think they also give a space to share like an “artistic online presence” (which I have), which I would assume increases my chances.
Yeah, not worried about the spiritual side, especially because there’s a church in Middletown or thereabouts.
I’m trying to put together a list of lots of different schools with many different acceptance rates/criteria for admission/cultures, and I’m just trusting that one of them will be the right fit:)
3 Likes
This article suggests that some religious students may experience the impression of being “condescended to,” however: Teaching and Religion – Roth on Wesleyan.
LOL. TBH, I think you’re missing the point of the whole article.
2 Likes
I didn’t really catch the feeling that Wesleyan was negative on religion from that article, no. I more got the idea that they were working to broaden their understanding of it from a societal, interpersonal, and pedagogical standpoint. Which sounds cool!
“Now, some may say that students should check their faith at the door (perhaps alongside their privilege) before they enter the seminar room. But that’s not the way I teach.”
At least for me, my faith is deeply tied to my passion for making the world a better place, especially through policy analytics. The world is a complicated and confusing place, and I have a goal to understand it more deeply; and to use that knowledge to both bring others to my faith and to improve the standard of living for other people. Being in an environment where religion is a topic of discussion and recognized as both a central tenet of humanity and often at conflict with modern sensibilities or thought processes seems like the place for me.
3 Likes
"The unexamined life is not worth living "
1 Like
It appears that you essentially disregarded the student Tom’s impressions, which may never have been meliorated. I wrote my post from this perspective. I appreciated where Mr. Roth intended to lead the reader, but I didn’t necessarily concur with him.
1 Like
Give it up. As a reading comprehension test, the OP passed it with flying colors.
1 Like
Socrates, I believe?
2 Likes
Yes, it seemed appropriate (although cliche)
2 Likes
I don’t think the dynamic to which Roth is referring in his piece is anything close to being particular to Wesleyan. I am confident a student would run into a similar general dynamic and attitude (of the sort referenced by Roth) at most of the schools on the ranking you posted upthread. I can say definitively that is very much the case at the handful of them with which I have direct personal experience.
That’s a pessimistic take given Roth’s closing commentary:
In my next class with Tom, we talked about Aquinas’s connection to Saint Augustine’s “short command,” by which he told the faithful to “love, and do what you will.” We talked about the struggle to bring love and intellect together, about the mystics and their relation to the philosophers. Tom energetically joined our discussion of how religious traditions create practices that link faith and reason and reveal the tensions between them.
Sounds to me like things worked out for Tom. In any event, the OP has made it very clear that he’s not concerned. If the OP had told us he is looking for Calvin College, I’d be the first to tell him to not look in the NESCAC.
2 Likes
Sounds to me like you have the makings of an essay.
2 Likes
A lot of my essays focus on the general idea of service to others, but I agree that tying it to religion more explicitly could be a good idea, especially with, for example, the Grinnell supp prompt.
1 Like
This may give you some good ideas:
https://magazine.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2008/09/20/historical-row-the-civil-rights-movement-and-wesleyan-freedom-riders/
1 Like
Hey guys, just an update on how everything is going
Submitted apps to
TAMU (accepted)
SMU
UT Austin
UMinn (accepted w/honors!)
Georgetown (interviewed, went well)
UGA
Colby
Grinnell
Drake (accepted w/34k/yr in merit!!!)
Trinity (interviewed, went okay)
Northeastern
Richmond
UA (accepted, 28k/yr in auto-merit!)
Wesleyan
Macalester (interviewed, went very well)
Gettysburg
Denison
WashU
W&L
Oberlin
Haven’t applied yet to
Brown
Emory
Thanks so much for y’all’s help:) I’ll try to update every once in a while!
13 Likes
Great - but who comes within your $15-20k budget so far ? Bama will be close. UMN will be near double. A&M??
Congrats on the admissions success ?
2 Likes
Okay here’s what I know about budget.
-
Meets-need schools will be affordable. EFCs look affordable, usually about 22k/year
-
15-20k is a target, not really a hard limit. I’m the oldest and they’ve never sent a kid to college before. A parent recently got an online masters’ that ran in the 20-25k range, and that was affordable. They gave me that number to shoot for.
So UMN is unaffordable unless they give aid for some reason, TAMU is affordable, Bama is affordable, Drake is affordable with music scholarships, the rest (save UGA, UT-Austin, SMU (which looked really good when I applied for music, and isn’t as attractive anymore) and maybe Georgetown) should meet need if I’m admitted.
3 Likes
I wanted leave the OP needed space, so I postponed a few responses.
What led me to skepticism was that Tom’s direct perspective appears early in the arcticle, but then is never revisited. For this reason, I can’t say with confidence how well things worked out for Tom.
I concur with this. If there’s a larger question, it may pertain as to whether or not religiously based texts can be authentically conveyed in fully secular academic environments.
As a more general comment, I understood Mr. Roth’s use of irony in his phrasing. I wasn’t beholden to this perspective, however, and expressed this, mostly for expediency, in the form of counter-irony.
1 Like