<p>Okay, maybe “scared” wasn’t the right word. How about “creeped out”?</p>
<p>I was wondering how Hampshire could be creepy, but check out this video - you’d have to try hard to make your dorms look so unappealing! [Hampshire</a> College Multimedia](<a href=“Hampshire College TV - YouTube”>Hampshire College TV - YouTube)</p>
<p>I do think that visiting schools on break often gives high school students a bad impression that even when they are aware of it, is hard to overcome.</p>
<p>My D was very turned off by her student interviewer at Hampshire, so she didn’t consider applying.</p>
<p>However, we all agreed that the student panel at the info. session was the best we’d seen anywhere. They made it plain that they were a creative lot with intense intellectual interests.</p>
<p>I’m not arguing for Hampshire … just saying.</p>
<p>I didn’t find anything creepy; to me it was just a bit underfunded and plain. My D also could not get past passing haystacks and cows on our way to Hampshire. Since she attended college in NYC, it’s obvious that those aren’t her taste.</p>
<p>Sadly, it stands in contrast to Amherst, Smith and Mt. Holyoke, its better funded siblings. The school was created to be a pedagogically freer part of the consortium.</p>
<p>As a mom with a D at Hampshire I have to laugh and agree that its buildings/infrastructure are not the most appealing (someone referred to it as the 1970s Brutalist style). That said, many find its campus attractive for the farm, open grass areas and wooded portions of the campus. It really is in the eye of the beholder. My D was creeped out by Mount Holyoke- so it just goes to show you. She found it too manicured and objected to a Jamba juice or something similar in the library. She said a library should smell like books and it smelled like a coffee shop. But I agree with you all, Hampshire is a special place and takes a certain kind of person to be settled/happy there.</p>
<p>The dorms don’t look much different to me than freshman dorms at any campus. Don’t get me started on the freshman dorms at UNC, they are usually not on any video for a reason! The mods look very nice. But then again, I like liberal and creative vibes. D did have a knee jerk reaction to the “pretentious” Amherst campus.</p>
<p>I agree the dorms look typical, but the way they were filmed makes them look much, much worse than they are. All that grainy old fashioned film look. It really was kind of creepy. I’m not a big fan of brutalist architecture, but most campuses have a few examples of that unfortunate style. I think Carnegie Mellon’s example is particularly ugly: <a href=“http://www.math.cmu.edu/PIRE/img/cmu-wean-600x400.jpg[/url]”>http://www.math.cmu.edu/PIRE/img/cmu-wean-600x400.jpg</a></p>
![http://www.math.cmu.edu/PIRE/img/cmu-wean-600x400.jpg[/url]](http://www.math.cmu.edu/PIRE/img/cmu-wean-600x400.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>My daughter LOVED Hampshire for everything except the campus. Not only is it ugly, which we knew it would be and it’s totally from it’s era, but it was dirty with trash and cigarette butts all over the campus. Totally the opposite of their environmental liberal philosophy. It was shortly after the Halloween snowstorm so I suggested that maybe they were busy cleaning up from the storm and I convinced her to apply and revisit this spring should she get admitted. She was and we will be back next Wednesday to a hopefully cleaner campus. We didn’t look at the other campuses, maybe we should do that when we arrive on Tuesday evening, thanks for that thought!</p>
<p>My son was turned off by Amherst, he said that they spent way too much time edging the lawn, I think that meant he thought it was pretentious. That’s the only one in the consortium we saw.</p>
<p>amtc: See you at accepted student day!</p>
<p>Hampshire makes me nervous! We haven’t visited yet. My S is not quite the misfit the school seems to attract, although he does have a slight hippie edge. It sounds like it could be the greatest experience ever for him…or the worst. It’s a lot of $ for what sounds like a lot of independent study and partying. My son, is not the artsy “creative” type. His interests lie in media-politics-philosophy. Lots of questions.</p>
<p>We are also visiting UVM & UNC Asheville next week.</p>
<p>Based on these visits, we may head to Skidmore (where he was WL) and beg :)</p>
<p>Also, FYI: his top choice dream school was Pitzer - the only school to outright reject him.</p>
<p>Temple University in Philly. It’s in a scary blighted neighborhood. Worst we’ve seen, and we’ve visited other urban campuses (such as American U and NYU) that were fine, even lovely.</p>
<p>University of Chicago. D said that if we made her go there, she’d have to wear a gas mask because of the smell of sewage (our visit was on a hot, summer day).</p>
<p>Temple is definitely in a bad neighborhood. You’re right.</p>
<p>I was thinking that the videos of Hampshire made the buildings look better than they do in actuality! We thought Mt. Holyoke was one of the most beautiful campuses we had seen - we drove through it.</p>
<p>My S got the same “pretentious” feel from Amherst. He liked the school when we visited informally, but when he went back for a tour and info session, he hated it.</p>
<p>My daughter crossed the University of Colorado at Denver off her list after visiting the campus. The campus felt fragmented. Many of the buildings on campus are shared with two other colleges (Metro State and a community college). Even the dorms are shared - so there isn’t much of a UC-Denver “identity” up there. </p>
<p>The students seemed unapproachable. (Everyone was busy texting. Everyone! I get that kids love to text, but nobody was interacting “in person”. It was very weird.)</p>
<p>I am leery of any campus that is too clean, new, and perfect. A campus should not be a dump but it should look lived in and used; even grungy in some places. Stepford wife like campuses give me a bad feeling.</p>
<p>I’ll never forget the info session at Swarthmore. The admissions officer made the school seem so intense and exhausting that I would have crossed it off the list immediately if it was up to me. It was like, “Do you have what it takes to be a Swattie? Do you want to have a double major and a couple of minors too? You can do that here! Do you want to triple major and have two minors and start a club and do an internship, all at the same time? You can do that here! You don’t need to sleep, do you?” I was stressed out just listening to him. My type-A daughter was on the edge of her seat with excitement. I was slightly relieved when she was wait-listed.</p>
<p>We visited Haverford earlier that day and it could not have been more of a contrast. The admissions person at Haverford was super-nice and asked the kids their names etc. and talked about community and the honor code and never once suggested that it might be appropriate to have a triple major and two minors. My daughter did not apply.</p>
<p>Uc irvine…every kid dressed the same, all had backpacks, didnt see even a messenger bag, there was no real variety of style, which sounds petty, but seemed cookie cutter. Different races, etc, but still everyone was just blah. Not a bright scarf, or fun pair of sneakers. It just felt like a factory.</p>
<p>JIGsMom - I sent you a PM.</p>
<p>@tetrahedrOn, re: Stanford, we know and love this university. However, DS was looking for a “learning-for-learning’s sake” undergraduate experience. In some areas, Stanford can feel very career-ist and pre-professional (business/law/medicine) – which can be off-putting to the purist academic.</p>
<p>And yes, there are plenty of non-English speaking TA’s in Stanford’s sciences. We know this first-hand. Professors in the larger classes (and many of Stanford’s science classes are large – they don’t want to overburden the Nobel-prize-winning profs) are not accessible to students in the way professors can be accessible at LAC’s. Not even close.</p>
<p>Stanford’s humanities and social sciences, by contrast, often provide small classes with excellent student/professor interaction, and we know students who are having first-rate educational experiences in these areas.</p>
<p>seahorses: i agree. my son and i had the same experience at UCI. but then, orange county (esp. irvine) is the mecca of planned/gated communities and business parks, so it makes sense that the irvine campus would have that sterile feel to it.</p>
<p>Kenyon- everything was absolutely fantastic but it was just too small.
Oberlin- hated it. I don’t even know why, it was like deserted though.</p>
<p>LOVED UMich-AA, slightly worried about the large size</p>