Help with decision - Macalester or Carleton? (Pol Sci) - just got off waitlist

winterwren
Fri, 22 May 2020 21:16:27 +0000

Everyone, thank you so much! coffee@3, I am so grateful that you put your procrastination into sharing your daughters’ notes! These are great, I think the view of another 17 year old will be perfect to share with my son. And Bill, I think you have good points about the benefits of a compact campus in the winter. My son doesn’t seem to mind the idea of the Mac campus being small. And he is used to living in a place where you can walk to great eateries and bookshops or hop on a bus to go across the city. On the other hand, we take him up to the mountains and snow camp so he thinks of snow as an adventure. He’d be ok either way in regard to cold and snow, but he does have a slight fear of how he’d handle endless cornfields. However I’m getting the sense that the focus on community and sense of shared intellectual endeavor at Carleton go hand in hand with the more isolated location. I’d choose that myself. Since my son is particularly interested in politic science and enjoys civic engagement, it’s a bigger tradeoff for him because Mac seems to do a great job connecting kids with opportunities in the city. We are hoping to gather a little more info about kids from Carleton that studied Pol Sci/International Relations there, and how they obtained internships or other cool off-campus experiences. Other than that, he might just have to go on his gut!