Isolation

Parents Forum
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<p>One of the things about the Hillels at these schools – especially small LACs – is that the feel of the Hillel program (not to mention the Baha’i community) can change a lot with the addition or graduation of a few students. </p>

<p>As for community resources for Jews around Williams: I happen to know a bunch of active Jews in the Berkshires. They would be devastated to hear that the resources of the area around Williams did not seem robust. (But not surprised if they seemed less robust, and less young, than those in the Pioneer Valley, which has a lot more people, and a lot more young people.)</p>

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<p>Isolation is what you make of it. The importance of visits can’t be denied, even if some can’t do them. I had siblings at Middlebury, Yale, and WUSTL, I’ve visited Williams in a past century, and traveled with my kids to Swarthmore, Sarah Lawrence, Wellesley, William and Mary, Bard, Wesleyan, and more. I can’t imagine a more beautiful campus than Bard. I felt it. My D felt it. We visited three times to be sure, switching back and forth between it being too isolated and rural versus the park-like manicured beauty of Wellesley. In the end it was D’s decision to choose Bard over proximity to a city like her sibling. But in two short months she’d been into The City by train twice, seen a show on Broadway, visited friends in city schools, gone to Central Park and MOMA, and had a blast. She’s also found the waterfall on campus, watched the sun set over the Hudson and behind the Catskills at Blythewood, and dug for artifacts at an on-campus Indian settlement archeology site. Every time we talk I ask her if she’s ready to transfer but she’s usually too busy with groups and activities on campus to spend much time thinking about it. It was always her first choice, but visiting nearly every time after we’d visited elsewhere cemented her feelings. It was on the way!</p>

<p>Of course everything changes at these schools once winter sets in! How does your son like snow? :)</p>

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<p>Proud Dad: You have made me want to go to Bard! Especially the waterfall.</p>

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<p>Regarding Jewish campus life, it seems to me that one rather fundamental measure of a Jewish presence is if there are actually Jewish students there. Sure you can have one sole guy dancing around by himself, quite happy and thriving by his own standards, but I think most objective evaluators would be somewhat unimpressed. </p>

<p>Hillel. org maintains a database with numberous stats, based on their estimates.</p>

<p>Here are the total Jewish student populations, as estimated by Hillel, for some of the schools that have been mentioned:</p>

<p>Williams 200
Amherst 225 + 3,305 additional within ten miles
Dartmouth 550
Colgate 400
Vassar 500 + 1,100 additional within ten miles</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.hillel.org/HillelApps/JLOC/Search.aspx[/url]”>http://www.hillel.org/HillelApps/JLOC/Search.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>If somebody has better data on this than Hillel, please post.</p>

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<p>I’m assuming that the extra 3,305 “within l0 miles” at Amherst includes the other colleges of the 5-college consortium, so UMass at Amherst with its 25,000 students plus people over at the LAC’s (Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Hampshire) would add up to around 3,305. </p>

<p>Is the Vassar statistic expressing some kind of partnership of the Hillel with a second or third campus?</p>

<p>Also note that many nonJewish students now attend Hillel services, sometimes doubling an evening’s attendance at some schools. So an event can feel much livelier than the demographic statistics indicate. </p>

<p>Some compare those stats with the total school population for a a different angle.</p>

<p>I assume that Hillel’s statistics simply reflect anyone who applies self-identified as checking off “Jewish” for religion. </p>

<p>If students follow in their parents’ footsteps, keep in mind that in major metropolitan areas, around half of self-identified Jewish families join synagogues, so there are plenty of Jewish kids on a campus (half?) who like their parents say “I’m Jewish” but don’t partiipate in Hillel’s worship and cultural offerings. Meanwhile, lots of nonJews come out to Hillel events. Some chapters are vibrant, others a bit dull; and the leadership changes every several years, making a large difference.</p>

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<p>The hillel site enables you to identify all colleges within 10 miles of a particular zip code, that’s how I got those numbers. (Any number of miles, actually, I just used ten).</p>

<p>And you’re right, the % gives additional information that may be significant. For example Dartmouth and Williams have the same %, which is half of Vassar’s and is among the lowest of any of the selective colleges in the Northeast that my daughters looked at.</p>

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<p>Good thread on the plusses and minuses of visits.
Like a lot of things in this process, visiting has a certain “blind men and the elephant” quality. Different people get different perceptions of the same college - all to some extent incomplete.
Also, the process of visiting itself may or may not be important to any individual student.
As much as we talk about visiting, it is NOT necessary to visit THE school that you end up attending. I think it is important to emphasize that point, for kids who can’t afford lots of visits.
Reading these threads, and gathering as much first hand info as you can without spending a fortune - that is helpful.</p>

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<p>Something seems wrong with that Hillel data. It’s really hard for me to believe that Williams has only 200 Jews among its students – less than 10%. </p>

<p>I went to the website and looked at some stuff. Supposedly, there are only 100 Jews among Dartmouth’s 1,300+ grad students. Hmmmm . . . that includes a business school, a medical school, and some arts & sciences PhD programs. Is there any chance there are really only 100 Jews there? No way. Hillel is basing its numbers on something, I’m sure, but it’s something not terribly reliable. On the other hand, the numbers probably do reflect how many people have done something to identify themselves as Jews (like return a Hillel questionnaire), so they may not be so bad for estimating how vibrant the student Jewish community is.</p>

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<p>If anyone would like specific information on the Jewish community at Vassar, feel free to PM you and I will share what I know.</p>

<p>As an aside, I don’t think that 1100 within ten miles (?) has anything meaningful to do with Jewish life at Vassar.</p>

<p>Marist College is up the road, but there are few (if any) Jews there.</p>

<p>A mapquest search shows that Poughkeepsie is about 12 miles from SUNY New Paltz. There are probably a lot of Jews from NYC and the NY metropolitan area there. There is no interaction between Vassar and New Paltz.</p>

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<p>No one else seems to have directly addressed the initial premise of this question: that a “remote” campus is necessarily a bad or limiting thing.</p>

<p>We live on Long Island and my daughter used to go into the City with friends almost every other weekend. At first she was positive she wanted to go to NYU. When we took a trip in the Spring of her Junior year to look at Northeast colleges, she refused to even look at a number of upstate NY schools.</p>

<p>Given that, I’m still not sure why a suggestion by a HS teacher got her to apply to Colgate. And she didn’t even consider it or a visit until a late April admitted students day that forced her to choose between NYU, Oberlin and Colgate.</p>

<p>Remote or not, she fell in love with it, and now in her Junior year, she still loves it with a passion that has led us to refer to it as Cultgate.</p>

<p>Sometimes things kids think they don’t want turn out not to matter once they’ve visited. And once there, especially for schools like the ones mentioned, often the “remoteness” can be an asset to cohesion, study and intense friendships. </p>

<p>My daughter and at least 10 of her friends all took sophmore summer internships in NYC which Colgate arranged. And she and her friends drive often (and even in the dead of the heavy snow winter) 1 hour to Syracuse for grocery, cosmetic etc. shopping. It’s a welcome outting for them. </p>

<p>Then they all hurry back to Hamilton.</p>

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<p>Well, it has been a long (long) time, but do recall some interaction between Vassar and SUNY New Paltz way back when. </p>

<p>Seems we did a joint Choral Concert with SUNY New Paltz, pairing the Vassar College Choir with the equivalent SUNY New Paltz group to do the Brahms Requiem, with a full orchestra of local pros and some students, plus pro soloists in from NYC and Boston. Likely they had to combine to be able to afford all the pro players and big-ish name singers. We did home and away concerts, which was probably the only time I ever got up to New Paltz in my time at Vassar. </p>

<p>In the way of these things, the very next year the Vassar Music dept. managed to deny tenure to the choral director, musicologist and impressario that pulled that whole thing together. He felt down in the dumps for a bit, but right as the Vassar gig wound down he got hired by - what is that school called - starts with H, located in Cambridge or something? - and he has been there ever since doing everything from small renaissance to big time romantic choral and orchestral works with many of the different choral groups there. That school with the H even features him conducting in the Memorial Church in their admissions propaganda video. Not one of Vassar’s better decisions. </p>

<p>Not that this all has much to do with the Jewish population at Vassar. I wonder if the Hillel quote of “1100 in ten miles” has to do with the local population?</p>

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<p>It’s New Paltz, as I said previously I plugged in a 10 mile radius of the Vasssar zip code into the Hillel site.</p>

<p>I have no idea how much interaction there is, but the bodies are there if someone wanted interaction. At some other places the bodies are not there.</p>

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<p>I loved Amherst and Williams, and hated Dartmouth! (Though I think my reasons were very personal). Funny how that works out. I ended up applying only to Amherst and Williams of the three, and making my final decision between the two. I also visited Williams in the Spring time when it was very beautiful and crisp. The thought of a Hanover or Williamstown winter is horrifying to me (I’m not very fond of Amherst winters, either, but at least I don’t have to be on campus!)</p>

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<p>JHS</p>

<p>I couldn’t agree with you less. Of course if people can’t visit, that’s one thing, but for many kids, visits are incredibly helpful. Maybe you dont get any illumination from a visit–that doesn’t mean that no one does.</p>

<p>Mammall</p>

<p>If you can’t visit, that’s ok, but if you can, it will help to narrow your child’s focus.</p>

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<p>Sometimes kids are helped very early on the process (even as sophomores or early juniors) by visiting a type of school that is nearby, and available (financially) for a tour, simply to know how they sit on the important early questions of: do I want urban, suburban or rural? large population or small? LAC or university? coed or single gender? diverse or homogeneous? (examples there: Historically Black College or not; Catholic or not; large Jewish population or not; Christian-focus or not…). Sometimes there are prototypes all within a weekend drive that give kids the ability to imagine different kinds of colleges elsewhere in the nation. After such a visit to prototypes nearby, they have a better comparison point for their website research.</p>

<p>While our S never got out to California to visit his eventual choice (Chapman U), he was familiar with Brandeis U (located an hour away from grandma) so could better imagine another “small university.” When he visited his brother in NYC, he took an NYU tour, which became his best talking point to decide to include UCLA on his list, although he saw UCLA only by website. He dismissed Bennington when he saw a red barn on their website, having grown up uber-rural with waaaay too many red barns so he knew he wanted college to be an adventure and not so familiar. </p>

<p>While these aren’t the best choices, nor very accurate, he believed in them and it helped him decide things. Meanwhile, I was marveling at how much better the tools are today, compared to just comparing printed course catalogues and reference materials in the school guidance office. The 'net is a powerful tool for this process. Many said we should go visit and “kick the tire” anyway in April, before we agreed to invest all that money, but it’s working out okay in our case. The older two had the complete tours with many weekends, but they also didn’t want to go across the continent.</p>

<p>Also, by force of personality, some kids (and families) are hard-wired to simply accept and make do with a wide range of imperfect situations and mold them to “work for them” once they get on the scene. My kids tell me I’m the “spin-master” such that whatever I eventually end up with, I’m great at justifying it as “the best thing that could have possibly happened.” </p>

<p>In the JHS vs. Bethie question in this thread, I’d suggest families shop as hard as you can manage, but then also realize there’s a certain amount of less-than-perfect in every outcome. At that point, in freshman year, you and the kid will end up adjusting or jollying each other into believing s/he’s found The Place where a great education can happen, even if the architecture is disappointing or confusing, and so on.</p>

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<p>I am not an anti-visit fanatic. I think somewhere in this thread I called them a “necessary evil”. I took my kids on visits (and loved it); I visited the colleges to which I applied. My main point is that visits produce a lot of extremely vivid information about things that may not matter as much in the long run as the things that are less easy to suss out on visits. Also, that making decisions based on all that very vivid, but trivial information is not really rational.</p>

<p>Visits are great when they help get a kid excited about the future, focused, and feeling comfortable about a college that, objectively, meets his or her needs and goals. Visits are less great when they produce irrational responses based on how things look, not how they’re lived. I think visits should be taken with few tablespoons of salt, that’s all.</p>

<p>Also, while we’re at it, thanks to the poster up thread who said plainly why “isolation” is not necessarily negative. That’s one of the problems with a visit: it’s easy to see that there’s nothing around a college, and much harder to see the rich internal life of the place.</p>

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<p>I can’t agree more! That’s why I often promote Oberlin (my alma mater, H’s, brother’s, D’s). </p>

<p>If you look at it from a helicopter you see “cornfield in Ohio, wha???”</p>

<p>But if you go there for 4 years you’ll realize you could spend an entire lifetime there, have plenty to do all the time, meet future leaders or symphonic musicians from every corner of the country and globe. It might even work better BECAUSE of its so-called “isolation” since everyone stays on campus most every weekend and brings their best to the community. I’ve heard people say similarly about Bates, Vassar, Dartmouth, Wms, Bennington, Colby, Hamilton, Grinnell, Earlham…the list goes on.</p>

<p>But if you want shopping, clubs, dances with other colleges, forgetaboutit. </p>

<p>Many other rural schools have similarly rich cultural opportunity. Loyal alumnae speak for them 30 years after graduation. These kinds of isolated places can get deep into a person’s soul and affect their way of life. You can’t know that from a website or a walk-about, but current students or alumnae can probably represent it well. I’m always impressed by alumni loyalty, not just financially but how people talk about their alma mater. It’s more than old codgers talkin’.</p>

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<p>Yup yup yup. Although it really ought to be possible to get a sense of that on a visit, too. But you have to look for it, and know where to look for it, and not get distracted by whether or not you like the architecture and landscaping or the tour guide.</p>

<p>(My daughter’s friends at Oberlin go into Cleveland to do stuff now and again. It’s not THAT isolated. My daughter also described it as “the coolest cornfield in Ohio”.)</p>

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<p>On site in the land of isolation – Parents Weekend at Williams.</p>

<p>Have good comparison to make with last week’s Parents Weekend at Barnard.</p>

<p>Barnard: Dinner at stupendous restaurant. Gorgeous surrounding. Innovative food. Horrendous bill. Movie at Lincoln Center Loews – adorable interior decorations, great candy counter, escalators. Happy, chatty, excited daughter.</p>

<p>Williams: Dinner at third rate local restaurant. Very reasonable bill. Movie at sprawling, lackluster Berkshire mall.
Concert S participated in. He sang Bach B minor Mass, and performed along with other choral group, strings, wind ensemble, jazz ensemble, percussion group is magnificent building. Happy, chatty mellow son.</p>

<p>D had no time to do music extracurriculars. Too busy running around Manhattan. She also felt groups were too competitive and was afraid to audition. S has a lot of time; auditioned and was accepted into two music groups.</p>

<p>Both were very excited about courses, friends. D more future focused (she is two years older) and talked about boyfriend. S in the here and now.</p>

<p>Which is better? Chacun a son gout. (Don’t have accents.)</p>

<p>I am happy with both schools; happy for both kids.</p>

<p>Pocketbook? A different story.</p>

<p>BTW: North Adams is ten minutes from Williamstown and is a bigger town with MassMoca which is hosting Williamstown Film Festival tomorrow night. Tonight it was hosted by theater in Williamstown, but we were at the magnificent concert.</p>

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<p>Tiny bit more info. on Jewish question and Williams: For Family Weekend there was a Shabbat service and dinner, and there is also another Hillel sponsored event, don’t recall what it is right now.</p>

<p>In addition to this, there is a Catholic Mass and a non-denominational worship service.</p>

<p>So it looks like the Jewish sponsored events outnumber events scheduled by other religious groups.</p>

<p>There is also a Jewish Studies concentration which has the same academic status as the Environmental and Neuroscience concentrations.</p>

<p>Still, it is beyond question that the Jewish presence here does not equal the presence at Columbia, Barnard, Tufts, WashU, Brandeis (well duh) and many others.</p>