Merit aid at Smith (and a few general questions)

mini
Tue, 02 Aug 2005 21:31:06 +0000

I’m obviously not a student or anything, but I can say something about what my d. felt when she finally decided to go to Smith. We visited Williams on several occasions (I’m an alum), and she was admitted with very substantial financial aid. But each time, she was stunned by its homogeneity. Not so much in skin colors, but in attitudes and dress and speech and… It was like she had fallen into an Abercrombie and Fitch commercial. It seemed that everyone drank - a lot (we later found out that was confirmed by the college’s own surveys); women spoke to her about their worries about putting on an extra 5 pounds. We took a tour of their environmental garden, a little patch, the tour guide wearing what we thought was a designer dress, and a very tasteful nosejewel (the only one we saw on the visit.) My d. thought she was going to go nuts!

When she visited Smith she saw the “women in black”, and the women in “twin sets and pearls”, and then discovered you couldn’t stereotype either their belief systems (or their sexual orientation) by what they were wearing. There really were poor people! (lots of them - we later discovered 28% of students are on Pell Grants) not upper middle class kids masquerading as them. There were athletes who were engineering students, students with pink hair who were pre-med, students who kept strictly kosher, and students who stooped to pray toward Mecca five times a day, and they were all very public about it.

PC - you bet! They pretty much have to be in an attempt not to step on each other’s toes. Now mind you, we are from a pretty liberal town, and she had attended Evergreen for a year before going to Smith. But, after visiting a bunch of other places, it was like a real breath of fresh air.

(She doesn’t think of the place as particularly radical though - having spent the winter break and this summer in south India among folks organizing those who live on less than a dollar a day, she views Smith as much too rich for that.)