Our Bryn Mawr visit and some questions

shoboemom
Mon, 01 Dec 2014 05:05:50 +0000

We finally got to visit Bryn Mawr recently. It is an absolutely beautiful campus…especially with the fall leaves! Wow! I loved it there. The campus is a true, enclosed campus, with most of the buildings around a very large quad. The students were friendly, in a proactive way…asking if we needed help, saying hi as we passed them, that sort of thing. The consortium with Haverford was obvious and certainly appeared easy to access. We took the blue bus, which was there about every 15 minutes, to the campus of Haverford just to check it out. I wish we’d had more time and we would have toured there as well.
D did an overnight and sat in on a class, and that is where the concerns came up. She really liked the people at the school, including those involved in the overnight, but found that they didn’t seem to be aware of anything going on on campus in the evenings. They tried to think of things, but came up with “there are movies sometimes”. She also noted that it was something of a slumber party atmosphere, with students attempting to do homework, but mostly socializing and not getting much work done. Fun, but she’d find that hard to deal with on a regular basis. Of course, this was during an overnight, so may not have been typical, but D got the impression that it was. I wonder how much has to do with the students being new freshmen. I’m surprised that is who the school would assign to host an overnight. They, perhaps haven’t had time to settle into good study habits or to learn about all the activities on campus?..Or maybe there really just aren’t that many events/activities?
Then she sat in on a class, and found it, …long. She said it seemed set up as a discussion based class, but it was a lecture, and was not engaging, even though it was a topic of interest to her. Is this common there? I’m afraid those things (and lack of kitchens in the dorms) have moved Bryn Mawr down the list. It has soooo much going for it. I want to be sure she isn’t getting a wrong 1st impression, and to be fair, this is the only school where she’s done an overnight, so she can’t really compare evening dorm life .