<p>wrath is right - lots of people here turned down NW and JHU, and wanted to get into Brown. (There are people who turned down Brown though, too).</p>
<p>These are the reasons I didn’t apply to the other schools you’re asking about:
- Swarthmore - I felt it was much too small (for me! other people like that size school) and when my mom and I asked where the library was, someone said “McCage? It’s right over there.” We thought it was called McCabe, and asked if we had it wrong, and the guy said, “Hahah…it’s because you NEVER LEAVE.” I’m all for challenging academics, but I wanted more than just classes out of my college experience, I wanted to meet people, sing in choirs, do environmental things, piano, voice, WHATEVER, the point is I wanted to have time to do things outside of classes and Swarthmore is famous for being a “their students never stop studying” school.
- Wesleyan - during the info session, the guy leading it said something like, “everyone thinks that we’re just a bunch of hippie liberals dancing in the woods, but we’re not!” and then the tour basically gave me no reason to believe the previous statement isn’t true. Pretty much everyone was wearing colored Chuck Taylors, and if they weren’t, their hair was green or purple or something. I’m totally okay with alternative/punk scene kids, but diversity was important to me. Also, like Swarthmore, I felt it was too small. Plus, they don’t serve breakfast. I don’t eat breakfast, but imagine if I had to go somewhere early and wanted to eat in the morning! Not an option! Then again, a girl from my HS went to Wesleyan ten years ago and she’s the coolest person I’ve ever met, works now as a producer at VH1.</p>
<p>And I’ll tell you what I mean by ‘too small’. On my Haverford tour, the tour guide said: “By your junior year at Haverford, things might start to get a little…claustrophobic. You see the same people, all the time, and you might have drama with them and it gets a little bad…which is why most juniors opt to study abroad!”
Me: (thinking) …**** gets so bad here that you have to leave the COUNTRY? no, thank you.</p>
<p>I had a graduating class of 143, so I’m no stranger to a close community, but what I like about Tufts’ size is that you can know a lot of people on campus and still be content with the knowledge that every day, theoretically, you can meet someone new and cool.</p>
<ol>
<li>BC - In contrast to Wesleyan and Swat, BC felt too big to me. I felt that its academics were a LITTLE bit lacking in the programs I was interested in. Also, homogeneous much? I didn’t want to be the only Jewish girl on campus. And I happen to not really care about football, which would probably put me in the minority. The people from my school who went to BC tend to be pretty attractive and had a lot of school spirit in high school.</li>
</ol>
<p>Hope that helped, but again, these were MY feelings - you should def. get out and see them for yourself!</p>