<p>Well, for one, I would characterize Williams as laid-back, but I wouldn’t characterize it as less academically stressful. A Williams poster once characterized it as a duck gliding smoothly along but paddling furiously underwater.</p>
<p>It seems to me that at Swarthmore particularly, students tend to mix academics and social life–i.e. writing a paper in the common room. But that is digressing into a specific “kind” of social scene; my general point was that being laid-back does not necessarily imply wanting to socialize with other people–and you’re probably also still stressing out over academics, just not publicly.</p>