Texas A&M vs. UT: which school is a better fit?

vultureair
Tue, 05 Oct 2010 01:59:28 +0000

In the end, I do not think that being conservative/liberal should make a difference when comparing these schools. There are much more important things than political affiliation



Dude, when people say that A&M is a very conservative school, they are not talking about politics, but rather the overall lifestyle.

I graduated from A&M and I also had a ton of friends at A&M. But the atmosphere of the school wasn’t for me and if I had the choice again, I would have went somewhere else.

Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about. My friends and I met a lot of girls at A&M and it seemed like the following could describe most of them:

1) Girls already in long-term, serious relationships. (Probably 60% to 70% of the girls I met while at A&M)
2) The really sheltered types (only one or no boyfriends in their entire lives, no or awkward social skills, etc. I met quite a few girls like this)
3) A few girls who are #1 above and have absolutely no social lives outside of their boyfriends (I remember at least one girl I had in class like this… nice girl though, but kinda pathetic.)
4) Girls who want to get married ASAP. Damn, I knew quite a few people from class who were getting engaged.
5) The real religious types.

I’m just using the above as an example of one conservative aspect of A&M I noticed. Don’t get me wrong, I did date girls at A&M, but I felt like had I went to a less conservative school, I would have met a lot more girls who weren’t so clingy. A lot of the guys at A&M were clingy as well.

I transferred in as a junior, by the way, so YMMV as a freshman. For being a school with almost 50,000 students, A&M feels more like a smaller, private school than you’d expect. A lot of my friends at A&M noticed the same thing, which surprised me.

That’s just what you’d have to expect out of a very conservative, research oriented school in a semi-rural part of the state.

The religious types at A&M are in a large minority but they are still in a minority. However, there’s a lot of kids here who may not be religious per se but they still have really conservative values. Me personally, when I was 22 the LAST thing on my mind was getting married. I have nothing against small town kids with real traditional values and I befriended a few, but it wasn’t me at all.

There were Greeks on A&M who didn’t fit this mold but man, a lot of them were straight-up trash. A&M isn’t a Greek school at all.

If I had anything to complain about any of this at all, I did get frustrated meeting kids at A&M who were very booksmart but were intellectually dull. I mean, I could meet people who were damn smart with class but were boring as **** to talk to. For being a school with 50,000 kids, I really wish the atmosphere wasn’t so one-sided.

Also, it seems like the school lost a lot of it’s unity after the Bonfire collapse. Ever since Gates left, the administration has been poor and ran on-campus living to the ground. As a result, dorm rivalries are starting to die out.

Not a total loss, my degree from A&M will be a good stepping stone into a MBA program eventually.