<p>My daughter was accepted to NYU as well, and she had originally focused on NYU in part because we simply thought her chances of being accepted there were greater. She fell in love with NYU when she first went to vist Barnard, but was staying with a friend in an NYU dorm. But when she came out for admitted student events, she realized that she loved NYU for the social life - (and the boys) --, but that the academic environment was far better at Barnard – NYU students complained of large classes, long lines, lots of difficulty just getting the courses they wanted. She could see that Morningside Heights could not in any way compete with the attraction of the Village – but she realized that she could have the best of both worlds with Barnard. She told me that the thing that really cinched the decision of her mind was when NYU students told her that they liked things so much there that they never left the Village… she didn’t want to be at a college where she “never left” the campus area, no matter how great. She wanted to have the full east coast/NY experience.</p>
<p>When I ask my daughter what she is doing for fun or entertainment, she is all over the city. There’s Lincoln Center, there’s the museums… After she was there about 2 weeks she told me things were going very well and she was starting to feel very comfortable about going places alone on the subway. OK, as her mom I don’t want to think about her all alone on the subway – but the point is that if her friends are doing something in midtown or lower Manhattan, she has no problem getting to wherever they are going. She introduced her new Barnard friends to NYU friends, and the other Barnard friends also had NYU friends, so now she has new NYU friends – and there just seems to be a lot of socializing. I am sure that there are also things to do in and around Morningside Heights – I think the bigger barrier to my daughter’s social life is that she is also trying to keep up with her classes, so a lot of times she is invited to go out somewhere and she has to say no simply because she has reading to do. She feels she has a handle on it all – she says she is keeping up with all her reading and assignments without a problem – but she has expressed some worries about some of her friends – so my guess is that my d. is spending most of her weekday evenings studying rather than playing, and probably isn’t even thinking about Morningside Heights as being a source of entertainment. </p>
<p>That’s not to say that Barnard is perfect for everyone. My d. is proactive and assertive – she simply is not the type of person to sit around her room waiting for something to happen. </p>
<p>So maybe the Barnard decision requires a student to look at herself and her personality to decide whether the environment is a real fit. Obviously, for a student who wants more of a ready-made social life, then co-ed living has its advantages. Also, although Barnard is a college with its own self-contained campus, that campus is very, very small. It only covers 4 blocks, from 116th to 120th, and NY City blocks between the numbered streets are very short. Of course there is also Columbia, but even that is physically small. If you restrict your life to on-campus and the immediate neighborhood, I think you might start feeling claustrophobic. For a student who really wants to have their social life as well as academic life center around the campus, maybe a more traditional suburban campus setting would be a better choice.</p>