The Uneven Student

calmom
Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:01:17 +0000

I did my graduate work at Columbia and, though I think she could find her place there, didn’t recommend she apply. She wouldn’t like the core requirements, for one thing. If Barnard isn’t a close-knit community, she might do better elsewhere. (And of course she will change a lot in the next year or so.)



Barnard doesn’t have a core, but it has a set of distribution requirements called “9 ways of knowing” - so it’s not an open curriculum either.

I think that Barnard is a little more close knit than Columbia, but the overall ambiance is not that different, especially after the first year when most of the students are living in housing beyond the quad, which could be 1 block away or 10 blocks away.

It’s kind of difficult to describe, because in some ways Barnard is an incredibly supportive environment, especially when it comes to the potential for student/faculty relationships. But my d. is a very assertive individual – the type of person who knows what she wants and is very direct about asking for whatever she needs. I joke sometimes that by the time I get a whiff that my d’s thinking of doing something, she’s already gone and done it.
So my impression is that the school offers tremendous resources, there for those who take the initiative of seeking them out.

Again though, I didn’t realize when I first posted that your d. was still only a sophomore. It’s a little hard for my to conjure up a memory of the 16-year-old version of my d., but when I do, I don’t really see her at Barnard either. My d. was not all that serious about academics in high school – she kind of breezed her way through A’s with very little work. Definitely not the bookish type. I’d get ticked off because I’d see her using SparkNotes instead of doing assigned reading – so it was hard for me to see her in a challenging academic environment. Then she ended up applying to U of Chicago as well as Barnard – quite the change. Now she tells me she’s thinking of going for a Ph.D. - she went from dreading her senior thesis to loving it.

I think that sometimes with teens we are seeing the impact of hormones rather than personality, so we do need to ride that part out. But I also think that students need to wait until the end of junior year before finalizing a college list – so at this point you should be looking at possibilities, but realize that, especially with a teenager with a lopsided profile and somewhat fluctuating interests, you may be looking at an entirely different set of colleges when application time rolls around.