Just to balance out the discussion here, I’ll offer my JHU perspective as a premed student who went through the program just a few years ago. I’m sorry to hear that some posters have family friends or heard stories from guidance counselors about students who didn’t enjoy their time at Hopkins, but this wasn’t my experience. I value the input of high school guidance counselors since they do hear back from students, and while this particular guidance counselor may have had a negative view, I can tell you Hopkins consistently ranks very well (better than many other top schools) in national surveys of public and private high school guidance counselors. The most recent ranking has Hopkins ranked #3 by high school guidance counselors: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/high-school-counselor, so the opinion of the high school counselor that one poster offered definitely is not the norm of the profession’s opinion nationally.
As for faculty being unavailable, that was not the case for me. I was part of the Neuroscience program, often the third or fourth most popular major at the school (about 250-350 students each year), and I had direct access to faculty for my classes and even the heads of the Neuroscience program. The Department Head, at least while I was there, had an annual pool party in her backyard, dinners at her house with other faculty, helped organize and attended program social and volunteer events, etc. I even had lunch with the President and nine other students at his house (quite a few students get the opportunity over their four years) - the JHU other posters are describing is not at all what I experienced. I never heard of a student transferring out of the school during my four years, maybe it happened, but it definitely wasn’t something I ever observed, let alone a common occurrence. Lastly, faculty everywhere are expected to conduct research and publish, so that shouldn’t be a problem on its own. JHU faculty were expected to hold office hours and, at least in my department ( a very popular and crowded one), faculty always responded to my emails, met with me after class, helped with coursework, invited students to intern in their labs etc.
Is JHU hard? Of course, it is very competitive - don’t attend if you’re not ready to work hard and take courses with other intelligent students. Are JHU students cutthroat (e.g. sabotage labs and hide library reference books)? Of course not. We’re teenagers and young adults just like everyone else, not animals. Group projects and team learning are a staple of almost all upper-level coursework for science courses (and throughout for engineering courses). This is the basis of problem solving in the real world, so of course the most effective educations utilize it, and Hopkins is no different.
I’m not sure when these stories of miserable students occurred or what programs they were in. Additionally, there are many factors that affect your happiness beyond a university’s efforts to make class grading fair, workload reasonable and offering social activities for students. The school provides tons of intramural activities, school-wide volunteer and social events, counseling services (both peer and professional), student interest groups, etc. They did all that they could (in my mind) to facilitate a happy and healthy student body, but yes, ultimately the onus is on you to talk to people, make friends and take care of yourself. It isn’t a tiny school. 1500 kids in a class should be enough for you to find a few friends at the very least. The school also prides itself in its diversity. Being in Baltimore (and a leader in public health, education, etc) the school is very cognizant of minority issues, poverty, etc., and so the school prioritizes a diverse class each year (Rice has a 0.69 diversity index to JHU’s 0.65, quite comparable, and both are high scoring): http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/campus-ethnic-diversity/page+2. Issues such as shyness, mental health (a legitimate concern for students everywhere), family problems, poor study habits, etc. can also be the root of the unhappiness, so I wouldn’t be too quick to blame a university when there are many, many factors outside of their control if students don’t ask for help.
Building up an entire university to be this sinister place where fun goes to die and students push each other into oncoming traffic just seems too melodramatic to be believable. Do some people not enjoy it? Sure. That can happen at any school, and it can be a combination of the people they happened to live around, the student’s own social skills, study habits, etc. Things happen. Just don’t let a few stories lead you to believe it is necessarily the school’s fault and that every student graduating is either a survivor or a monster. That just isn’t what I saw, and I wait to hear from another JHU student to disagree with me since I just haven’t heard anything like that from actual students.
I don’t mean to discount what other’s have said. I believe them, but I am hesitant to blame the school when there clearly are so many other contributors to such complex problems. It’s so radically different from my own experience I just had to say something. That’s my two cents.