W&M Pros and Cons?

Farquhar
Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:36:08 +0000

As someone who transferred to W&M after a year in a college in a big city and after graduation took classes here and there at a variety of well-regarded universities for professional development, I think I can offer some useful advice. In fact, I joined this site just to give the advice I would give my own brothers as I happened to be considering that exact question when I found this thread.

Most of the pros and cons that people give for W&M do not ring true to me (most of the given pros could have come from the college’s own About section – never a good sign as far as veracity goes. Most of the cons are just gripes about college in general).

W&M is a very good choice for college, but if you are selecting between W&M and UVa, or Wake Forest, or Georgetown, or Yale, or a small liberal arts school, you need to have some meaningful way of making a choice. On some of the W&M clichés: W&M is neither a brutal or a breezy academic environment – you could skip a lot of classes, do your work the night before and graduate with a B average, or you could brown-nose within an inch of your life, repeat what the professors want to hear, and get a 4.0, without doing any intellectual heavy-lifting. People aren’t exceptionally friendly, talented, or unique, on the whole – just regular college students, some there just to study, some there just to party. Professors don’t take special concern for their students relative to many other schools – actually I’d say on the whole they were the least caring of the school I’ve been to, in part because they are openly angry about their pay and the intellectual quality of their students – but a few rare professors at W&M really do live up to the hype. The community is not distant or especially tight nit. In most ways, W&M is like any other college you might attend, and the people are like those at any other college that ranks in the top 75 or so.

If you have choices among similarly ranked or more highly ranked schools and all else is equal (you got into an honors program in all or none of them and financial aid and cost is about the same), you might choose W&M because you love the idea of going to school in, basically, Colonial Williamsburg, with all the atmosphere and historical resources that entails. This is a legitimate reason, especially if you are looking to study history. You might choose it because you think it is less douchy than the other options (like say UVa or Duke). This is not a very good reason – entitled students abound and the fraternity scene at W&M is much more intense than it has the reputation of being. It is actually pretty huge and there have been a lot of problems with alcohol, drugs, and rape. If you think you can skip the UVa frat scene by going to W&M, I doubt you will succeed. As I recall, freshman girls went through the same rituals as UVa freshman girls as described in the infamous Rolling Stone article from 2014. One frat had mugs made up that included “the three pillars of frat”: breaking things, getting black-out wasted, and f-ing b-ches. If that sounds bad enough, it’s the same on the sorority end – one sorority had black shirts printed up that read “blackout squad.” They wore them often and lived up to them. A lot of these same people were involved in college Christian associations, so everything bleeds together.

If you like the idea of the Honor Code or Phi Beta Kappa being originated at W&M, neither is a good reason. The Honor Code has some interesting ramifications. As at any college, cheating is common and rarely detected. Unlike other colleges, some students, I suppose they are mostly on an honor code council, look at catching their fellow students much the same way that police view their daily quota. You’ll see such peer policers hovering around the computer labs looking for signs of honor code violations to report. They never bothered me, as I never cheated or did anything that looked like it, but I felt like they were despicable tools all the same. I guess it should be obvious that my opinion of W&M is slightly negative – it reminded me more of high school than any other university I’ve ever attended or visited.

The best way to select W&M or another college is to look at the quality of the faculty in the subjects you are interested in, look at the campus living situations, special academic or career opportunities, and odds of getting into the grad school or career you want. College decisions should be transactional. It’s like buying a house, getting married, or deciding what grocery store to shop at and what to buy. Forget about the mystique or horror some try to paint about W&M. It’s about what you are going to get out of it (and that has a lot to do with what you are going to be inspired to put in). If you do wind up at W&M, feel lucky, but don’t go in with blinders on.

I would strongly advise those considering colleges to see if Coursera or HarvardX has courses from schools of interest to get a taste of what the better professors will be like. Like I said, I attended W&M for 3 years, and have a graduate degree from an ivy league school, as well as experience taking classes here and there at whatever decent school has been local. By visiting campuses and exploring on your own without a tour guide (who will feed you as much propaganda as meaningful info), trying to sit in on classes unannounced it you can wing it, and watching unedited recorded lectures available for free online, you can get a strong feel about a college – how the student body feels and behaves, how the professors approach their jobs, and the general school vibe.

If you can do all that and W&M still looks great to you, you will probably be one of many that absolutely adore it.