What did you turn down for Bowdoin?

barvoets
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 22:38:15 +0000

Allaboutbooks, I definitely disagree with your first statement. Name recognition DOES NOT equal prestige-just because more people know about Cornell and WashU doesn’t mean that they have more prestige. I can speak for Bowdoin when I say that many alumni have gone on to do things that are just as notable as grads at those two universities. We’ve got the founder of Netflix, Subway, CEO of American Express, one of the two founders of Mayo Clinic, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry W. Longfellow, Joshua Chamberlain, and way to many politicians to name. We also have an arguably more storied 50-75 years of existence than the other two. Being a small school, Bowdoin has a close-knit feel, excellent professors and the small-school-New-England feel that attracted me-and so many others- to it. If all that’s not prestigious for a 1,700 student LAC, with a lower RD acceptance rate than most other ‘prestigious’ Universities, then I don’t know what is.

Bottom line, don’t associate name recognition with prestige. Just because someone hasn’t heard of a school DOES NOT mean it is less prestigious. It certainty isn’t the case with Midd and Bowdoin, both of which are certainly in the top echelon of schools.