<p>clearly. Listen, as I’ve said before, there are going to be people who have bad experiences at any college or university in the country. The fact is, Williams has among the highest, if not the highest, first-year retention, four and six year graduation, and alumni satisfaction (measured, chiefly, by alumni giving percentage) rates of any college in the country, and Williams also does as well as any college in the country when it comes to graduate school placement. The average GPA at Williams is something around a 3.3-3.4. None of these FACTS supports the image of a school which, generally, is the sort of brutal, impersonal weeding-out factory that ARobot describes. </p>
<p>Is Williams a perfect place? No. Are there probably faculty or admins there who could be more student-friendly? I’m sure. Will some students, inevitably, not be well-served by Williams, and experience justifiable frustration with certain institutional priorities? As with every school, of course. It’s impossible to tailor any school to be everything for every person. But again, it’s all RELATIVE. Is there any place where the atmosphere is materially more hospitable and student-focused for high achieving students, while still being extremely academically rigorous? If there is, I’ve never heard of it. I mean, believe me, there are people (even people who have commented here in the past) who have the exact opposite claim, that Williams is not rigorous enough, grades are too inflated, students can cruise and are too coddled and get away with too much especially compared to how the school used to be, etc. I don’t agree with that, either, by the way. It’s hard to find that balance, certainly, but you don’t want to be a place which is so “self-empowering” or whatever that students are never pushed / challenged to the edge of their capabilities. </p>
<p>But I CAN say that neither I nor any of my closest friends at Williams were atypically prepared for college (I went to a barely-above-average large public school) and I didn’t experience ANY of the issues ARobot did. Whereas, later in life, I’ve certainly been in environments where I have. The one current student I know at Williams is absolutely thriving, earned a great fellowship, etc., and does about 50 different activities while having a social life, and again is a product of a non-elite public school. So these issues are far from overwhelming on campus, even if they may exist. If they were, again, Williams would not have graduation and alumni giving rates that equaled or exceeded its peers, and it would not consistently place students, in every conceivable field of study (yes, even many that ARobot considers “weed-out” fields), at the top graduate programs in the country. The fact is, not everyone can be an astrophysicist or a heart surgeon. I could not have been, I’m sure. And you know what? I’m cool with that. </p>
<p>Williams faculty members, as a whole, are incredibly accessible and overwhelmingly interested in student well-being, and are certainly not going to disregard whatever vague laws ARobot keeps referencing. IF they did, there would be a heck of a lot of lawsuits filed against the school, as opposed to the approximately zero that I’ve heard about. That’s why many of them chose to be at Williams, a school which, has as its model, the image of the log, and which has tutorials where faculty and students are simply unable to avoid close contact. </p>
<p>I don’t doubt that ARobot had a bad experience at Williams. Guess what – it happens anywhere. Sometimes, yes, even at Williams, the institution is to blame, and I know this is a crazy idea in this age when everything is the fault of everyone other than one’s self, but guess what – sometimes the individual student is (gasp) to blame. Sometimes, it’s a lot easier to point fingers rather than look in the mirror (again, this may or may not be true in ARobot’s case, but I’m always a BIT skeptical when someone is SO determined to blame other people or institutions for whatever disappointments they’ve experienced in life. Not really a healthy way to go through life, btw). Especially doing so anonymously on an anonymous message board, when there is no way to know what is motivating the claims and what the actual TRUTH behind them is. </p>
<p>Other times, no one is to blame, and it’s just a bad fit. But I do have a problem with ARobot making sweeping generalizations, based on his own experiences (and even perhaps based on the experiences of a few other disgruntled people he knows), which are belied by (1) everything I and all my close friends experienced at Williams, (2) everything I’ve heard from other students / recent alumni I’ve chatted with about their Williams experienced, and (3) all of the actual statistical evidence, which is flatly contrary to those generalizations.</p>