Reply to What’s wrong with William & Mary?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "What’s wrong with William & Mary?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Large, well-known universities**. Possibly there are local universities where professors don't teach classes and TA's do, but even then I find it somewhat hard to believe. Perhaps graduate students in their last year of research at the university might teach a whole class.

[quote=Anonymous]My DS is having a tough time deciding between WM and VT & UVA.  We were planning to visit VT and UVA before everything went virtual. He liked WM but is concerned it may too serious and boring.  None of his friends applied to WM.[/quote]

W&M is definitely very serious. A lot of students want to go to medical/law/business/graduate school so a lot of people care about their grades. You won't find this at other universities where people simply don't care about grades.
Grading in the humanities and essay-grading is going to be somewhat more harsh than UVA/VT. There is no big-time sports culture

W&M has its advantages over UVA/VT, but I think for many public school kids (especially male) whose conception of college is huge stadium sports, huge block parties, buzzing college towns, W&M is very disappointing. 
For example, UVA, Michgian, Berkeley have these attributes while having as good academics (possibly less so in humanities/government/IR) without being like how W&M. It's very much a liberal arts college. [/quote]

There can and should be different types of schools and environments.  There is no one size fits all.  Many of the top schools do not have big time athletics and large undergraduate student bodies (think all Ivy League schools, MIT, Caltech, Chicago, Rice, Emory, WashU, Tufts, top LACs, etc.).  I think most who go there are happy with their choice.  They have very high graduation rates and very high levels of alumni involvement in the school.  That type of environment can have many advantages for people who appreciate it.  They are residential and many feel that contributes substantially to their learning and the feeling of community.  Relationships with faculty can be closer and this is appreciated.   Take a look at ratings of student faculty interactions that show up in places like Niche and Princeton Review.  Students at these types of schools often have opportunities to do more faculty-guided research and capstone projects which are useful for graduate school and admissions and applying for jobs, particularly so in science and in applying to medical school.  Take a look at USNews rankings for undergraduate research, capstone projects, and undergraduate teaching and these schools tend to rank very high.  These schools also rank high in percentage of students who go on to get Doctorates in STEM and other fields.  W&M does well in all of these areas I just mentioned.

William & Mary can be rigorous, but grading is fair.  If you look at Gradinflation.com, you can see that W&M's most recent average GPA was 3.33, which is comparable to UVA at 3.32 and higher than VT at 3.15.

So W&M isn't for everyone, but that's not a bad thing because it provides a good fit for many.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics