Reply to Thought on Wake Forest?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Thought on Wake Forest?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]2004 Wake grad here.

Other posters have covered some of this, but my experience with Wake was great academically and a little less great socially. I chose Wake over better schools because they gave me a great scholarship without which I'd be in significant debt. In terms of qualify of the education, I think it was fantastic. I studied biology which is one of the stronger departments there. The work was challenging, the classes were small, and I forged much closer relationships with my professors than my friends at the other elite North Carolina schools. Friends in the same major at UNC and Duke were surprised that our professors were actually in lab with us (we had TAs for some of the intro courses, but in the advanced classes the professors were also there). The work there was definitely challenging, and it set me up well for graduate school down the road. In fact, my Ivy League graduate school seemed easy in comparison to the workload at Work Forest. Worth noting that if anything students felt there was grade deflation going on. Very few people get out of there with a 4.0. Then again, I've never need to put my undergraduate GPA on anything other than my graduate school application so this really shouldn't be a big deal to anyone.

Socially, the Greek system is admittedly large.  It's so big that it's not as exclusive as on some campuses. There were 1 or 2 sororities that I thought were pretty snotty, but the rest were full of nice girls for whom being in a sorority was just another fun activity to take part in. Several years I opted to live in friends who happened to be in sororities, so it's not like once you're in the Greek system you ignore everyone else. Also, rush happens 2nd semester so most people have already forged friendships by then. I had very little use for the frat guys, but I wasn't their type anyway!

My main social challenges were that I grew up with very little money, I'm very liberal (Williams was my first choice, I just couldn't afford it!), and I've never been much of a partier. The student body at Wake definitely has a range from super conservative to rather liberal, but I felt that most people were moderately Republican. Most had also clearly grown up pretty comfortably affluent; despite being perfectly nice, many students just didn't seem to have a sense that many people grow up differently from how they did. That said I chose Wake in part because I felt like people were basically friendly and not hyper-competitive, which I'd still say is true. It just took me a while to find those people that I really clicked with.

The Southern thing is being way overstated. Wake is in the South but has many many students from elsewhere. If you want to leave afterwards you'll leave. After graduation I moved to the Raleigh area, then to New England for graduate school, and now I clearly live in the DC area. It's only limiting if you make it so.

Parting words--if you are the type of person who cares about going to a "name" school, people are always going to say: "Wake? that's were people who don't get into Duke go, right?" However, if you can look past the name and want a top notch education, it's well worth looking at. [/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