Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:59     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:My DS graduated from Swarthmore. Sure, he worked hard, but I never heard/felt major stress from him. To those parents who think they see this INTENSITY when they tour, what are you seeing?


I asked about this on a Swarthmore thread. I visited with my DS this summer and maybe because we had a very outgoing and funny tour guide, my kid came away very enthusiastic. But everything I read here claims it is an "intense" school - how do we know that? what does that mean? How are we supposed to know if a school is too "intense" for any particular kid?


My opinion isn’t going to be popular but it really comes down to a combo of natural ability and work ethic. Good work ethic can make up for a lack of natural academic ability, and natural ability can compensate for lack of work ethic, but the compensation both ways has its limits. You probably have a reasonable idea if your kid has good work ethic or not from their behavior, but it’s harder to tell if they have the natural academic smarts to make an intense school manageable. Sometimes AP/honors kids are just shocked by how much harder intense college academics are and it would be nice if they had some warning. I guess you can look at test scores as a hint, but I think it’s a real problem that the modern SAT is more preppable than the old one. While it’s admirable that some kids can study for over a year to get a really high score, those kids aren’t going to perform as well as the kids with equal study habits who can get a high score on the first try without study.


+1 I don't disagree that the SAT changes make it less of an IQ test than it once was but that is still an aspect regarding which kids do well in one sitting. Same with the AP tests where scoring has been relaxed, it might make some feel better but a 3 or even a 4 places you at the bottom of your college class at top schools.
I don't really get the desire of some to scratch and claw so their kid can be the last admit to a really competitive school

I think we all agree with you there, but it's still hard for some parents to accurately assess where their kids are on that spectrum, especially if they've been surrounded by similar kids all their lives. I have one kid with special needs and one kid who is gifted so this was made clear to our family from the start! But other families may not have a built-in means of comparison.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:56     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I always hear Cornell described this way. But I don’t get it. Cornell is huge. How can it have a single vibe?

Curious to hear about people’s kids’ first-hand experiences there. DC is a work hard/play hard type. Is efficient and focused to learn and get the work done but doesn’t dwell on it and is remarkably unstressed. Instead, has a big life outside of school - sports, social, ECs, and downtime. Just a normal, very smart kid with a lot of energy and a huge capacity for both academics and people.

Cornell must have tons of similar kids, right? Would love to hear about that.


Cornell is huge you were right. For the kids that are engineering or computer science majors or even hard sciences their life is a grind.

However, unlike other schools, there is a thriving social scene if you are Greek. Tons of Greek Parties, date Parties once you were in a house, social events abound. And then the bars in College town. They have more than 30 or 40 fraternities and more than 20+ sororities.

They just don’t have D1 sports. It’s a pretty tight group though.

For any school, don’t go by what the tour guides show you. They’re typically horrible. The only Tour guide we loved was Wake Forest.

You need to meet with people who attend the college from your high school or that you otherwise know. If possible, spend an overnight and go out with them. See what a day in the life is really like.

Formal tours basically take you to the library, the dining halls and the dorms. There is more to college life than those three spots.



Cornell is D1 for all sports and just won the NCAA mens LAX championship.


Love that. Do kids actually go watch games? Lax? Soccer? Basketball? Football?

DC has friends on all the teams at their high school and goes to watch and cheer them on (when they’re not busy playing their own sports.) They want a school where other kids are similar - interested in going to watch the school teams.


DD is 6 weeks into freshman year at cornell and having a blast in arts & sciences. taking a bunch of intro classes (unsure of major), joined clubs, homecoming this weekend so friends are going to football game, went to applefest/ithaca farmers market, fall weather has been beautiful. she definitely works hard but is also getting out a ton and having fun meeting new friends. she was really disciplined and hard working in high school (highly competitive sports, rigorous academics, extracurriculars) so the transition has been ok. i think she also tried not to overload her first semester with hard classes and prioritized meeting friends so that has helped a lot.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:54     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Is this a bot generated prompt?


That’s what I thought! AI is hungry for more words!

This is not how AI is trained. Some person just wanted to stir the pot.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:52     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:My DS graduated from Swarthmore. Sure, he worked hard, but I never heard/felt major stress from him. To those parents who think they see this INTENSITY when they tour, what are you seeing?


I asked about this on a Swarthmore thread. I visited with my DS this summer and maybe because we had a very outgoing and funny tour guide, my kid came away very enthusiastic. But everything I read here claims it is an "intense" school - how do we know that? what does that mean? How are we supposed to know if a school is too "intense" for any particular kid?


My opinion isn’t going to be popular but it really comes down to a combo of natural ability and work ethic. Good work ethic can make up for a lack of natural academic ability, and natural ability can compensate for lack of work ethic, but the compensation both ways has its limits. You probably have a reasonable idea if your kid has good work ethic or not from their behavior, but it’s harder to tell if they have the natural academic smarts to make an intense school manageable. Sometimes AP/honors kids are just shocked by how much harder intense college academics are and it would be nice if they had some warning. I guess you can look at test scores as a hint, but I think it’s a real problem that the modern SAT is more preppable than the old one. While it’s admirable that some kids can study for over a year to get a really high score, those kids aren’t going to perform as well as the kids with equal study habits who can get a high score on the first try without study.


I think we all agree with you there, but it's still hard for some parents to accurately assess where their kids are on that spectrum, especially if they've been surrounded by similar kids all their lives. I have one kid with special needs and one kid who is gifted so this was made clear to our family from the start! But other families may not have a built-in means of comparison.


I’ve never known anyone to discredit hard work or natural ability, but I have known people who think the lack of one can totally be made up for by the presence of the other. But yeah I agree it’s really hard to tell where you’re really at when you have no basis for comparison.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:39     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:My DS graduated from Swarthmore. Sure, he worked hard, but I never heard/felt major stress from him. To those parents who think they see this INTENSITY when they tour, what are you seeing?


I asked about this on a Swarthmore thread. I visited with my DS this summer and maybe because we had a very outgoing and funny tour guide, my kid came away very enthusiastic. But everything I read here claims it is an "intense" school - how do we know that? what does that mean? How are we supposed to know if a school is too "intense" for any particular kid?


My opinion isn’t going to be popular but it really comes down to a combo of natural ability and work ethic. Good work ethic can make up for a lack of natural academic ability, and natural ability can compensate for lack of work ethic, but the compensation both ways has its limits. You probably have a reasonable idea if your kid has good work ethic or not from their behavior, but it’s harder to tell if they have the natural academic smarts to make an intense school manageable. Sometimes AP/honors kids are just shocked by how much harder intense college academics are and it would be nice if they had some warning. I guess you can look at test scores as a hint, but I think it’s a real problem that the modern SAT is more preppable than the old one. While it’s admirable that some kids can study for over a year to get a really high score, those kids aren’t going to perform as well as the kids with equal study habits who can get a high score on the first try without study.


I think we all agree with you there, but it's still hard for some parents to accurately assess where their kids are on that spectrum, especially if they've been surrounded by similar kids all their lives. I have one kid with special needs and one kid who is gifted so this was made clear to our family from the start! But other families may not have a built-in means of comparison.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:35     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:My DS graduated from Swarthmore. Sure, he worked hard, but I never heard/felt major stress from him. To those parents who think they see this INTENSITY when they tour, what are you seeing?


I asked about this on a Swarthmore thread. I visited with my DS this summer and maybe because we had a very outgoing and funny tour guide, my kid came away very enthusiastic. But everything I read here claims it is an "intense" school - how do we know that? what does that mean? How are we supposed to know if a school is too "intense" for any particular kid?


My opinion isn’t going to be popular but it really comes down to a combo of natural ability and work ethic. Good work ethic can make up for a lack of natural academic ability, and natural ability can compensate for lack of work ethic, but the compensation both ways has its limits. You probably have a reasonable idea if your kid has good work ethic or not from their behavior, but it’s harder to tell if they have the natural academic smarts to make an intense school manageable. Sometimes AP/honors kids are just shocked by how much harder intense college academics are and it would be nice if they had some warning. I guess you can look at test scores as a hint, but I think it’s a real problem that the modern SAT is more preppable than the old one. While it’s admirable that some kids can study for over a year to get a really high score, those kids aren’t going to perform as well as the kids with equal study habits who can get a high score on the first try without study.


this is why a renowned athlete with great national/international accolades and rankings gets into Stanford with a 3.7uw gpa and TO.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:07     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:My DS graduated from Swarthmore. Sure, he worked hard, but I never heard/felt major stress from him. To those parents who think they see this INTENSITY when they tour, what are you seeing?


I asked about this on a Swarthmore thread. I visited with my DS this summer and maybe because we had a very outgoing and funny tour guide, my kid came away very enthusiastic. But everything I read here claims it is an "intense" school - how do we know that? what does that mean? How are we supposed to know if a school is too "intense" for any particular kid?


My opinion isn’t going to be popular but it really comes down to a combo of natural ability and work ethic. Good work ethic can make up for a lack of natural academic ability, and natural ability can compensate for lack of work ethic, but the compensation both ways has its limits. You probably have a reasonable idea if your kid has good work ethic or not from their behavior, but it’s harder to tell if they have the natural academic smarts to make an intense school manageable. Sometimes AP/honors kids are just shocked by how much harder intense college academics are and it would be nice if they had some warning. I guess you can look at test scores as a hint, but I think it’s a real problem that the modern SAT is more preppable than the old one. While it’s admirable that some kids can study for over a year to get a really high score, those kids aren’t going to perform as well as the kids with equal study habits who can get a high score on the first try without study.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:06     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Is this a bot generated prompt?


What’s that


It's like a word salad intro with a super vague question that is not school specific and couldn't possibly help anyone? Does anyone really need to know the ins and outs of the intense vibe at thousands of schools around the country?
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 12:01     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:My DS graduated from Swarthmore. Sure, he worked hard, but I never heard/felt major stress from him. To those parents who think they see this INTENSITY when they tour, what are you seeing?


I asked about this on a Swarthmore thread. I visited with my DS this summer and maybe because we had a very outgoing and funny tour guide, my kid came away very enthusiastic. But everything I read here claims it is an "intense" school - how do we know that? what does that mean? How are we supposed to know if a school is too "intense" for any particular kid?


You can never know for sure.

People come away from tours with certain impressions, accurate or not. When visiting Dartmouth, we met several students, including our very accomplished tour guide, who politely said that academics were intense. They actually came out and said it. While it was never described quite as plainly elsewhere, we got the same vibe at Williams and Georgetown. We visited other colleges like Middlebury where we got the distinct impression that our tour guide was an airhead and lots of other students we met were there to have fun and not study - and the admissions person we heard did nothing to dispel that view.

Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 11:55     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:My DS graduated from Swarthmore. Sure, he worked hard, but I never heard/felt major stress from him. To those parents who think they see this INTENSITY when they tour, what are you seeing?


I asked about this on a Swarthmore thread. I visited with my DS this summer and maybe because we had a very outgoing and funny tour guide, my kid came away very enthusiastic. But everything I read here claims it is an "intense" school - how do we know that? what does that mean? How are we supposed to know if a school is too "intense" for any particular kid?
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 11:47     Subject: Intense vibe schools
I think when people call a school “intense,” it’s usually referring to engineering, which is a grind everywhere. But there are some schools that have notoriously stressful engineering departments. Cornell and Carnegie Mellon come to mind. But I’m sure students in other majors have a more typical college experience.

But “intense” is usually thrown at the strong STEM schools - Cornell, CMU, MIT, Georgia Tech etc But it’s major specific. The anthropology majors at these schools are not nearly as stressed as the engineering majors.

Swarthmore is kind of unique. And Chicago was too until recently. These two schools were the places where the humanities and social science students could totally nerd out. I think that’s lightened up in recent years. And neither are as “intense” as their reputation.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 11:46     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I always hear Cornell described this way. But I don’t get it. Cornell is huge. How can it have a single vibe?

Curious to hear about people’s kids’ first-hand experiences there. DC is a work hard/play hard type. Is efficient and focused to learn and get the work done but doesn’t dwell on it and is remarkably unstressed. Instead, has a big life outside of school - sports, social, ECs, and downtime. Just a normal, very smart kid with a lot of energy and a huge capacity for both academics and people.

Cornell must have tons of similar kids, right? Would love to hear about that.


Cornell is huge you were right. For the kids that are engineering or computer science majors or even hard sciences their life is a grind.

However, unlike other schools, there is a thriving social scene if you are Greek. Tons of Greek Parties, date Parties once you were in a house, social events abound. And then the bars in College town. They have more than 30 or 40 fraternities and more than 20+ sororities.

They just don’t have D1 sports. It’s a pretty tight group though.

For any school, don’t go by what the tour guides show you. They’re typically horrible. The only Tour guide we loved was Wake Forest.

You need to meet with people who attend the college from your high school or that you otherwise know. If possible, spend an overnight and go out with them. See what a day in the life is really like.

Formal tours basically take you to the library, the dining halls and the dorms. There is more to college life than those three spots.



Cornell is D1 for all sports and just won the NCAA mens LAX championship.


Love that. Do kids actually go watch games? Lax? Soccer? Basketball? Football?

DC has friends on all the teams at their high school and goes to watch and cheer them on (when they’re not busy playing their own sports.) They want a school where other kids are similar - interested in going to watch the school teams.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 11:43     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:I think there is some truth to the rumors of intensity. For example, can you imagine MIT/Caltech as being laid back when it comes to academics? But some students thrive under these conditions because they were under-challenged before and are finally at a place where they can thrive. The problem is when a kid who would not thrive when the work is this hard selects such a school anyway for prestige or whatever reason.


We’ve heard there’s a decedent segment of this at Cornell. The Ivy-or-die crowd who didn’t get in to the others and need to grind constantly to keep up (or because that’s who they are naturally.)

I wish Cornell chose to promote the more fun and social side of the school. The marketing and socials all feel so dreary - even the highlighted kids ECs seem heavy and academic in nature.

Our DC assumes that all these T50 schools are excellent academically, with all the opportunities for those who seek them out. What they’re trying to figure out instead is what life actually feels like on campus day-to-day for four years.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 11:39     Subject: Intense vibe schools
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I always hear Cornell described this way. But I don’t get it. Cornell is huge. How can it have a single vibe?

Curious to hear about people’s kids’ first-hand experiences there. DC is a work hard/play hard type. Is efficient and focused to learn and get the work done but doesn’t dwell on it and is remarkably unstressed. Instead, has a big life outside of school - sports, social, ECs, and downtime. Just a normal, very smart kid with a lot of energy and a huge capacity for both academics and people.

Cornell must have tons of similar kids, right? Would love to hear about that.


Cornell is huge you were right. For the kids that are engineering or computer science majors or even hard sciences their life is a grind.

However, unlike other schools, there is a thriving social scene if you are Greek. Tons of Greek Parties, date Parties once you were in a house, social events abound. And then the bars in College town. They have more than 30 or 40 fraternities and more than 20+ sororities.

They just don’t have D1 sports. It’s a pretty tight group though.

For any school, don’t go by what the tour guides show you. They’re typically horrible. The only Tour guide we loved was Wake Forest.

You need to meet with people who attend the college from your high school or that you otherwise know. If possible, spend an overnight and go out with them. See what a day in the life is really like.

Formal tours basically take you to the library, the dining halls and the dorms. There is more to college life than those three spots.



Cornell is D1 for all sports and just won the NCAA mens LAX championship.
Anonymous
Post 10/03/2025 11:33     Subject: Intense vibe schools
I think there is some truth to the rumors of intensity. For example, can you imagine MIT/Caltech as being laid back when it comes to academics? But some students thrive under these conditions because they were under-challenged before and are finally at a place where they can thrive. The problem is when a kid who would not thrive when the work is this hard selects such a school anyway for prestige or whatever reason.