Vassar College Top Questions

Poughkeepsie itself is no college town. Despite the proximity of Marist, there is no real life outside the campus. The best thing about Vassar is the open-mindedness of people and for the most part, every person is accepted by others. The administration is alright and takes care of their students. Most academic people are impressed when I tell them I go to Vassar. A lot of time is spent studying and finishing up projects at various buildings. There is school pride, but it's not in the athletic sense. The biggest complaints are, in no particular order, dorms, health services, and the food.

My favorite thing about Vassar is that I can be a two sport varsity athlete while also staying committed to my school work and education. Because the school is on a smaller scale, I am very close with my professors, all of whom know that I play sports. When a game comes up in the middle of the week, they understand if I need to miss class and do not penalize me for it. Conversely, my coach also understands if I need to miss/be late for a practice for a class or lecture. With this flexibility I have been able to compete for the past three years on two amazing teams, one of which I am a captain of and has recently been named as the Division III Field Hockey Team with the highest GPA in the nation, and the other is ranked as one of the top 20 Division III W Lacrosse Teams in the nation. I also still have time to enjoy the beautiful campus and hang out with my friends on the weekends. Vassar honestly is a college where you can do it all, and still have time to spare!

-Oh is that an all girls school? No. We've been co-ed since 1969, but our reputation as one of the 7 sisters still precedes us. If you're not from NY, most people probably won't have heard of Vassar, unless they're in the world of Academia themselves.

Perfect size, beautiful campus Distinct social culture Sucks at sports, unfortunately

I find that the administration here tends to not be very helpful. For example, I applied to switch dorms, and they denied my request citing that they were unable to find room in the dorms I requested. This seemed fairly ridiculous to me especially since I know they are holding some rooms for next years freshmen. It just seems that they often take the easy way out instead of trying to accommodate people. If you don't need to ask anything of administration, things here are great, but unless your experience needs no fine-tuning it can be kindof a hassle.

The best thing about Vassar is the people. The students and the faculty alike. Everyone is happy to be here and more than willing to help you out. I would like it if there were more things to do in the Poughkeepsie community, though. Overall, I think Vassar is the perfect size: small enough to not be overwhelming and to know you can go to the dining hall and run into someone you know, but big enough that you meet new people every day. I spend most of my time on campus in my dorm MPR and on the quad when it's nice outside. Unfortunately, Poughkeepsie is not a "college town." There aren't really cute shops or cafe's except for a good restaurant right across the street from campus. We have a lot of school pride and recently there was an issue about the sports' teams uniforms: our traditional school colors are gray and rose (pink), but when we went co-ed, the sports teams got to wear gray and maroon. Now the male athletes want to get back to pink!

I spend most of my time on campus in the library, it's great, though we're trying to get its hours extended, it's a good work environment, when the dorms aren't always.

The best thing about Vassar is probably the social scene. Organizations don't require anything to start (unless you want funding, in which case you have to go through a semester-long approval process first), so people form new groups all the time, like the Mixed/Bi-Racial Student association, which was founded in January. You can almost always get people to come to something -- I'm hosting a "midnight chess" event this week and I've already got more guests than boards. If I could change one thing, it'd probably be ResLife, as we've had a few quarrels with them this year. Vassar's a small school, so it doesn't have a lot of name recognition back home, but the places where its reputation DOES reach, you get a little bit of a "wow" factor. Most of the people in Poughkeepsie can tell we go to Vassar anyways, but down in New York we're on the A-list with Columbia students when it comes to eye-bulging. I don't come here for the name, though, I come here because I like the school. I spend most of my time either in the eateries, my room, the woods, or the swamp. I find the nature areas here to be very peaceful, so I'll often hike into one of them for a little study break. I spend my *free* time almost equally everywhere. We may not have much of a college town, but enough stuff happens after dark each night that I've never felt the need to wander past the sushi restaurant, a block away from the college. Vassar's administration varies by department, and by person. Almost everyone loves Cappy, our president. She's really accessible, too -- just in my freshman year, I've had over a dozen conversations with her, including the time I sat next to her at the Rocky Horror Picture Show. If you want to go to college at a place where the president knows your name, you're in luck here. DB Brown, the Dean of Students, personally visited me in the hospital when I had appendicitis. As for our other administration, well, a lot of us are happy that the current Dean of the College, JJ Jackson, is leaving this year, due to some of her unreasonably conservative policies regarding gender-neutral housing, which she refused to put before the Board of Trustees after it was unanimously approved by all Trans-related organizations AND the VSA. Luis Inoa, director of ResLife, has been coming under fire lately because of some housing problems we're having that are taking a bit too long to work out. That's about it, though. Administration and Students get along well here. School pride exists in spades here, if you're willing to accept the fact that we're never going to care about sports unless we're the ones playing them. The only rivalry I pay attention to is between us and Marist over Magic: The Gathering, and that's because I play it. I don't find a problem with non-sports-related school pride, though. The most unusual thing about Vassar is probably the student-run porn magazine, Squirm. I helped pick the cover for next year's issue, so I think you'll enjoy it.

I think the size of Vassar is almost perfect, but I would round out the population to an even 3,000 if I had my way. When I tell people I go to Vassar their first reaction is to ask if it's still an all girls school ( we went co-ed in '69!) It's a pretty annoying question after a while. Poughkeepsie doesn't have too much to offer, although it has the essentials (supermarkets, liquor stores, a big mall, some great mexican restaurants). For the most part my feeling is Vassar students don't utilize Poughkeepsie and would rather stay on campus than explore the city. Also, New Paltz is a great town and it's only 20 minutes away. I think a really hard thing about being an American Culture major at Vassar (and perhaps at any liberal arts school) is the feeling that all the inequalities and injustices present in our society cannot be changed by a single person. I entered Vassar a more optimistic person than I will leave it.

I think that there should be more support for/attendance at athletic events. For the past few years (although things have gotten a lot better within the past year), students on campus have expressed negativity towards athletes and Vassar athletics in general. When I tell people that I go to Vassar, most people believe that it is a.) entirely girls b.) artsy.