Wesleyan University Top Questions

Hipsters/lesbians/jocks.

As an English and Music major, I couldn't be happier. The music department is tops in the country, and is filled with legendary jazz and experimentalists like Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier, all who are incredibly accessible. (You're not going to find anyone that famous willing to sit down with you for an hour at Yale, kids.) The English department is of the same caliber, and so were my experiences in Biology, Art History, History, and many other departments.

Wesleyan students are politically progressive intellectuals. They are generally fairly wealthy. There is fair percentage of the student body that are students of color, a high percentage of LGBT students, and very few conservatives, "jocks," or stereotypical college "frat boy" types.

Hippies and athletes. Rich white kids who pretend otherwise. Predominantly leftist, completely leftist, entirely leftist. Experiences with racial or LGBT groups can be tough because they are often so militant and unwelcoming to reason. The kind of student that would feel out of place is one who does not buy the party line. Four tables in the dining hall: -white athletes from Boston -unwashed hippies -vegans -LGBT

Wesleyan is a more-than-most-liberal-arts-schools open community that still has issues of Race, Gender and Class fomenting under the surface. At Wesleyan there is not enough, but far more dialogue about these issues than at anywhere else I have heard of or experienced. It's populations are working toward deconstructing some of these issues and should be commended and encouraged.

Wesleyan is as diverse as diverse can be while still being full of generally well-off kids from good homes who had the money - if not to attend the best schools - to give time to their studies in high school. True diversity -a false concept if there ever was one - is not the reality there. This doesn't mean that Wesleyan doesn't deserve credit for the tremendously open space it provides for people to define themselves. This is perhaps the best interpretation to Wesleyan's claim of "diversity." People at Wes are the most self defined that I have ever met. This kind of freedom often leads to self righteous assholery but also makes for a large and interesting community of people comfortable with being themselves and passionately involved in their particular interests. If you would desire freedom you must endure people who feel free to be jerks. The side effect of this openness can be a suprising amount of comfortable and un-enforced closeting of communities. Because it is so okay to be a transgendered preppy physics student committed to change in Burma people end up seeing only the same tiny set of people who fit into the communities they see themselves a part of. If I could give advice to incoming wes students it would be to try to get a foot into as many different circles as possible. Too many kids come to wes and spend their whole experience in the confines of one community. And this in a place where they length and bredth of commmunity types is more diverse than anywhere else you are ever likely to be.

There are students of every group at Wesleyan, and for the most part, they are included by everyone else. There are a lot of wealthy kids though. Once in a while, I felt weird being slightly more middle-class (although my family is definitely not poor!). Students are politically active, and the campus is pretty far to the left, but that's one of the reasons I went there. Most kids are from New York or Boston areas or from other parts of the Northeast. However, there are kids from all over the US (like me) and the world (I think it's like 6 percent international or so).

Wes students are very open to any and all kinds of people. As long as you're passionate about something, anything, and are willing to share your passions with others, you'll fit right in here.

There aren't many conservative students at Wesleyan. They may sometimes feel out of place, because they are such a small minority. I think that they are even sometimes ridiculed. Wesleyan students preach acceptance and try to be welcoming of all religions, colors, nationalities, genders, etc. and I believe that most social settings are fairly integrated. But sometimes, students with different views, if they lean more toward the right-wing, are criticized in an unfair way. Wesleyan may not be as much of a "Diversity University" as it claims, but from what I observed throughout my four years, the student body is a good mix of people from all walks of life who come together and are able to enhance each others social and academic experiences.

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