Should Latin Daughter attend Wellesley

[elisemarie]

I attended Wellesley College. Like every other school, it has pluses and minuses. On the positive side, it is beautiful, safe, and VERY strong academically. It is close to Cambridge and Boston (Wellesley College runs buses between the campus, Harvard, MIT and the MFA - at least they did when I attended) so there is a lot to do. It is EXTREMELY diverse - all colors, nationalities, religions, etc are very well represented on campus and diversity is not only welcomed, it's celebrated. The all woman's environment means that all of the presidents of all of the clubs and teams are women...talk about female role models everywhere!

But like everything in life, the strengths can also be weaknesses. I found the lack of men on campus made it more difficult to have platonic friendships w/the opposite sex. You were either dating the guy or not - very few opportunities through classes, clubs, and on campus recreation to form basic friendships with men. It wasn't impossible - just more difficult.

I would not call Wellesley the "typical" college experience. It's unique and wonderful but not "typical". In in my personal opinion, some of that "typical" college experience is great to have and some is not.

My only advice to your daughter would be to make sure that she understands what it REALLY means to attend an all-woman's college and to think very hard about the positives AND negatives of the reality of no men on campus!!!

[azaleaeight]

Your decision should be made on all the other factors about where your daughter wants to attend school - not on the Latin factor. If she wants to attend then she should. I'm not of a minority group, so maybe I just don't know enough, but I can't imagine being Latin creating a problem for your daughter.

As a mother of a college-aged daughter myself, though, I'm not sure I'd want my daughter so far away if she has a chance to get a good education closer to home. An awful lot of kids think they want to be off and away, far from home - only to discover they want to find a school closer to home once they've been away for a while. (Then again, there are, of course, those who are fine being that far away.)