Middlebury College: S, Stress, Sex, and Maple Syrup

Introduction
Whether we admit it or not, early college decisions usually follow the real estate maxim location, location, location. So if you've got Middlebury on your list, I'd assume you know we're in green, clean, quasi-socialist, Ben&Jerry's land Vermont. So first off, if the idea of Vermont doesn't strike your fancy, Middlebury probably won't either. Every MiddKid I've ever met loves Vermont. You should also like (or be willing) to study. We do a lot of that. The academics are great, the facilities top-notch, the students brilliant and diversely talented and yada yada yada. You've probably already heard all that.
I chose Middlebury for location of course (we've got our own ski mountain, after all), size (My high school was small, my town is small I like things that way), and academics (it's solidly liberal arts, but seemed to have a little more depth of offerings).
Oh and that nebulous "feels right to me" when I visited. So visit.

Campus Life and Social Life
I hate to say it, but partying exists at the margins of student life at Middlebury. Academics thoroughly dominate weekdays, and if that doesn't hog your time, clubs and activities and sports and meetings etc. will. So social interaction gets suffocated for the most part, building up pressure that bursts most every weekend into a shitshow. Thursday is generally opening night (although there's a running wednesday night beirut party) and saturday the climax. You could spin this setupin a positive light by saying we're a "work hard, play hard" campus, but that's just a euphemism for students getting overly stressed and then binge drinking and going overboard at the first chance they get. It not that we don't have fun, getting crazy crunked is fun. It's just that it could hardly be called "healthy" and it never wears well over time. It doesn't help that the state of vermont liquor control board has decided they're going to be hard asses and send down their liquor nazi to harass us.
Outside of this narrowly defined party scene, however, social life on campus isn't that bad. Dining at Proctor (the older dining hall on campus) for example, is one of the great treats of my day. The food is good, the chairs comfy, the conversation spectacular and consistently philosophical, and the atmosphere relaxed. It's hard for most to get out of Proctor in under an hour and three hour odysseys through the passions and minds of brilliant middkids is a common occurrence.

Our isolated location means that basically everything occurs on campus. So clubs and sports and activities are a big deal and there seems to be a club for everything. That pervasively annoying tour guide line about "you can start your own club if there's not one..." happens to be true here. Example: my friend arrived freshman year to find that although there was stellar Nordic ski team, there was no casual Nordic club. Two years later they've got more than a 100 people in the club.

The dating scene at Middlebury is pretty abysmal, if typical for these days. No one dates. Either you hook up with people or you've got "Midd marriage." In the end, actually, most of us get Midd marriage--some ridiculously high percentage of graduates are married to classmates. While we're in college though, it's basically the same deal as with parties. No one has the time for dating so we just let sexual desires mount (no pun intended) until the weekend bacchanal.

I guess I shouldn't write without mentioning the commons system. Back in the nineties we got a bit bigger so the administration decided to group the college into commons. Roughly based on Harvard's "houses" or Yale's "colleges," the idea was that the commons system would be the main structure for student life, encompassing dining, housing, student affairs, social events, and professor-student interaction outside of class. But all anyone really cares about is housing, and because of this, they've been a mess ever since. The problem is that they decided to build out the commons one at a time. So now we've got two fully finished commons with new dining halls and dorms with ridiculously nice suites that are like SoHo apartments. The rest of us, in contrast, have shit. So the students hate the system and all the positive parts are overshadowed by the housing inequality. Theoretically, I think it's a good idea, it's just that the school's already small enough that breaking things down further doesn't work from a social perspective. I think things are changing on the housing front now, but the commons system will take awhile to lose it's bad rap.

Oh yeah, and drugs. Look, drugs are here if you want them, invisible if you don't. We smoke a fair amount of pot and do a bit of acid and mushrooms, but drugs don't impose much. Unlike nasty ol' natty ice or Busch (actually Busch is the campus favorite, I have no idea why though), the drug scene sticks to certain segments of the population (4.20 being the exception). Academics
We don't let academics dominate for nothing. The academics at Middlebury are fantastic. My professors are not only leaders in their fields, but they're engaging, grounded, friendly, and committed to the liberal arts idea as well. I'm not surprised the Princeton Review has us ranked at or near #1 for professors get high marks. TAs don't exist. My classes are small and filled with interesting discussion that spills over into dining and club activities. The only drawback to this is that there's no hiding in class and it's pretty obvious when you didn't do the work. Thus, all the studying.

The most talked up departments are all the foreign languages, environmental studies, international studies, and english/am lit/writing. Those are officially established "peaks," but that doesn't mean everything else is bad. Middlebury's departments are surprisingly even throughout the college. The peaks in foreign language and English/writing are a bit misleading as well. Their reputations are largely built on the summer graduate programs of the Bread Loaf School of English and the Middlebury Summer Language Schools.

I'd say you should come to Middlebury first and foremost for a solid well-rounded liberal arts education and that the great majority of students get a rewarding experience from their major. One last tip: The hidden gems at Middlebury are the science departments. The chemistry, biochemistry, geology, and biology departments, along with geography, have great professors, lavishly advanced labs, and very few students. So, for example, the professor of my friend in chemistry is basically his private tutor and research partner.

Yeah, this reads like the damned viewbook, but you know what? We're kind of a big deal:)

Student Body
Sometimes I just sit in shock and awe at the brilliance of middkids. Sometimes I just sit in shock and awe at the idiocy and self-absorption of middkids. It often seems to me like Middlebury has a double identity. I think this is because the student body splits raggedly between two types of student. The one half is an interesting, diverse, intellectual and passionate amalgamation of bohemians, international students, Vermonters, break dancers, musicians, hippies, nerds etc. that are fun to hang out with, while the other half are suburban preppys headed on the straight and narrow for Goldman Sachs or AIG or whatever and bore me to tears.

I think the organization that exemplifies the best characteristics of Middlebury students is the Sunday Night Group, arguably the most forceful student environmental/climate activism group in the nation. The group is highly informal and unstructured, and espouses many of the common activist ideas of justice and peace etc. except the students take a very serious and deliberate approach to activism which is amazingly forceful and effective.
This encapsulates another common trait at Middlebury: students are generally very clean. Yeah we have all types of people, but even our hippies take showers regularly and can argue a point coherently. This probably adds to that other reputation as being preppy.

Speaking of preppy, I'll admit we've got more than our fair share of pricks that just stepped off the cover of J. Crew. The whole Club Midd image they uphold makes me queasy, but even if I do my best to subvert it, it's worth mentioning.
I don't want to hate on recruited athletes, cause I'm friends with a bunch, but prepsters and athletes overlap quite a bit, and as a generalized mob they don't contribute much. So many people apply each year that I don't want to think about all the interesting folks that could have been here in place of some of these clods. So still, overall, students bring a plethora of backgrounds and interests to Middlebury and people's interests are out in full force on campus. At the end of the day, the only commonality seems to be that we all work hard.

Oh and we're really attractive.

In Closing...
Well I think I've said just about enough. You might wonder why I have the time to get distracted by student surveys, but I'm abroad where the universities are a joke compared to Middlebury. I'm also starting to get nostalgic and excited about returning for j-term (a special term during January where we study only one subject intensively and ski a lot (as long as climate change doesn't melt all the snow)). I've generally given Middlebury high marks here, but it really is hard to find unhappy people at Middlebury. Sure we might be stressed, but everyone turns into a friggin cheerleader when asked if they like their college. That's probably the best sign that good things are happening way up in the Green Mountain State.