Controversy Loves Company

Introduction
I initially applied to Reed as a high school senior, but went to NYU instead. After one year, I transferred to Reed, which was thankfully an incredibly easy process. If you've already applied, they simply "re-activate" your old app and ask you to fill out a page-long form as a supplement. I would say that is the best thing I've encountered at Reed: the ease and accessibility of the faculty and administrative personnel and processes. Compared to the monstrous, largely impotent bureaucracy of NYU, Reed has been consistently flexible with my transfer credits and curriculum needs. I chose Reed largely for this kind of intimacy and that has paid off.

My other expectations, however, specifically about Reed's community and the student/social atmosphere, have proven largely dissapointing. I pictured Reed as a creative, constructive place that values the individual and each person's ability to form his own identity. While this is true on paper and in spirit, when you look around at the kids here you'll find the application of this ideal to be a little more complex and often very different from what you'd want. I would advise students who are looking for a college to support their creative endeavors (students to whom Reed might seem extremely attractive) to avoid Reed for a number of reasons. For one thing, the art departments are peripheral, limited, insular and largely ignored on campus. Reed's education, despite its reputations for eccentric students, is relentlessly classical. It requires an absurd number of distribution courses (only 2 of which involve creative departments), and most creative pursuits are not considered "academic" compared to the traditional humanities curriculum.

Campus Life and Social Life
Obviously, if you're looking for frat parties etc. you probably aren't looking at Reed to begin with. Reedies, however, are notorious for conspicuous consumption, especially during the orgiastic year-end celebration, Renn Fayre. This aspect, I feel, is overstated a lot. We have a reputation to maintain, so I suppose there's a certain amount of myth-making that goes into it (Reedies love myths and the making thereof).

In my experience, there is definitely an opportunity for excess and experimentation, and of course certain social pressures involved...But really what most Reedies do is smoke pot and drink PBR, just like at any other Liberal Arts school. To varying degrees, that is: there are Reedies who smoke pot all day every day, sometimes very much in the open, on campus. There are also Reedies like myself who don't smoke at all and prefer not to drink on campus. The Drug and Alcohol policy here has been the subject of much revision and debate lately, and while everyone talks about "the crackdown" I can't really see any difference so far.

Basically, it's chill, which I like. I don't think students should have to run and hide or put themselves in bad positions to do the things they're going to do anyway. The bigger social problem, I feel, is the overall social-awkwardness of nearly every kid on campus. Reedies are always in some kind of unspoken "cool-contest" and always trying to out-activism each other...mainly to impress those members of the opposite sex they see doing the same. Pretty much every other conversation at a party revolves around schoolwork, the Reedie's favorite conversational crutch. Advertisement
Academics
The academics are insane. Everything you've heard is true. In fact, you probably can't grasp the degree to which it is true. Be prepared to be crushed under stress...repeatedly. Junior Qual is the worst so far. Try to balance a Reedie's crazy social life with the relentless pressure of grueling classes, and you'll end up like so many Reedies, taking a semester or a year off, wondering when exactly your psychic-break occured. An example or two: Reed refuses to have a science course for non-majors (even though lab science is a group requirement for ALL students) simply because its not "the Reed way." Reed science being as infamously difficult and time consuming as it is, be prepared to die or attend PSU during the summers. Also, inexplicable reqs. are thrown into some departments. English majors have to be fluent enough in another language so as to take two semesters of lit. not in translation....I.E. NOT ENGLISH.

Student Body
Trustafarian. The tragic fact of the "typical Reedies" is that they usually come from a fairly well-to-do family, but expend great amounts of time and energy looking "working class," buying secondhand hipster clothes, dumpster-diving TJ's, putting patches on their ratty hoodies and generally protesting everything that represents "the man." The paradox is obvious: they're paying $40k a year to go to one of the best schools in the country, they represent an elite, but they are so anxious not to. It leads to some very weird and obnoxious personalities.

In Closing...
If you come to Reed, be prepared to be surrounded by "controversy" over everything from where the pencils used in the admission office come from to attacks on the cafeteria for using soda that contains food coloring made from an endangered species of insect. Be prepared to be looked at with disgust and moral repugnance if you're not vegetarian or vegan. You get the idea.