If you’re reading this article, you may be wondering whether you should apply to or attend Wellesley College. As a current student, I feel confident that I can give you some idea of what Wellesley is like. Based on my description, you may be able to add some tidbits to your own pros/cons list. Keep in mind, though, that I’m just one student at Wellesley, and that each of the other 2,400 or so students have different experiences from me and may tell you other things about Wellesley.
To start, you should know that Wellesley is a women’s college. This often worries prospective students (who we call “prospies”) coming from co-educational high schools, but I have to say that I rarely notice the lack of men. In fact, the only time that I remember that we’re an all women’s college is when I see a guy around campus. Seeing men triggers my memory that they do not attend my school.
There are many advantages to attending a women’s college. While at co-ed schools, some gender prejudice may exist in terms of who gets on committees or who is given a leadership role, at Wellesley, women receive nearly all of these positions (I say nearly since we shouldn’t neglect Wellesley’s transgender and genderqueer communities). Also at co-ed colleges, men tend to make up the majority of the faculty, while Wellesley’s ratio tends to be closer to 50-50 in terms of gender of professors. You may hear this and say “Yeah, that’s great. Why should I care who gets the leadership roles or whether my professors are women?” It’s hard to see sometimes, but our society still is, to some degree, easier for men to live in. I’m sure you’ve heard the statistics about how much money women make to the man’s dollar and about how few female CEO’s there are in the United States. If you want any more proof of this gender bias, look at the presidency.
Has there ever been a female president? Who was the woman to come the closest? A Wellesley graduate, Hillary Clinton. If you take a tour of Wellesley, you will hear our statistics on Wellesley graduates. Most of us go on to grad school, a largely male-dominated domain, within 10 years of graduating Wellesley. Wellesley has produced more female CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies than any other college or university in the nation – and we don’t have a business program. These facts, along with the strong, independent, and successful Wellesley women that I meet every day convince me that an all-women’s education does still have merit in 2011, just as it did in 1875.
Of course, as you can imagine, there are disadvantages to attending a women’s college, the most obvious of which is related to dating. Since there are so few men on campus, straight Wellesley students often do have a hard time finding boyfriends or even just guys to hang out with. That being said, we have a bus that runs to MIT and Harvard as well as a bus to Olin and Babson (two co-ed colleges very close to Wellesley). Wellesley students can meet men, but it is often in the sometimes lackluster situation of the MIT frat party. If you were hoping to meet your husband in college, you still might, but being at Wellesley requires that you go and seek him out. He will not come beating down your door without some effort on your part.
Beyond the aspect of being a women’s college, Wellesley has some characteristics that you should consider when choosing a college to attend. These include quality of academics, extracurricular options, beauty, and diversity, among others.
Classwork at Wellesley is very, very, extremely hard, but also very rewarding. We are generally known to be the most academically rigorous of the Seven Sisters (a group of seven famous and old women’s colleges in the Northeast), and I would definitely say that we live up to our reputation. If you go to Wellesley, be prepared for grueling work. At least once you finish, you’ll be a graduate of a highly respected college!
Wellesley has some incredibly large number of constituted organizations on campus, as well as many others that are only informally recognized by the college. We have everything from a cappella groups, sports teams, societies (analogous to sororities at other schools), theatre ensembles, academic clubs, political groups, tens of cultural organizations, co-ops, a fiddling society, a guild who plays the bells in our tower, a Haitian drum and dance ensemble, and so many more.
If you’ve ever been to Wellesley, you know how beautiful it is. We have hundreds of acres of trees, fields, and lake. In fact, Wellesley’s beauty is referenced in our Alma Mater: “In ev’ry changing mood we love her, love her flow’rs and woods and lake. O changeful sky, bend blue above her. Wake ye birds, your chorus wake.” I suggest that if you haven’t visited campus, you look up some pictures of Lake Waban, Severance Green, and Galenstone Tower. You won’t be disappointed.
The diversity of the student body is amazing. When I was looking at colleges, I never considered diversity. It didn’t matter to me. Now that I am a student at a college with such incredible diversity, I shake my head at my high school self. How could I have not know how fantastic this would be? Wellesley has diversity of pretty much everything: race, ethnicity, international vs. domestic students, sexuality, gender (yes, even without cis-gendered men), religion… everything you could think of and so many things that you can’t. It is truly amazing and has broadened my worldview and horizons more than I ever knew they could be broadened
Lastly, I want to make a note of something important. The admissions office tends to downplay the number and impact of LGBTQ students at Wellesley. In some ways this is good, as it allows students whose families are not accepting of LGBTQ people to attend Wellesley without suspicion or discipline from their parents. However, it causes many prospies to believe that everyone at Wellesley is straight. This is, quite frankly, not true. Wellesley is a very accepting place for students of all sexualities, whether they be LGBTQ or straight, and I have found Wellesley to be a freeing place that gives me strength as a young gay woman, since acceptance of LGBTQ people in my high school was not common like it is at Wellesley.
I hope that I have helped you in some way with this guide to Wellesley College, but if you can, please come visit! Visiting Wellesley and staying overnight was what cemented into my brain that I would be a student here. Good luck with your college search!
