Anonymous asked: hi! i'm going to be a freshman at grinnell for the fall of 2012 and stumbled across your blog... sorry this is so creepy. I was wondering what your honest and full opinion on grinnell was. it's too late for me to turn back now but you seem smart and funny and nice and I hope some people at grinnell are like you. needless to say i am kind of terrified. once again I apologize for the creepiness.
Ayyyyy hello class of 2016! I was wondering when your wee heads would sprout up from the ground. No, ha, I’m only like 3 years older than you. ANYWAY.
Ok, first off, not a creepy question, I did literally this exact same thing when I was applying. Grinnell has a pretty shitty web presence in terms of letting you know what it’s actually like to go here beyond like, ~*a tRadItiOn of SoCiaL JuStice*~, so I see why you’re worried. So, ok, I’m gonna do this in numbered format and it’s gonna be really long because that’s the only way I know how to say things:
1. Alright, my first response to how I like it is this: I love it. This was really weird for me, accepting the fact that this cliched sounding stock phrase was actually true to my experience, but ya know…it snuck up on me.
2. The thing I love most is the people I’ve come to know here. This sounds like another stock phrase, but that’s what most people you’ll talk to will say, and it’s true: the people here are some grade A humans (not in an eating way, in a person way.)
The people here are, I guess, in some sense, your pretty standard liberal arts bag- Grinnell isn’t like Reed, which bills itself as the zaaaany school where everybody lives in yurts or whatever. It’s just, in my experience, the people I’ve met at Grinnell are really, exceedingly cool, in the sense that they have interesting things to say, funny things to say, weird things to say, are really into whatever it is they do, academically and otherwise, and even though they write papers on Transnational Sociopolitical Perspectives on Communist Propaganda, they will still take care of you when you’re puking over a gross toilet even though it’s your fault because you thought that fragrant temptress gin would be good to you this time. I went to a high school where the feeling that nobody, or almost nobody, cared about me fucked with my ability to enjoy other people. But, coming here, I’ve found this really fucking supportive community of people who do care about me, and it feels great. In other words, yes, Grinnell is full of people who are like me in the ways you said, and that’s exactly why I love it here, and why my grand idea of transferring to Brown after a year became, within the first week, a laughable idea.
3. Actually, and this sounds sort of weird, but if you hated high school at all, you’ll probably like it a lot here. Most people I love kind of hated high school, at least in retrospect. Then again, maybe most people just hate high school, because duh.
4. For good measure, here are some things I don’t like:
I’ve noticed a weird disconnect between people saying they care about privilege and oppression and how fucked up the class system is and everything, but they also leave beer cans in lounges for facilities management to pick up, rip things up just because they can, and secretly write off the opinions of a wide swath of the population just because they aren’t non-mainstream, aren’t “different”, or are these things but not in the ways that are most superficial. Basically, what I’m saying is, often, people’s minds are less open than their mouths are, and I include myself in this group (but not the beer can group- I am nothing if not fucking respectful to the people who are paid to clean up after little shits like myself.)
5. The weekends are pretty fun. Sometimes they’re more funny than fun, but I still like that. We get a lot of really good bands. This was actually a pretty big factor in my coming here.
6. Oh, also, if you’re pretty down with the, uh..personal brand I present here, and just because you have a tumblr and are thus part of a very special cultural demographic that’s close to my heart, I’d suggest you request south campus on your housing form. Everyone I’ve ever known who did this (myself included) has been really happy they did. I dunno, it’s just a nice place to live.
ALRIGHT WELL that was a lot of words. I hope this makes you less terrified! I’m really excited for you, first year is fun. Oh actually, I have one more thing
7. When you get here just go like, balls to the wall. Put yourself out there a lot and go to parties and have really long dinner conversations even if you don’t feel like it. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned in the past two years is that other people make me feel better about things, that most of them are pretty cool, and most of them will think you are too. And I mean, if they don’t, fuck em, right?
NAMASTE GOD BLESS
