We had a meeting today where a Twitter rep from one of my accounts came into the office. Before she arrived, I quickly took a look at her LinkedIn profile and noticed that she had Wellesley listed as an undergraduate institution she attended, as well as Barnard/Columbia after it. Hmmm, I wondered. She must have started undergrad at Wellesley, hated it for whatever reason, and then transferred.
At the end of our meeting, I told her I had looked at her LinkedIn and noticed she went to Wellesley, and I also told her I was part of the Class of 2008. She would have been Class of 2011, but she transferred, just as her profile had hinted at. She said the academics at Wellesley were some of the best classes and professors of her life, but socially she just didn’t feel like she fit in. How funny, I responded. That’s how I felt. We’re pretty much the same in that regard. She also said that when she transferred to Barnard/Columbia, the academics were nothing compared to what she had at Wellesley, but she fit in significantly more there socially than at Wellesley — the trade-offs we make in life.
I always wondered what it would have been like if I did transfer after my first two years, but I’m not sure where I would have transferred to. Due to Wellesley’s grade inflation policy that restricted the number of As given in classes that had over a certain number of students, my GPA wasn’t show-stopping by any means, so that wouldn’t have helped my transfer admissions. I also would have looked at it as a failure, something I didn’t see through to the end. My parents never would have supported it and probably would have been outraged and terrorized me about it (what did they support anyway, other than getting a degree?).
It’s comforting to meet other people who feel the same way I do, though, about Wellesley. I always look back at my classes fondly and the discussions we had in class as some of the most challenging and rigorous I’d had in my life. People were never shy in my classes to disagree and argue things out, and not in a hostile, passive aggressive way, but in a smart, educated, “look at every perspective” way. At times, it was so emotionally and mentally draining to be in class. There I was, a naive, narrow-minded, small-world American who had barely left California state before arriving at Wellesley, coming to an institution where for the first time in my entire life, I was meeting women from over 50 different countries, every state in the U.S., who had traveled extensively, lived in multiple countries, and had a far more worldly perspective than what I was exposed to. Just within my first week, I met a woman who was born in the U.S. but raised in Cairo, Egypt, another woman who was Turkish but raised in Greece, and women from Malaysia and Singapore who attended private American high school in Taiwan and spoke with American-accented English (when I was 18, I thought, what language do they speak natively in Malaysia and Singapore? How would I know? I knew so little). In college, I learned about all the other cuisines of China other than Cantonese, met Vietnamese women from all around the U.S. where there were small Vietnamese populations as a result of the Vietnamese refugees from the Vietnam War (how was I supposed to know that there were large Vietnamese populations in Minnesota and Arkansas?!).
I look back on what I learned very fondly, not just academically but about my classmates and the rest of the world. I’m looking forward to learning more about my rep’s experiences and what she thought of another women’s college that’s right here in New York.
