“Conn Is What You Make It” (But So Is Everywhere Else)

College Prowler’s report card for Connecticut College. Grades are assigned based upon student ratings. Image from web.

Conn was my first-choice college as a high school senior. I liked it for a few reasons: because nobody from my high school had ever come here, there are no frats or sororities and I wanted to have a car on campus. I only knew one other incoming freshman as a new student, and I hadn’t seen her for four years before matriculating, so I really didn’t have any way of knowing what life at Conn is really like.

Due to this lack of Conn-tacts, I relied pretty heavily on college guidebooks like those put out by Princeton Review and Kaplan and websites like Unigo, StudentsReview and College Prowler. These three sites boast reviews by actual students. It seems ridiculous now to think that I made such a big decision without even staying overnight in New London, but what may be more ridiculous is the fact that I trusted these reviews so implicitly.

I remember reading in the 2007 edition of the Princeton Review guidebook that Conn is full of “cool nerds.” I remember that phrase especially, because at the time that sounded like the best thing imaginable.

As a high school senior who was getting into comics and was already really into The Lord of the Rings (among other things, of course), it was an attractive description to somebody desperate to escape a sports-centric all-boys school. However, I think even my high school self knew the difference between the actual cool people and the ones who knew seventy-five percent of the dialogue from The Empire Strikes Back by heart.

“Cool nerds” meant to me “nerds who think they’re cool and who actually are cool to other people who really like playing Super Smash Bros. and going to school.” Having said that, I was and am self-aware enough not to think that’s actually cool. What I haven’t retained from my high school days is the tendency to trust everything I read, which is why I was so surprised in revisiting these college search websites.

College Prowler, one of the most popular of these sites, is full of straight-up lies. In a section called “Inside Scoop,” the editors of the site compile a list of “facts” about Conn, some of which are obviously not about Conn: “Dandelion Day: Nicknamed D-Day, this is the all-time favorite tradition at UR. Held on spring weekend when classes end, an all out fiesta will ensue on the main quad in front of Wilson Commons, the student union. Security is lax on this day, and students are allowed to be on the quad with alcohol without much of a second glance…There are rides, games and a band each year.”

Sounds dope, but what the hell is UR? Also on the list are things like “Painting the Tunnels,” which I assumed referred to the KB-Larrabee tunnel (it doesn’t) and “Meliora Weekend,” which I thought was a horrific misspelling of Floralia (it’s not). It turns out they’re all activities at the University of Rochester. For some reason, the College Prowler version of Conn is a strange hybrid of UR, Dartmouth, Wesleyan and Conn circa 2001.

Comparably, the student activities list is at least five years old, including clubs like SOUL (replaced by Spectrum), CCBA (replaced by CCCR), STING, SAVE, the Zionist Organization of America and something called Stitch ‘n’ Bitch. It also omits clubs formed since I arrived here.

The student write-ups on the sites are reflective of the wishy-washiness that I’ve come to know and love here: campus safety is too strict, they’ll never break up your party, they’ll chase you from party to party; the library is huge, the library only has four floors; classrooms are beautiful, classrooms are old and the desks are uncomfortable; New London leaves a lot to be desired, New London is full of hidden gems; parking is ample, it’s impossible to find a spot; students are stuck on campus if they don’t have a car, the Camel Van and Zipcars are really useful; drugs are becoming a problem, not enough people do drugs; the network is really reliable, the network is really unreliable; the student population is really internationally diverse, everyone is white here; everyone plays sports, not enough people pay attention to athletics; the Plex dorms are sterile, the Plex has air conditioning and big rooms; the dining halls are “terrible,” the dining halls are “the greatest thing ever”; the campus is beautiful, the campus is cut off from everything; student body is made up of activists, everyone is apathetic; students are “down-to-earth,” students are “dull and snotty.” The only thing Conn students agree on is that not having Greek life on campus is a good thing.

Why did I ever think looking at this site was a good idea? Like College Prowler, Unigo and StudentsReview feature both nostalgic reviews by alumni who loved their stints here and scathing reviews by embittered students who transferred out halfway through their first year, which makes sense: when people evaluate something, they’re either dissatisfied and looking to vent or they’re so happy that they want the world to know. The vast majority of reviews come from blissful freshmen and sophomores who paint a picture of Conn as a utopia, and that’s not surprising, either. For most people, college is infinitely better in almost every conceivable way than high school. It was these reviews that convinced me Conn was where I belonged, but in hindsight, any college would have looked great compared to high school.

The phrase that kept popping out at me is, “Conn is what you make it.” It appears dozens of times across these websites, typically in very flattering reviews of the school. But to me, that’s true of any competitive liberal arts college; it’s what you say when you don’t really have anything else to say. It’s a way of rationalizing: students who “make it” great—the ones who do well and graduate happily—get to celebrate their perseverence in dealing with Conn’s shortcomings and inadequacies. Let’s be real, there are more than a few. At the same time they can look at the ten percent of their peers who bounced after freshman year and write them off as having not put forth enough effort, overlooking real complaints like our school’s location, size, endowment and lack of course offerings in a lot of areas.

The biggest problem I see with these sites is the huge role they play in shaping prospective students’ views. They go to great lengths to self-promote in their mastheads as “The only college guides written by students for students [boldface in original],” or the place where “College students and experts tell you what colleges won’t.” While these taglines aren’t necessarily false, they’re certainly misleading: it should be evident by this point that no two college students are even close to the same. College search sites let visitors sort reviews by majors, but even that distorts reality. Speaking from personal experience, I’m not close friends with many of my fellow English students, but as a high schooler I’d assumed the opposite. User reviews of colleges are a lot different from user reviews of an iPod: nobody can distill four years of residence and over thirty courses into four sentences, but that’s not something I was able to understand four years ago. Instead, I read the reviews that appealed to me and pretended the others didn’t exist. When I got to Conn, I didn’t find the Steve Buscemi Club I was promised and I didn’t find very many “cool nerds,” but I also didn’t mind.

I have a deep affection for Conn and I will be forever grateful to the school for facilitating some wonderful friendships, but I’m not willing to admit that I couldn’t have been happy anywhere else. I lucked out and found a place that works for me, but College Prowler and Princeton Review don’t deserve any of the credit. •