Sunday, July 12, 2009

At Bard College!!!!

Although the trip to Bard College was pretty exhausting but it was well worth the time and effort. I personally feel that having a guide to show you around is much better then just going to visit the campus because otherwise we would just be looking at the buildings and not gaining any information in return.

Anyways what I liked about Bard was it's beautiful buildings that at about 100 years old or older! In addition to their original buildings Bard had a new building dedicated mainly to the science department which include Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Studies and much more. Talking about buildings, let me talk about Bard housing. So what Bard offers to all of it's students is four years of housing if the students prefer to live on campus for their whole four years at Bard. Something unique about Bard's housing system is that there is no typical dorm because bard has all types of housing including suite type dorms, doubles, singles, triples, and even the more traditional dorms where rooms are located on either side of a hallway with the bathroom at the end. Also what I like about the housing system is that they do their best job in pairing you with a roommate that they think will be a best fit for you in terms of personality and habits. For example, when applying for housing you have to go through the process of filling out a survey that include questions like- Do you mind if your roommate brings a music listening device? or Are you an early riser or a late riser? I think Bard's housing system is a smart way of finding people that will be able to get along and live together as roommates.

However,although Bard is a pretty neat school I did not like the fact that it's location is in the middle of nowhere and the buildings where very separated from each other. In addition to the location, I would think Bard is not the school for me because I got the impression that Bard is more of an Art school then anything else. Bard provides programs in art, music, and photography more then anything else and I'm just not into the arts. Nonetheless Bard College is a beautiful college and I am glad I had the opportunity to check it out for myself. I had a great time!

3 comments:

Charles Tillman Ramsey said...

I wish that Mercedes Montelongo could have visited the campus. She really likes the Arts. I hope that you will pass on useful information about Bard to others at Richmond High School and your college counselor Sue Kim. We may have someone else who could get excited about Bard.

One of our students who went to Cornell wants to study Environmental Studies and knowing this I will pass this information onto her. I am glad that you had a great two days touring college campuses. I am sure that you got a lot out of the experience.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Remember tomorrow you have a very important day with Columbia Professor David Buckwald, so get some rest.

Take care.

Charles T. Ramsey, Esq.
School Board Member
West Contra Costa
Unified School District

Charles Tillman Ramsey said...

One last thing, you are the lucky winner. You are number 100 for the Columbia group. Congrats!!!

Charles T. Ramsey, Esq.
School Board Member
West Contra Costa
Unified School District

Don Gosney said...

Sofia,

Old architecture is nice to look at but sometimes an old building is just an old building with all that that entails: leaking roofs, substandard plumbing, antiquated electrical, no AC, mold, mildew and poor acoustics. I’ve never been to Bard so I can’t say that any of these apply but it’s not unusual for older schools to lack the funds necessary for routine maintenance and technological upgrades.

It’s nice to have the option of living on campus the whole time you’re at college. Sometimes schools see that there aren’t many alternatives due to where they’re located. An example is Stanford. Yes, Stanford is surrounded by millions of homes but immediately surrounding Stanford is some of the priciest real estate in the US. Even a porta-potty rents for about three grand a month ☺ . They even have to provide on campus housing for a lot of their professors or they couldn’t afford to live anywhere near where they work.

It’s also nice to have alternatives with regards to the type of housing offered. The old barracks style you mentioned is much more common but the newer suite styles are very popular. While at Cal I was fortunate in that right across the hall from my room (barracks style) we had the laundry room and right next to it was the restroom. Back then we had maybe 20 rooms per floor with two to a room with ten floors per building and four buildings per complex. I understand they’ve converted a lot of those same cramped rooms so they’re now three to a room.

Profile matching is also pretty common and has been since I went to school a LONG time back. Sometimes it even works [my roommate was Army ROTC during the Vietnam War and I was anti-war so you can imagine some of the tense times we had].

As beautiful as Bard is, I’m glad you got to the academic part of the discussion.

When Mr. Ramsey congratulated you on being the 100th Columbian blog, I thought he was going to tell you that the prize was that you would be allowed to blog a second time that day.

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