Written by Anya Morgan
What can one say about Wesleyan except that it's an all-around great college? Make no mistake about it, though, when you move into your dorm the first day of freshman year, you'll be petrified. You may very well be freaked out by the strange attire of your classmates or about the angry protesters on Foss Hill. Plunging into a bizarre world of drugs, hippie-paranoia, and ultra-left-wing weirdness may, at first, seem imminent. You might even lock yourself in your room and refuse to come out, worried that those tree-hugging granola heads on campus might sacrifice you to their hemp god. These fears, of course, are unfounded, ridiculous, and are all part of becoming a college student (except maybe the part about the tree-hugging granola heads).
Wesleyan has a lot of reputations, and it lives up to some of them. It's often called "Diversity University," and has been portrayed as being extremely politically-correct in the movies (PCU), and has been depicted in papers like the New York Times as being "naively liberal." Is it true they have naked parties? Is it true they do drugs? Is it true they sip foreign tea and talk about socialism? Yes, yes, and yes. It's all pretty much true. However, what you might not hear often enough and what is the truest fact of all is that Wesleyan is an amazingly wonderful, open, and stimulating place that will change your life forever. What the accepting atmosphere at Wesleyan gives the student is a sense of endless possibilities. At Wes, one has the room to try so many new things, and I'm not just talking about the drugs. I'm talking about music like you've never heard before, ideas you've never considered, people so fascinating and different from one another you can't believe they all exist in the same place. Wesleyan is for students with open minds, who love to think, who love art and music, theater and film, and literature and experimentation. The feeling at Wesleyan is that life is beautiful and short, and that now it is the time for us to experience all that we can, learn all that we can, and in the end, come out so much larger than when we came in.