Benjamin

The stereotypical Hampshire student: a pot smoking, privileged, pompous hipster 'concentrating' in ergot chemistry, 'medicinal' botany, or gender-identity (i.e. her gender and identity). The stereotypical rendering of Hampshire: a 'camp' - rather than a 'school' - peopled by a single archetypal whiner; that opining politically correct someone to whom you wanna scream: "you've never struggled through anything, shut up!" The common critique of our community: a collection of liberal libertines constantly convincing themselves of their 'uniqueness,' when in fact they've contrived a single libertine that themselves and everyone else must be to be.

Are these stereotypes accurate? I'd like to think not. They are relevant. There's no debating that. Hampshire has always had an intellectual reputation and little funding. Because of this it is both very attractive to imbecile children from Manhattan who needn't ever work for a living, and to young people with little more than ambition. This isn't an absolute binary - these too are stereotypes. However, if you ask most people around campus they'll commonly provide this distinction: students are either of the 30% of real 'elites' who can afford this school (and who fund this school) or they're of lesser means with lots of dreams (and, ergo, receive a slice of the majority of our operating budget [$21 million per annum]).

I'm part of that second group. I gotta say - as a recipient of this aid and this education - that opportunities I've been provided, and people I've encountered, shatter these stereotypes in my imagination. People come to Hampshire for a vast multiplicity of reasons with a wild variety of goals. Those who set out to pursue their dreams - hell, to have a dream - do very well at this college still slumbering in the seventies. I've personally had high-level courses and seminars at every school in the Five College Consortium. I've studied abroad at the University of Edinburgh (free of charge), researched life-sentence appeals toward my Div II portfolio, and taken a graduate-level course at UMass. I've had a seminar in a prison, toured a penitentiary, argued with supermax litigators in California, interned with a law office, volunteered with a youth court - all because of Hampshire.

To those who work within and outside the bounds of this college - those who treat this 'camp' as a community, but also a resource - the possibilities are endless. This cannot be said of any other undergraduate college anywhere. [Period].

With these opportunities and this diverse a collection of formative provocateurs (from around the world), being a student at Hampshire College is an inspiring and aspirational experience. One can 'major' in virtually anything - with the resources of the Five Colleges, the sky's the limit. I have to admit that I took an additional year simply because I didn't want to leave; there's so much to learn, so precious little time.

Live it, love it, learn it Hampsters of the future; pace yourselves on the herb and the vino, they're only blessings if you respect them.

Visit anytime – we're a half mile past Potwine Lane on the farm just before the co-op.

The best thing about Hampshire? The Five College Consortium.

I don't mean this out of disloyalty. Provided the opportunity to attend any other college in the nation - given a free ride to Harvard - I'd turn the opportunity down to remain at Hampshire. What I mean in answering that the Consortium is the best of Hampshire is that the discursive purpose of Hampshire was the Consortium - we constituted the corporation and we have the most agency to use the resources. We don't have to consider credits in selecting courses; because of this, we need only be accountable to ourselves in perusing 5,300+ options in the course catalog each year. You can genuinely study anything at several institutions. I used to rip off UMass dining halls every Tues/Thurs before my Commonwealth honors seminar - where I was welcomed as a Hampshire kid with a differing perspective. Most people in the U.S. can't win - at Hampshire it's hard to lose. You are your own bureaucracy. Even your committee [team of advisers] is entirely of your choosing; they aren't administrators, they're the professors who inspire you.

Amherst and Northampton are a couple of the best college towns in the nation. Students flood these communities every fall and we're welcomed by an already booming economy - this area is "one of the best kept secrets in America" (as a random guy once told me on a plane). I quite one job two weeks ago and got another with an email and a phone call yesterday; while housing and groceries are expensive, this area is an obscene location of wealth. Besides that, this community has all the features forming what oughtn't be your reasons to attend college - a stupid number of parties, youth and debauchery, frats at UMass, bars and breweries, herbs...Jesus Christ herbs...herbs in spirit of Humboldt. The towns also have such a collection of restaurants competing to attract students that I can't begin to offer a description - from the best three buck slice of pizza you'll ever have to a Hibachi dinner that'll make you feel like an exec.

I certainly have my complaints to. Hampshire can be polarizing politically, it can be emotionally overwhelming, it can turn you into an alcoholic - this all depends upon who you are, what your stress-levels are, etc. You might also be of that privileged class of kid who needs to attend college because mommy said so, and who might prefer to do this 'stoned' (not spiritually elated, but 'stoned'). If this is the case, don't bother; you'll ruin your parents pension for petty purposes. While this tends to be the sort of kid with money, but without ambition, they still tend to be accepted - whatever, they ultimately fund this school anyways.

To preface: there are Hampsters from all over the globe. This is the beautiful bit about Hampshire College and the Five College Consortium: we're an international relations community where people commonly come to study politics, diplomacy, society, and the sciences. I live with my Malaysian hermano and a new girl from China; they've both been tutoring another modmate studying Mandarin (to little avail ;P). Our neighbors are from Taiwan, Nepal, Germany, and France. I'm from far Northern California; my mom is half Chicana. People are just people - we have our cultural differences, we acknowledge them, we work around them. I end up drinking sake rather than Mickeys - so it goes. We're chill with each other...except for that one time that I stepped into the sauna and a randomly naked Tibetan hombre was all disturbed, but I suppose that's just disjunctive cultural interpretation. It happens - like drinking with Germans, you regret it afterwards.

The dining hall isn't the primary eatery at Hampshire - people's common troughs are kitchens in Mods, our food is what we can create for each other. My Malaysian bro cooks too many amazing dishes to start listing them here. Of course, this leads to contention among the entitled population whose parents shower them with money and who expect to be provided for (without reciprocation) by their modmates. Dear children from NYC and alike metropolises: the world doesn't work this way and taking advantage of people with a "Fuck you, Buddy" mindset gets you nowhere...except perhaps Wall Street, but the U.S. is just pathetic that way. Isn't it?

This brings me back to the privilege question: it isn't a clean split, but I measure it 30/70. 30% of the kids are immensely wealthy and may be attending 'college' for the wrong reasons (i.e. mommy and daddy told me to, so I might as well attend the hippy/ster school). The majority of Hampshire students attend this college because we're sick of 'academic' nonsense and sophistical 'ideal types' of educational development. For the majority of Hampsters, our camp is a pedagogic statement denouncing the mythology of ivory towers. Concurrently, we attend classes at these ivory towers (through the consortium) where we're welcome to shit all over their structured fallacies. The Amherst students 'on the real' tend to love us, same with the professors; Smith administrators hate us and their students tend to be a bit on the slow-side socially. I don't mean this as an insult to feminisms - I truly believe that Smith students are brilliant, but emotionally underdeveloped. They tend to be very privileged people without much world experience, trapped in a bubble whereby any penis is a biopolitical enemy; Mount Holyoke students are historically the legit feminists and they're our closest/friendliest neighbors. UMass is too diverse to ever classify and an excellent resource - it's a zoo, and I hear that they're gonna start growing medical pot soon (a great opportunity for any aspiring nouveu-botanist.

Yes, Hampshire students lean heavy to the left, but the former president of the collegiate young republicans of Massachusetts was a Hampshire Student. This school's philosophy is open to libertarian interpretations. Personally, I've stopped calling myself a democrat and come to identify as a preference utilitarian - if Ron Paul tones down his rhetoric concerning public education and recants his stance on abortion, I just might vote for him. Yes though - in that 30% I mentioned earlier, many kids are politically clueless and de facto 'liberal' (again, because their parents 'said so'). It's super frustrating talking political philosophy with these imbeciles, because the argument inevitably turns ad hominem (e.g. 'you're only rehearsing the patriarchy of dead white men'). Then you turn the argument to Hannah Arendt, comparative to Kant, and they still can't keep up; isn't it shameful when one claims this elitist revolutionary political philosophy without any understanding of the past three hundred years? Anyway, yeah: the school sways left, though there are multiple dimensions to the left. There are no nationalist proto-blood-and-iron, god-and-family Hegelian American exceptionalists at Hampshire; if there were, they'd at once have too many readings to contend with to maintain these positions. I came to Hampshire touting Ayn Rand (who I 'needed' at the time), then I found Mill and recognized how confused a Russian she really was.

What do people wear? All sorts of everything - the more outlandish the better.

Who would feel out of place at this school? People who came to 'college' as 'to attend college.' People seeking an ideal type of pedagogic development (i.e. 'a major' in 'a dorm' with 'a cohort') tend to fair poorly. Also, religious people from the Midwest may find a culture of 'Easter Keg Hunts,' 'Extravaganjas,' and 'Trip or Treats' offensive. Sorry, it's the community that our combined cultures create.

Do students talk about how much they'll eventually earn per their degree? I had to laugh writing this. No. That's an Amherst culture, and they're sick of themselves with it. Life is vibrant and many of us may eventually make money. I'm currently writing my first book, entailing over a year of research - the only Amherst kid who has been able to say this over the past twenty years was Ted Conover. "I happen to believe ya make your own destiny. [...] You're gonna have to figure that out for yourself," -Momma, Forrest Gump. Hampshire prepares you to direct your own fate, and to never stop learning along the way - where adaptation is the catalyst to all life and prosperity, Hampsters carry around an ever evolving tool-kit, all our days. We're taught how to pack it at Hampshire...(I mean this in sooooo many ways xD).

Yes, there are parties, but they're often poorly attended. Gatherings phenomenally turn into parties at Hampshire - whoever's sitting on those two boxes of Franzia and a bit of herb is most likely having a party this instant. Dorm life is crazy that way, and it's part of why mods are preferable. Mod communities are welcoming, but not constantly consuming substance.

The big parties every year are Hampshire Halloween in the Fall and Easter Keg Hunt in the Spring. There used to be a Drag Ball, but persons in the trans community expressed upset in 2009, ruining the tradition which had brought Kurt Cobain to Hampshire.

Yes, people in the dorms leave their doors opened, but it's like I said: this environment becomes tiresome within a year. The dorms had ought to be featured on The Wire -there's more substance exchanged and more people tripping in those buildings than in the whole of Western Mass. That said, kids get sick of this fast - it's all part of growing up. We can't stay eighteen forever - your first evaluations may reflect this truth.

The dating scene? Phenomenal or nonexistent. Sorry straight guys: you don't approach; you are approached. Otherwise you're doubtlessly behaving in an affronting and offensive manner - you'll be contrived as a misogynist for engaging in simple, sexually suggestive (equal) manners. The LGBTQ community seems to have the best sex and dating life - it still isn't as good as the less-standoffish LGBTQ community I witnessed studying abroad in Edinburgh. And this is funny to me, because Hampshire is one of few schools where your physical 'roommate' may be of the opposite sex, if you so choose. I only know a few couples of the opposite sex who do this - it seems to be a lovely set-up, though I could see disaster pending if the relationship weren't solid.

Things to do not involving sex, drugs, and rock-and-hiphop: we host a variety of lecturers from all over the world, as do the other colleges, almost every week. Though we don't have competitive 'sports' or 'frats,' we do have a variety of athletic clubs and student groups. I'm a 'signor' for the new Roosevelt Institute public policy Chapter at Hampshire; there are a hundred plus other groups doing all sorts of exciting things. For those who don't drink (as I'm cutting back on doing): there are both sub-free designated living spaces and groups that meet commonly. On the average night, if you check your announcement-emails, you can usually score free pizza and a movie at these meetings. If all else fails: there's porn in the world. xD

Off campus life is vibrant - there are all sorts of parties at the other colleges, few of which I can remember. Amherst and Northampton are feel-good towns with too much to do to list here.