College admissions is competitive,

The best thing about Williams is clearly the academics, which without a doubt are top-notch. Probably the worst thing about the campus is its size and location. Williams is suffocatingly small. Break up with your girlfriend? Plan on seeing her everywhere you go for the rest of your college career. Awkward experience with a Freshman year roommate you'd like to forget? Ditto. Also, the people of Williamstown are rather hell-bent on keeping out any kind of popular chain stores or restaurants. The main commercial area of campus consists of nothing but mom and pop stores that keep terrible hours, only sell organic food products, and will charge you about six times what you would pay elsewhere. If you need anything on Sunday after noon, forget about it. NOTHING is open. There's one bar in the entire town. They do not like students, even those of legal drinking age. Also, don't kid yourself, Williamstown is colder than a polar bear's testicles for 3/4 of the year. If you live anywhere south of New York City, you cannot even begin to fathom how depressing it is to walk back from the library at night, shivering despite your winter jacket, in the middle of April. When it's not snowing, it's raining. You're pretty much going to school in Seattle meets Anchorage.

The academics at Williams are rather superior, but not necessarily as world class as you would imagine. You could probably get about the same education at a Big Ten honors college. The key to getting a decent education from Williams is to not follow the pack of prep school alums who will be lying up for Art History majors or the jocks trying to breeze through Econ and Psych. (This coming from a Psych major, but not a jock.) Find something that interests you, that really motivates you. For me, this was religion. Though, as you'll note, I'm not a religion major. My career path lies with Psychology, but there are times when it can become dry and boring and banal. Religion, on the other hand, is something often underappreciated at Williams, and the department is filled with quirky professors and students alike. Religion is what keeps me going when the hum-drum world of the Psychology major gets me down. You need to find your religion if you're going to make it through Williams. Take classes on topics you will probably never need to know again, like African art or the social theory of Carnival. You will thank yourself later. The students at Williams tend to find academics to be work rather than pleasure. Few people are interested in discussing academic topics outside of class or doing anything other than the bare minimum needed to pass. That being said, the bare minimum is rather high. If you want to achieve anything in the B+ and up range, plan on spending a good 70-80% of your free time in the library. It's difficult at Williams to get anything lower than a C, but it's certainly possible. Professors at Williams are rather open to talk to you about anything. Some even give their home phone numbers. This openness is definitely something you should take advantage of, as it will substantially improve your grade to be in contact with the person grading your exam. Regarding how well Williams prepares you for a career, those on the Econ/Bio/Chem/PreMed/PreLaw route are well-prepared to hold nearly any job they want after graduating. If you like Div I or Div II (excepting Econ), expect to feel that you've learned quite a bit in four years, but not to know how to apply that knowledge to the real world.

Though Williams certainly thinks of itself as being progressive with regards to racial, economic, and gender equality, the steps taken by the administration to deal with these problems are largely all fluff and no substance. Though numerically Williams has students from all over the world and from all different kinds of backgrounds, for reasons that boggle my mind, everyone conforms to the traditional "prep" image upon arrival. If you don't like wearing pink polo shorts with popped collars and Banana Republic chinos, expect to feel out of place and to belong to a silent minority that is too fractured by the depression of not fitting in to unite and overturn the tyranny of the preppies. People at Williams only interact with other people who are like them. Period. What's even more maddening is that people seem totally oblivious to this. When a recent racist incident erupted on campus, there was nearly a riot of people demanding that racism just couldn't exist at Williams, that the problems must be imagined. Williams is big on a "not to people like us" mentality. Politically, there is a group of Williams students who rather vocally try to pull the general culture to the far left, but the average student is completely and totally politically apathetic. Anything that preserves the status quo is acceptable.

Williams has plenty of opportunities to get active in something, but most of these involve either a) being athletic or b) being interested in liberal political causes. If you are an overweight Conservative, you'll be spending a lot of time in your room. Despite the athletic nature of the school, athletic events, outside of the well-attended homecoming football game, are largely ignored by the larger student body. Guest speakers and theater performances draw even less of a crowd. The dating scene at Williams is atrociously dysfunctional. You can either sleep with a different person every weekend or get engaged to the first person you go to the movies with Freshman year. There are no in-betweens. Friendships are built largely through participation on sports teams, or by people you lived with Freshmen year. You're not really going to meet anyone that you haven't met at the end of Freshman year. Socially, given the middle-of-nowhere location and the stress of juggling all the academic work, weekends are about getting as drunk or as high as possible. Nothing else substantial occurs, and no one would even think to hold an event without offering some sort of mind-altering substance. Sunday evenings find the typical Williams quad littered with beer cans and vomit, and Sunday evening dinners are little more than opportunities to talk about what drunken mistakes you made over the weekend.

Williams students are generally stereotyped as rich white New Englanders. They are bright people, no doubt, but not bright enough, or well-connected enough to get into the Ivies. The students are also seen as athletes, kind of educated meatheads.

For the most part, yes.

If you like God, you won't like Williams. Nearly a third of the student body admitted to being atheist/agnostic in a recent survey, and the majority of those who identified with a religion are largely non-practicing.