Excellent. Academics are excellent. Professors are excellent, know students' names, work with students, facilitate great class discussion (Mac students like to participate!), often invite students to do research with them. The quality of academic life is very high and the number of students really taking advantage of it is striking. I cant say enough nice things. My only two reservations are as follows:

Students are pretentious often but so are professors - it is sort of the nature of the academy and academia... you are sitting in a room dissecting and criticizing the world. That is sort of pretentious to begin with and students hop on the professor bandwagon of using absurd terms that they don't know the meaning of but generally, the students are intellectual powerhouses - even the ones that occasionally succumb to sesquipadalian verbiage, so to speak.

My only really concern with Macalester is one that I sense as an emerging trend among liberal arts schools: students and professors are forgetting the roots and often ideals of liberal arts education (to create freedom of the mind) and becoming too fixed in their disciplinary/departmental studies and pursuits, unable to see the value of cross-collaboration. I think this is mostly a problem with professors but I see it manifesting itself in the student body.

Great. A lot of weird people. Big international population of students that you really feel. A lot of people say that they are exclusive but I disagree with that - anyone can hang out with anyone, so long as they try.

There is a lot going on.

Everything is international/internationalism based. Everyone has a "thing," a cause, like environmentalism, immigrants issues, Democratic Party... something and that becomes your identity and has major social/academic implications from day one to graduation.

Those two stereotypes are self-fulfilling prophecies but they don't have to be. There are tons of amazing domestic students of diversity... and just plain amazing domestic students... and even internationals that are focused as much or more on the local scale but you do have to know where to find them and they can often sort of fall by the administrative way-side as groups. The ones getting attention for not conventionally "international" stuff tend to be individuals and tend to be individuals who really know how to advocate for themselves and their causes whereas the more "internationally" focused seem to have more of an infrastructure of support - social, monetary, institutional, academic... everything.

As for having a cause to champion, plenty of people come into one after a year or two but by the time you are a late sophomore, definitely by the time you are a junior, you are probably branded as "that kid who promotes *fill in the blank*"