Macalester: The Big Picture
Macalester is a small school and it is really nice most of the time. You know or at least recognize everyone on campus. The professors know your name, and even invite you to their houses for dinner sometimes. If you ever get sick of the people on campus, you are in a city, so you can leave easily to go somewhere else for a while.
The vast majority of people at Macalester are very very liberal, which sometimes leads to big debates with the moderate and the very few conservative students.
Most people at Macalester do not like sports very much (there are definitely people who play sports and enjoy watching them, but it's not at the same level as a school with a big football team). But, when you do go to games, there are great cheers. My favorite is: drink blood, smoke crack, worship Satan, go Mac!
Macalester Academic Life
Classes at Macalester are hard - you have a lot of reading to do and papers to write. There are a lot of classes to choose from though, and you can easily find classes that are extremely interesting and rewarding. There's a good variety of classes - there are many classes on random topics. I took a wonderful class on the Post-Soviet Sphere and spent a semester writing papers about Uzbekistan.
Professors are usually very nice and informal with their students. Most professors tell you to call them by their first name. Many of them invite you to their houses for dinner or tea at the end of the semester.
Macalester's Student Body
Macalester students are fairly open-minded and willing to listen to most opinions. However, if you are conservative, it would probably be hard to express your opinions on campus. Also, while many of the students are atheists, and the majority don't really believe in organized religion, there are plenty of religious students on campus. There is a chapel that has Christian services, and there are religious student orgs on campus that hold their own services. (There is an open Shabbat every Friday night in the Hebrew House on campus).
Many students are politically active. There are almost always students handing out flyers in front of the Campus Center at lunch, at there are usually petitions to sign in the basement of the Camus Center (save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, encourage our congressmen/women to provide more funding to the MN State scholarship fund...)
Most Mac students are not at college to be trained for a specific job - we are at Mac to learn, and we'll figure out what we want to do for the rest of our lives sometime during college.
Macalester Student Activities + Social Life
I was captain of the women's rugby team, which has been one of my favorite parts of Macalester. Rugby is a club sport, so we only practice twice a week (instead of varsity sports that practice every day), we have games on Saturdays. Many of my close friends are on the rugby team, and the whole team often hangs out outside of practice or games. One of my favorite parts of rugby at Macalester is when we all go to dinner after practice and we are all covered in mud and we sit together at a big table in Cafe Mac. It's always lots of fun.
There are usually lots of things to do at night at Macalester. There are often movies on Friday at Saturday night at the Campus Center, there are sometimes dances, there are music and dance concerts, and some plays. You can always find something to do and people to hang out with whether or not you want to drink.
Macalester Naked Truth
Macalester is awesome and I am extremely happy that I'm here!
