I visited Western Washington University yesterday with my two kids and one of their friends. The purpose of the visit is a little complicated but let’s put that aside for now.
First impressions of any college I have visited is how young and vibrant everyone is. Same here a WWU. I really wanted a piece of that. I want to have that kind of idealism and optimism around me. The flip side is how much I am not one of them.
I even feel this at our local community college, where I take Italian 6. People who discover I am taking Italian always say the same thing, “Why are you taking that? Didn’t you already go to Italy?”
I say the same thing, “I like it. It’s good for my brain.” And that’s true. But even though I might be the youngest person in my Italian class. I’m still in a class, at a college.The other people are there because the want to be there. They are trying to change something in their lives or brain. This might be the closest they come to going to Italy, but it’s closer than they were yesterday.
It’s not the same as WWU or Boston University or UMass Lowell, when I was there. But even Bellevue College is a dynamic, energetic environment. Mark Neslusan likes to say that undergrad was the last time anyone really cared about what you think. What you write, what you think, what you say. It’s all very critical and absorbed deeply by those around you. And you do the same for them.
Around here, WWU is called “Western.” It’s part of the Washington state system. It is in Bellingham which is only 20 minutes from the Canadian border. It is a beautiful place, akin to Middlebury in that it is tucked away from everything and essentially designed to enhance and embrace the local scene. It is surrounded by tall Douglas firs on one side with a view of Puget Sound on the other.
It was rainy so you couldn’t see any of the nearby North Cascades but there are plenty of snow covered peaks around too. I personally loved the physical place.
The closest school to western that I know is UVM, with the lesser burden that Western is not the flagship of the state. That job is the UW.
Class sizes are small, average 14 to 18. The undergrad program is the focus so not a lot of TA classes. And the student body is medium, 14,000 students.
The school lineage is like UMass Lowell’s South Campus in that it was a Normal school for training women to be teachers when it started. Later, is subsumed a number of other colleges to become an umbrella university. It has a little 60-70’s flavor too as the Fairhaven college is a design your own major, no GPA college.
In the tour, the guide did a great job of anticipating the question of how does that work if you go on to grad school. The guide was in her own major she called Eccopreneurship. She is studying sustainable design and interior design. You receive a BA when you graduate. The bottom line is that it works fine, judging from the results that graduates have had.
The architecture is walk through the past 150 years. From old brick, to poured concrete to certified green. Poured concrete is not a great look but you seem to see it on every campus. The UML south campus library for instance is a bit like that. At think point, it looks a little fish out of water.
Everyone there is wearing rain coat, back pack and some kind of low slung sport shoe. We arrived during the twice-a-year humans versus zombies week and saw students walking around with Nerf guns and orange bandanas while other wore green one. The consensus was that that orange/Nerf people were the humans. Zombies don’t use guns.
It all sounded and looked great to me. If I lived here, I think I would go there.