Why Oberlin Was Right For Me

It’s 76 degrees out and sunny. Everyone is in their best spring outfits and the dandelions are still a sea of yellow,  not the tall, white puffs they’ll turn into within a few days. ‘Sco workers are just starting to set up TGIF and there’s a clothing sale later in Wilder Bowl. It also happens to be another All Roads Friday, so swaths of accepted students are wandering around campus looking vaguely lost by themselves or exceedingly confident in their direction with a handful of other red lanyard wearers. Walking from my class at Ward to meet my best friend and girlfriend for lunch on Wilder porch, I can’t imagine a more perfect day to visit.

My All Roads experience, back in 2024, was just slightly different. From what I remember, it poured from the second my mother and I crossed the Pennsylvania border into Ohio to the minute we left the following Sunday. Students were, I assume, holed up in their dorms with friends, taking shelter from the rain and attempting to beat the spring slump and finish work from what I now know to be the late April overload. I wore an outfit I didn’t like, now damp from the rain, and my ever-failing sense of direction continued to fail me as I tried to find the Ward Art Building and the class I signed up to sit in on, “Medieval Saints and Relics.” The rain sucked, but what I remember most clearly from that day is a girl I met at Stevie lunch telling me that if we liked Oberlin in this weather, we’d love it in the sun.

At that time, I was finishing up my senior year of high school and no closer to choosing a college than I had been when I went on a week-long road trip tour of mid-western colleges with my dad for Spring Break in junior year. I didn’t commit to Oberlin until April 30, almost the last day you’re able to, even after that stellar All Roads experience. That might make it sound like I was hesitant about coming here, but that’s not the case at all. The reason it took me so long to commit is that I didn’t have a dream school, Oberlin or otherwise–I had dream attributes that I wanted my college to have. I went to every accepted students day I could, looked around every corner of every school website, emailed professors, read some of these blog posts, and looked at course lists so that I knew for certain the school I committed to was the perfect school for me. For that reason, I feel pretty qualified to write to you, “why Oberlin?”

Picking a college is no small task, so I had a few specific (maybe strange) requirements I wanted. One of those was that it had to be a “no sweatpants” school. What I mean by that is that I paid close attention to what students wore at the colleges I toured, and if I saw too many people wearing sweatpants or athleisure, I knew the school wasn’t really for me. At my high school, fashion wasn’t really important; most people wore sweatpants or pajama pants. I don’t blame them, I did too many days because high school starts so early in the morning. In college, though, I wanted to be somewhere that self-expression through style was valued. Oberlin is definitely that kind of place–people take pride in what they wear and how they present themselves. In my time here, I’ve been able to explore my own sense of style in the way I had always wanted to in high school.

Diverse social opportunities also mattered a lot to me when choosing a college. I decided if a school fit what I wanted from a social life in a few different ways, usually starting with looking at different clubs, magazines, and social spaces online. Oberlin has a ton of opportunities that I’ve engaged with since being here. My absolute favorite is CATSS, or Community Action To Save Strays, which is a community-run organization that helps stray cats. During kitten season (which is about to start!) CATSS has open hours where students can come in and play with the kittens they’re currently taking care of while waiting for them to get adopted. Aside from CATSS, Oberlin has the highest volumes of student-run magazines that I've seen, from the Oberlin Review (the official college newspaper) to The Grape (a more creative newspaper) to The Synapse (the STEM magazine) to Lattice (the newly formed lesbian culture magazine). When I went on college tours, another way I’d look for social opportunities was keeping an eye out for flyers on campus. One school I went to was eerily barren of posters, giving it a big all-work-no-play feeling. I crossed that one off the list quick. Anywhere you go in Oberlin, there’s sure to be a plethora of posters and advertisements for anything from a student recital at the Con to a house party that weekend.

To segue from that–the party scene. The number one question I heard from other Prospies at All Roads was undoubtedly “Are there actually any parties here?” Just as current students did for me then, I’m here to quell your fears: yes, there are parties here. While not the scale or volume you’d get at a Big 10, I’d say there is at least a party every other weekend, and there’s certainly a big to-do at the ‘Sco or a good deal at the Feve for those weekends in between. It varies, for sure, by season, but as a little anecdote, I went out twice a week, every week from the first weekend I stepped on campus during my freshman year until it got crazy cold in early December. In general, if you want to do something, there will always be something–it might just take a tiny bit of digging.

Now, we have to talk about the nitty-gritty, a few other reasons I knew Oberlin met all my requirements: the educational opportunities. When my dad and I first started thinking about what college I would want to go to, a small liberal arts school was sort of a no-brainer. Liberal arts schools emphasize teaching students how to critically think, not just teaching them course content. To me, that’s meant that I’ve been able to take some really cool classes on niche subjects and gain not only knowledge on an interesting subject, but transferable skills that I’ve used in other educational and professional settings. The “small” aspect of a small liberal arts school was probably my biggest priority of all. I wanted to go somewhere my classmates and professors would know me by name, and where classroom settings would be more conversational than only lecture based. I’ve enjoyed my lecture classes too, but my favorites are the ones where students and professors have just about equal time talking about the materials we’ve worked on. While my friends at bigger state schools are also having a good time at their 30,000-student colleges, Oberlin’s size has been perfect for me. Every day, I’ll run into at least 5 people I know and 5 that I’ve never seen before. I’ve had an easy time making new friends because of this, but I also don’t feel limited; there’s tons of people I have yet to meet.

A lot of students choosing a college might not consider how size affects the opportunities they can get at their school, but it really does make a difference. Since Oberlin is small, I’ve had no problem achieving my academic and career goals at the pace I want. Last summer, I worked on an excavation project in rural Italy just because one of my professors had a connection with the project’s directors and thought I might want to know about it. At bigger schools, resources are spread thinner and student interest in any given project is highly competitive. At Oberlin, in my experience, qualified students have a much better chance and much better support at doing the things they want. This even applies to getting classes.

On that note, something I did that I’d really recommend was scrolling through the course catalogues of colleges I was interested in. Without a doubt, Oberlin had the coolest and most creatively named classes. My favorite I’ve seen so far is “From Pushkin to Pussy Riot: Literature Meets Music in Russia and Beyond.” There are also more classically “practical” classes too–next semester I’m taking Introduction to Statistics. For my Art History major, though, I’ve been able to take a number of classes teaching about different time periods and art styles from all over the world. At comparable schools, I was pretty disappointed with the variety of classes in the field.

I actually originally intended to be an English major, though of course I came in undeclared like most people here. Ironically, I felt pretty sure I’d go through with the English major, but it was important to me that Oberlin allowed for the kind of exploration I ended up needing. So much changes in the transition from high school to college, and for a lot of people the thing they want to study is something that changes. It’s hard to predict who you’ll be in four years, so going somewhere that lets you find it out on your own time is incredibly valuable. 

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times on every college tour: “why here?” I chose Oberlin because it checked every one of my boxes. There’s not a day on campus where I’ve felt like I chose wrong.