One of my favorite things that my alma mater has done recently as part of their marketing campaign is to create “Oberlin Stories” – a catalog of experiences, with tales about campus life, post-undergrad work and the world, as told by Oberlin Alumni. Ben Jones, the VP of Communications at Oberlin has done a great job transforming the website, and in many ways the image of Oberlin, and has done a great job of bringing out the best part of the college – its outstanding community. I recently decided to do my part and bare all, by rehashing my first visit at Oberlin, speaking to why I fell in love at first sight. I’ve copied a little excerpt below – feel free to click through the link to read the entire story. I hope you enjoy it.
There are thousands of attributes, numbers and statistics that you could chime off that make Oberlin either marginally better or marginally worse than any given institution. Class size, diversity, average high school GPA. What the Princeton Review or the US News and World Report cannot calculate, however is the Oberlin community. It is Oberlin’s student body and its faculty that set it apart from other colleges. It is an idea and a set of ideals that cannot be quantified or added together, but must be seen, felt, experienced. How can you measure the experience of being taught swing dancing in an Oberlin ExCo or learning bowling from the legendary Tom Reid? How do you quantify engaging discussions at 4 a.m. sitting on “Mount Oberlin” in the middle of Winter Term?
