I’m a community college student in Seattle. I have been accepted at The Evergreen State College. There seem to be two prevailing opinions on Evergreen:
Everyone smokes pot. The professors are know-nothings without Ph.Ds. All they teach is leftist politics. Evergreen sucks.
Evergreen gives you a great education. The people are friendly and intelligent. The professors are great. Evergreen rocks.
Can I get any insight from anyone who knows?
Well, my wife is an Evergreen graduate with a degree and stuff. She started there the very first year it was in existence, IIRC. Back then, she said, it was real hippie heaven but it got better in the following years. Back then they didn’t give grades; one either learned one’s subjects ‘satisfactorily’ or not. They even had a football team, The Fighting Gooieducks (sp?) Marcie is well educated; she is literate, well read, and well informed. Her politics are her own. So I have to say she turned out well. I’ll try to get more info from her when she gets home.
If you have something against tree hugg’in dirt worshippers and people who smoke a little pot now and again…you may not like it. My closest friend in the business [environmental economics] started her career at Evergreen. She was a birkenstock wearing environmentalist who smoked a little pot now and again, and still does (she’s 47) and is an all around good person. Well read, well rounded and again, her politics are her own.
What is your take on the environment and people who are openly liberal?
It depends what their liberal views are. If they’re the environment-respecting homosexual-respecting type, I like them. If they’re the Noam Chomsky-esque America-and-Israel-must-die type, I’m generally not that friendly. I would say that I’m liberal on most issues: gay marriage, women’s rights, the Iraq War, separation of church and state, and so on. I would not say that I’m so far left that I’ve fallen off the edge of the planet, though.
People who smoke pot once in a while are everywhere. My question is, is the pot problem much worse than it is at any other college?
Phonetically accurate, but it’s geoduck . No doubt the image of warrior clams struck terror in the hearts of opposing teams.
Have you visited? Talked to any current students or recent graduates? Asked their career services where their graduates are employed or going to graduate school? Looked at the courses to see if you’d enjoy them or find them useful? Sat in on a class? Asked your CC career or transfer office anything about Evergreen? Sat in a student coffee place or the library and noticed whether the students seem like people you want to spend time with? What caused you to apply in the first place, and does it still hold true?
No not much worse…equal to most liberal arts colleges I would guess. We’re not talk’in about profs. toking up with the students or anything like that.
My husband, Left Hand of Dorkness, is an Evergreen alum. I’ll try and steer him to this thread when he gets home. He had some great experiences there.
My sense is that Evergreen has a lot of super-smart, very motivated students who go there and learn a ton, but it also has a lot of trust-fund hippie kids who want to spend four years smoking pot on their daddy’s dime. If you are self-motivated, work well independently, and aren’t likely to get sucked into slackerdom, I think you could get a very good education there. If you need more direction or like to party a lot, it probably wouldn’t be the best place for you.
Just don’t get a degree in homeopathic medicine.
/obscure Futurama joke
Wonder if they ever play against UC Santa Cruz’s Banana Slugs? (salt shakers and copper braclets prohibited)
I know several Evergreen alums (known locally as Greeners) and they are a nice mix of people. It is very self-directed and they don’t use the traditional grading system.
Degrees from Evergreen are considered just as good an a degree from any other college–they don’t assume that because you went to TESC (The Evergreen State College is the official name) that you are a crunchy-granola, pot-smoking hippy. Several of the people I know who graduated have never even smoked pot!
The campus is pretty nice, surrounded by trees and all. They have great community events. It’s a terrific place.
Okay, my darling Marcie, the Evergreen Grad, says that if the OP is the straight arrow type, Evergreen may be a poor choice. If the OP is liberal in most matters and is rather laid back, Evergreen is an excellent choice.
Now seating, Evergreen College Republicans, party of none.
To be honest with you, I know nothing about this Evergreen college you speak of, but I work at a community college and you just described pretty much every community college.
It also depends on what you study. Despite what some might think, Evergreen does hard sciences well. I have a friend who studied microbiology, did interesting research on rat hearts while a student, and went on to do medical research professionally.
My agency hires people who have environmental science and other science (geology, biology, etc.) degrees from Evergreen.
Did somebody call?
Most of the posters here have summed it up pretty well. There’s a lot of leeway to either excel or coast; you just need to right mindset and habits to take advantage of the opportunity.
At least, that’s what it was like while I was there. I haven’t checked up on my old alma mater, lately.
I’ve met a few Evergreen grads. For the most part, they were fascinating conversationalists, liberal, idealistic, well-read, and utterly devoid of common sense.
YMMV, of course.
Here’s the metaphor I use to describe Evergreen:
Most colleges are a train station. There’s several places you can go. You get the schedule, you go to the right tracks, you catch the trains, you get to your destination. Don’t screw around, or you’ll miss the train. But as long as you pay attention, you’ll get there.
Evergreen is a bicycle rack. There are some bikes there. It’s up to you whether you take one. If you do, you can go just about anywhere, on your own schedule, at your own speed. Don’t worry about the schedule: there is none. But there’s a danger in that: if you’re a lazy goddam potsmoker, nobody’s gonna make you pedal, and you can sit by that rack for four years and never get anywhere at all.
There are lots of crazy-mad pedallers at Evergreen, folks that design their own curriculum and do really cool stuff. There are also a lot of potheads there who do stupid stuff; I had one kid in a politics class who got away with four credits that he earned by teaching us how to drum, only he didn’t actually teach us so much as bring in his drumsticks and blather about it for fifteen minutes. When my project in the class involved putting together a documentary on the role of religion in politics and the IRS’s approach to the issue, I was a little miffed. But that’s Evergreen for you.
Politics? Hoo doggy. I graduated in 1998, so I don’t know what it’s like now. At the time, though, the politically active folks were extremely, extremely far left. I was part of an anarchist conference, and I wasn’t far left enough, if that gives you a sense of the politics. I remember playing pool with a guy who was describing how earlier that day he was shouting at a logger, calling him a murderer for cutting down trees. I asked the guy to pass me the corpse he was holding in his hand; he looked down at the pool cue and was not amused.
You gotta be able to put up with some nonsense along those lines, the leftist equivalents to Ann Coulter. If you can’t laugh at it and ignore it, you’ll have a hard time there with the students on the quad sneering at your bourgeouis apathy because you’re not willing to write letters about Myanmar or East Timor or Headwaters Forest or Chechnya or globalization or whatever their particular cause is.
I had a good experience at Evergreen, but I also had a bad experience there. I figure most schools would have worked that way for me, with different highs and lows. Visit the place, figure out if you like it.
Oh, and professors? The political department is (was) pretty heavily socialist. The other departments, not so much, although they still have a pretty lefty bent. I had great science professors (Mike Beug is awesome, as is Brian Price) and some great literature professors (Tom Rainey, woohoo!).
Daniel
All too often, Ph.D seems to be an abbreviation for “A sad case of a man educated beyond his intelligence.”
Where I went to school, only one of my best 5 instructors (you had to have a Ph.D to be a professor) had a ph.D, the other 4 had Master’s degrees. All of my worst 5 instructors were Ph.Ds. 4 of them were tenured professors. Make of that what you will.
Note: I know, and have known MANY Ph.Ds who are very bright people. But I know more that should have stuck with the short bus…pretty much like the population in general, except that idiots without a degree are, in the whole, far less arrogant than those with letters after their name.
Incidentally, it looks like 72.8% of faculty have terminal degrees.
Incidentally, consider the evaluation system: instead of grades, you’ll get 1-2 page evaluations from your professors each quarter (you’ll usually have just one 16-credit course each quarter, taught by several faculty members working together).
THE BAD: The transcripts are many, many pages long; I think mine is somewhere around 30 pages. If you’re thinking of going to another school, be prepared for some irritated administrators and department heads.
THE GOOD: Personally, I love this level of feedback. I’m a straight A student now, but that doesn’t mean much to me: it meant far more to me to get detailed feedback on my work from my professors, including both praise and constructive criticism. Some folks really enjoy this kind of feedback.
Oh yeah–consider the 16-credit course approach.
THE GOOD: You classes are exquisitely coordinated with one another. No more of this business wherein all your professors assign major projects due the same day. Also, your classes are thematically integrated; it’s a great way to study a subject with great depth.
THE BAD: Remember that bicycle flexibility I talked about before? This can really cut into it. Because so many classes are 16 credits, there are a lot fewer classes offered at Evergreen than at a lot of other schools (of course, at a lot of other schools, once you choose your major you’re stuck just taking a few classes anyway–it’s all tradeoffs).
And if you go to Evergreen, don’t make the mistake I made and feel that, just because it’s not required, you don’t need to go to Academic Advising. That’s the part of the bicycle I neglected, and I think my education suffered for it. Make those folks your friends.
Daniel