URGENT Information Requested on Mills College, Oakland, and Univ of West Florida

Factual Questions
21

Oakland is a nasty place only if you’re a white suburbanite who’s afraid of the colored folk. If you like, I dunno, actually doing interesting things, it’s fine. My parents lived there for many years (they moved to San Francisco just before I was born) so we have family friends and such there and I’ve spent a lot of time there.

FWIW, I applied to Mills out of high school and was accepted. It’s a good school, although I ultimately decided not to go because I thought going to a women’s college would be weird.

22

roger thornhill writes:

> Others charge for dorms; both of these two don’t.

I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t make any sense. Exchange students who are coming for just a few months are always charged for room and board and tuition (and maybe other fees as well). The only students who get any break on such things are regularly enrolled students who are getting financial aid. Even then, they don’t get room and board or anything else waived. They are given certain amounts of scholarships, loans, and campus jobs and are expected to use that money to defray the cost of their expenses. I’d go back and reread the brochure for this exchange program. I suspect that your wife’s niece hasn’t read it very well.

You ask in the OP about the academic reputation of these two colleges. Well, neither of them is very well known. There’s nothing wrong with them, but they’re not major institutions by any means. Could you please give us the complete list of colleges that are available for exchange programs? I’ll bet that none of them has much of an academic reputation. It sounds to me like the university that your wife’s niece attends tried to find a number of colleges in the U.S. that it could partner with for exchange programs and discovered that no major place wanted to partner with it. It settled with finding a number of smaller colleges that were acceptable places. There’s nothing wrong with this, but your wife’s niece should know this.

23

Heh. I have spent my life all over the US, Europe and central America and have seen and done some pretty interesting things. In fact, I like 'em. But I certainly have no desire to spend more than 5 minutes in Oakland. And not liking Oakland doesn’t make one racist.

But of course, YMMV, as always.

24

I’ve lived in P’cola, and my wife took classes at UWF - for an exchange student, I would highly recommend against going there. It’s American in the sense that strip malls and suburban sprawl are American, and it’s not really even the South, since it’s been influenced and homogenized a lot by the transient Naval community. Don’t get me wrong, Pensacola is a nice place and I have OK memories, but I wouldn’t go there expecting an interesting cultural experience. The beaches are great, though - but without a car, how much would one really expect to see?

If it’s that or Oakland, I would think that Oakland would be much more interesting (and more do-able without a car). I’ve lived in the East Bay and now in Palo Alto / Stanford - the Bay Area is a pretty nice place. Have you definitely excluded all other options? Thanks.

25

I’m going to cast a vote strongly in favor of Mills College/Oakland.

Although it doesn’t exactly have a world-wide reputation, Mills is pretty highly respected by those who are familiar with US liberal-arts colleges. It’s academically rigorous, and has a beautiful campus in a nice, safe part of the Oakland hills. The student body is diverse (except for the obvious absence of Y-chromosomes amongst the undergraduates), and although the college has a feminist/liberal slant, the Mills graduates that I have known personally have been free-thinkers and not brainwashed. Your namesake would have been very happy with a Mills grad (and Eve Kendall might well have been one!). There’s a list of alumnae at the Wikipedia page here.

[Barbara Lee, the current US Representative for Oakland and Mills alumna, was briefly famous back in 2001 for being the only member of Congress to vote against granting GWB the broadened powers he subsequently acquired post-9/11. She considered it the role of Congress to determine which countries, if any, should be invaded. Interview here. I, for one, agree with her, and wasn’t a bit surprised to learn that she was a Mills alumna.]

Your wife’s niece wouldn’t need a car at Mills (I would recommend that she live on campus, especially if only there for three months). There are numerous social and cultural activities at Mills itself, but it’s also easy to get to Oakland (~15 minutes) and San Francisco or Berkeley (30-45 minutes in each case) by a bus / train combination (e.g. AC Transit bus #57 to BART, running every 12/15 minutes at most times).

As you can tell from the responses in this thread, mention of Oakland can be quite polarizing. It’s true that the city has a high crime rate in certain areas, but those areas are easily avoided by a student at Mills (especially if she lives on campus). By far the majority of violent crime is within the same demographic group in certain well-defined areas, so although Oakland can be a very dangerous place if you’re living in the bad areas (unfortunately there’s a fair amount of “collateral damage” of innocent victims amongst the gang turf wars), tens of thousands of Oaklanders live happy productive lives without fear of random violence. I’m sure that any orientation at Mills (especially for foreign students) would delineate the safe and unsafe areas. I know that the Bay Area Dopers would be able to put a pretty good map together as well…

Oakland suffers from a largely-undeserved bad reputation – reinforced by those who misuderstand Gertrude Stein’s line of “There’s No There There” (she was referring to a return to her childhood home, which had been knocked down, and not to anything about Oakland per se). It also lives in the shadow of the world-class reputation of San Francisco, just across the Bay; if a city with Oakland’s cultural life were not right next to SF and Berkeley, it would be justly famous in its own right. There’s a thriving arts and music scene. The Oakland Museum is fascinating. The climate is excellent (the air comes in fresh off the Pacific just like in SF, but Oakland gets much less fog and more sun). There’s a lot of easily-accessible hikeable parkland in the Oakland hills, and the views are spectacular. It would truly be an experience to treasure for her, and she’d undoubtedly make good lifelong friends at Mills.

I’ve never lived in Pensacola, but good friends of mine have, and couldn’t wait to leave. It’s largely a military town, and public transit is almost non-existent so she’d go nuts without a car. As was written above, auto-racing and football are the main live cultural options.

There’s no question that Mills would be more expensive; not just because of the cost of living, but because there’s so much more to do. However, a great deal of the joy of living in the Bay Area (wonderful, interesting and smart people, and superb natural spaces) doesn’t carry a pricetag.

26

Thanks, once again, people. I did read the relevant sections of the handout the students were given myself and yes, some colleges charge for dorm accommodation and some don’t. As regards the second-rateness of the colleges, yes, that’s true, but my niece-in-law’s uni here is ranked 7 out of 7, so no surprise or problem there. In fact, we already discussed that.

So…Oakland and San Antonio seem best, followed by Nashville. As I wrote (fairly clearly, I had thought!) in my OP, she’s going to bein the US for three months from around mid-Jan 2007 - hence the cold issue. Gee, I feel like I’ve gone 15 rounds with Frazier (YES, FIGHTS USED TO BE 15 ROUNDS IN THOSE DAYS!!!) - no not Amy, Joe…Smokin’ Jo! and I just wanted some friendly advice. But, seriously, many thanks, especially to those with first hand experience and informative responses. (I get off on all the abuse, so thanks to evryone else too!)

I’m afraid I don’t have the list, but some of the names mentioned ring faint bells. More importantly, I’ll forward this thread to Candy (good American, apple-pie name) so she can draw from it to make her application. I’ll try and get her to write a thank you note (since it’s Christmas time) and post it here so everyone can get a warm fuzzy feeling. OR…rip it apart for poor syntax, ambiguity and factual inaccuracy!

Campers, my sweet, I was pretty close on the old Birkenstocks, wasn’t I? (A girlie version of Doc Martens, I’d say.) Please, please tell me that you never wore Doc Martens, else my virtual love for you shall wither like a snowman in San Antonio.

Some of you might be interested - others, definitely not - that in my recently completed thesis, I did an analysis of a letter written to Berkeley Barb back in the year of the assassinations ('68) - when that scurrilous rag had a circulation of 70,000 and outsold the local broadsheets. The author was a part-time lecturer at the University of Santa Clara, and he wrote to complain about alleged police brutality on Telegraph and Haste in Berkeley. The Mayor duly responded and skewered him (SDMB-like) on various details he’d got wrong. Anyway, I mention this because the day the incidents happened was the day after Huey Newton (of “Free Huey” fame) was convicted, in Oakland, of killing a policeman. As a kid of nine growing up miles away, it’s funny how the names of Eldridge Cleaver, Newton and their confreres made such an impact on me at the time. And such images (who can forget the Olympic salutes that year of Tommy Smith - have I got that right? - and his team-mate) truly live on, and help contribute, perhaps, to the reputation that Oakland has even today.

27

I presume that your wife’s niece is a student at Lingnan University, since that’s the only university in Hong Kong that Mills College has an exchange program with:

http://www.mills.edu/academics/undergraduate/catalog/academic_requirements_ba.php

(There are also other websites out there that talk about exchange programs with Lingnan.)

I’m sorry, but it still just doesn’t make any sense that an exchange student wouldn’t get charged for room and board. That’s not how exchange programs work. They’re intended to be money-makers for the college, and not charging for room and board would make the programs be a loss-maker. Furthermore, the way exchange programs work is that the student pays money to their home institution for the time of the exchange (and sometimes the home institution defrays costs by financial aid). They don’t directly pay any money to the institution where they will be studying at, but their home institution pays that institution a certain amount of money that the two institutions have agreed on. (A student may be on financial aid at the home institution.) It’s possible that your wife’s niece would have to pay a single fee to Lingnan that includes both tuition and room and board.

The real decision that your wife’s niece would have to make is whether the college she goes on an exchange program to has some courses she wants to study. If all she wants to do is to live in the U.S. for three months, what’s the point of being a student? Why not live in some American big city for those three months and have a chance to see a lot of American culture? She can also travel around for a while. If she wants to study at an American college though, she needs to get an academic catalog from them and make sure that they have some courses that she’s interested in.

I think that eliminating colleges in colder environments is a bad idea. This makes it sound like your wife’s niece is interested in a nice winter vacation and not an education. The northern U.S. is not Antarctica. It will be no problem to get around a college (since your wife’s niece is going to be living on campus). She’s going to have to buy a winter coat perhaps, but it’s not going to be that cold.

28

Perhaps there is a program fee and some colleges also charge a supplamental fee for the dorms. Perhaps it is just a part of Mill’s agreement with the other college. Exchange programs are also about cultural exchange, reputation, and goodwill. It could be that Mills wants to attract more exchange students so they put together a more attractive package,

Of course this is a deciscion that all people contemplating foreign echange have to make, and I’m sure she has thought about it a lot. Perhaps she plans to jump right in to a career after school. Perhaps she is a little timid and wants the support system that having organized activity, people your age, and a guarenteed place to stay brings. Perhaps her financial aid covers it and she might as well use her free chance to travel abroad. Perhaps her parents are a little worried about her being on her own and will finance an organized thing like this but won’t just hand her money to screw around in a foreign country. I had the chance to go abroad in school and chose to wait until I could do it on my own, but it’s not the best choice for everyone.

So you would gladly accept a 3 month work assignment in 100+ degree heat and high humidity without even considering the weather? I’m considering joining the Peace Corps, and you can bet I specified I wanted to live in a warm climate. Not because I want a “two year vacation” but because climate is a major quality of life factor for me. I’m skinny, and even in a mild coastal CA climate my toes turn blue and I shiver a lot and I spend weeks avoiding going outdoors. I know how to live in the heat but not the cold. I know the signs of heat stroke but not of hyperthermia. I love walking around in shorts and I HATE walking around in winter clothing. I also have a habit of locking myself out of the house, and I won’t live somewhere where that can be a fatal move. And guess what? It’s my life and I don’t have to live in a cold climate if I don’t want to! I’m not sure why you think that Roger Thornhill’s neice also doesn’t have good reasons for the decisions she wants to make.

Indeed, what is your problem? Did you come in here only to crap on Roger Thornhill’s neices every move?

29

You can rest easy, roger. Never owned a pair of either Birkenstocks or Doc Martens. And I’ve never had a radical army phase, that I know of.

As roger both is literate and has the program materials to review, I vote we bow to his superior knowledge in this area.

That could very well be it. I’m also with you on the cold thing.

So overall, I’d vote for Mills over an unknown college in San Antonio, but I’d rank San Antonio over Oakland for cities, simply because (as Hippy Hollow so charmingly put it) the “cultural stew” in San Antonio is a load of fun.

30

Building from Wendell Wagner’s detective work, I’d be willing to bet that the list of choices is here (scroll down for the US colleges):

[ul]
[li]Augustana College (Rock Island, IL)[/li][li]Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)[/li][li]Belmont University (Nashvile, TN)[/li][li]Beloit College (Beloit, WI)[/li][li]Butler University (Indianapolis, IN)[/li][li]Carleton College (Northfield, MN)[/li][li]Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA)[/li][li]Hobart & William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY)[/li][li]Lafayette College (Easton, PA)[/li][li]Mills College (Oakland, CA)[/li][li]St. Mary’s College of Maryland (St. Mary’s City, MD)[/li][li]Trinity College (Hartford, CT)[/li][li]Trinity University (San Antonio, TX)[/li][li]University of the Incarnate Word (San Antonio, TX) [/li][li]University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg, VA)[/li][li]University of West Florida (Pensacola, FL)[/li][li]Washington College (Chestertown, MD)[/li][li]West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV)[/li][/ul][locations added by me – feel free to correct!]

These are mostly smallish private liberal-arts colleges (UWF and WVU are the only state schools, I think), but there’s a fair mix of “urban” vs “rural” as well as “cold climate” vs “warm climate”. BTW, she should realize that Nashville gets pretty cold in the winter:

The only reliably snow-free places on the list are in CA, FL, and TX.

Most of the places on the list would, to a HKer, feel really in the middle of nowhere – although that can have its advantages too depending on what she wants to experience.

San Antonio (aka SATX) is a fun city with a major Hispanic influence (it was the first top-10-population US city to have a Hispanic mayor, IIRC), but would be harder without a car than Oakland would. Politically, SATX is not as hard-right as most Texas cities (Austin being the only major one further to the left than TX), but there is a large military (mainly Air Force) presence as mentioned by other posters. It gets very hot in the summer, but if she’s leaving in April that won’t be a problem.

:confused: SATX has a mix of two cultures, with variations on the theme (i.e. Anglo + Hispanic -> Texan, Tejano, Tex/Mex, etc) and a few others added. Oakland is the friggin’ UN. Read even sven’s posts above; she knows of what she speaks.

31

Thanks for the tip. I actually did read even sven’s posts and I agree with her in most respects. Nevertheless, having spent time in both Oakland and San Antonio, I would prefer to spend three months in San Antonio. To call San Antonio simply a “mix of two cultures” is wholly inaccurate, in my opinion, and to refer to Oakland as the “friggin’ UN” (whatever that may mean) is also inaccurate. Look, comparing San Antonio and Oakland isn’t really possible. They’re both interesting cities with lots to offer, but very, very different. I prefer San Antonio. Sue me. :slight_smile:

32

I’m assuming your wife’s neice is a Cantonese speaker from HK? If so, she’s probably going to be a lot more at home in Oakland/Bay Area. There’s a huge Cantonese diaspora there, restaurants, stores, video’s, etc. Downside is that she might not get the immersion she wants. It’s probably akin to being British in HK - there’s plenty of Western stuff if you want it, and if you don’t want it you can go pretty local.

33

Upon reflection, I misrepresented the cultural mix of SATX a little in the above post. I used to visit a girlfriend who lived there (long-distance relationship), and have many fond memories of the place. It’s true that it has more cultural influences than just “Anglo+Hispanic” (German and Czech are already mentioned), and these make it more of a mix than almost any other location mentioned by roger as a possibility.

The :confused: on my part was only because the cultural variety of SATX was being trumpeted as compared to one of the few areas in the US where it’ll lose every time, and that’s the SF Bay Area. SATX is culturally rich, but the Bay Area has to be experienced to be believed. I ask that any snarkiness on my part be excused by my location tag.

In other news; my comment about “reliably snow-free” shouldn’t imply that it never snows in Oakland, Pensacola, or SATX, just that it’s extremely rare in the first two and quite rare in the last one. If she wants to see snow, however, she can head up into the Sierra Nevada from Oakland by train or bus (about 4 hours each way), and hit Reno or Lake Tahoe for a weekend (gamblers’ excursion buses from Chinatowns in Oakland or SF to Reno are very cheap, and no-one forces you to gamble when you get there).

Erratum: “Austin being the only major one further to the left than TX” should read “within TX”. Parts of SATX are very liberal.

34

Never! You’re a motivator and an entertainer, not to mention a kick-ass litigator. The Ally McBeal of L.A. County.

I’ve put together a digest of the info and views presented here on San Antonio and Oakland to help Candy in her application. (Lazy bugger’s still asleep and it’s approaching midday here - so she should do well, whichever student community she joins). She’s got to get the application in by Friday, so there’s really no point poring over other options, if that only means information overload and confusion, when both these places (and their three colleges) offer so much of what she’s looking for, and, just as importantly, features she can use to make her application stand out from the others.

35

She finally got up.

And she’s chosen Mills College, Oakland, as her first choice, and University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, as her second. (The deal is you’ve got to do a write-up on your first two choices.)

So, thanks to all once again, and I’ll pop back and resurrect this thread around Easter when she knows whether her application’s been successful.

I’ve sent her the links to the Birkenstocks (she already knows what Doc Martens are - she’s the one who put me onto an extraordinarily violent French flim told backwards with a graphic rape scene in a subway, which makes Memento and Reservoir Dogs look like Lizzie McGuire.) Don’t stereotype our little yellow friends, you see - as Peter Sellers once said to his manservant.

Darn it, Campers, after reading this thread, she now wants me to find her some army surplus boots as well…

36

Wow. That was a long nap.

I think she’s made a good choice. She ought to enjoy her time at Mills, and you can tell her that we’ll expect regular reports.

May I remind you, sir, who first mentioned army surplus boots in this thread? :wink: But tell her she’s better off going thrift shopping when she’s out here than relying on you to pick something up for her. I’m betting that in the Bay Area, she’ll be able to find some mighty nice boots.

37

She weighs less than 100 pounds, so she could probably do with some combat boots to kick any Oakland ass that gets a bit frisky. I always tell her she’s wasting her time studying (especially Women’s Studies, which she wants to do at Mills - OH.MY.GOD, as some dopers would put it in that faintly irritating style which says “I don’t know how to convey the tone of a message without resorting to these annoying punctuating tricks)”, and should enrol on the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s apprentice scheme. She could even appear in Seabiscuit II.

I mean, women’s studies? Really. Tollers summed it up well 80 years ago when the English Faculty at Oxford University was quarrelling over whether the course should focus on language or on literature (both, it must be added, of a rather non-modern variety). Some of the literature folk (too trendy by half, even in those days) had the idea that reading English literature should improve a student’s character, as well as furthering his or her knowledge. Tollers was having none of this arrogant and authoritarian nonsense, telling his old mucker CS Lewis that this was why he abominated “liberal studies”.

38

As I’ve always said, once they gave women the vote, it was all downhill from there.

39

A litigatory double whammy - I am honoured! Classic diversionary tactic blended seemlessly with appeal to emotion. No, I think we will know we’ve reached the bootom of the hill when they foist a course called “Men’s Studies” on their subjects.

40

For what it’s worth at this point, I’ve only heard of 2 schools on that list, and those are Mills College (Oakland, CA) and Trinity University (San Antonio, TX).

My sister went to Trinity University. As I recall, it was a top-ranked regional mostly-liberal arts school in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. My sister liked the school very much. Also, San Antonio is a really neat city, with attractions such as the Riverwalk.

I’ve never heard of the University of the Incarnate Word, and I used to live in San Antonio! (OK, it was 25 years ago, but still…)