Hi Neeta! Can you please elaborate on WISE? How is it living with all girls? Do you find WISE helpful? Thank you! :)
Hello! Of course! So I talked about WiSE a little bit here, so I’m going to copy and paste a piece of it and then go from there.
WiSE is the Women in Science and Engineering community, and they have a WiSE floor in Warren Towers, which I currently live on! It’s all girls who are in a STEM major as well as a few upperclassmen who live on the floor as Peer Mentors, who help out with tutoring and things. We also have the WiSE version of FY101, or the First-Year Experience, which is a pass/fail one-credit class that happens like every other week, where we do a variety of activities, like listen to women currently in STEM fields, lab tours, and even more general things like resume workshops.
Living with all girls is fine; it doesn’t make it any cleaner or anything like that since on other floors it would still be all girls on one half of the floor. I think our floor is cleaner than most largely because most of us don’t drink, especially not on the floor. Since we’re all either science or engineering, I feel like we’re pretty similar so there aren’t usually huge disagreements. I mean, of course you’ll get along with some people and not others but that doesn’t cause much drama.
I do find WiSE helpful, especially as a first-year student! Going into college as someone who was not interested in partying or drinking, one of my biggest worries was being a science major who has a lot of work to do around people who may not have as much work and party five nights a week, and having my academics affected as a result. (I’m not saying that’s the case if you live somewhere else, that was just my concern.) So having a community of girls, some who are the same or similar major as me but all who have a very similar workload as me, was good for that because it honestly kept me focused but I still made a lot of friends. A lot of us were in the same classes, so if I had questions I had a lot of peers available right there. So in a way it kind of combined the social and academic aspects of that life triangle thing, if you know what I’m talking about. Most of my closest friends (and all of my roommates for next year) are from my floor this year.
If I had to say something negative about WiSE, it would probably be that occasionally the FY101 classes were a bit irrelevant to my specific interests. STEM is a large category to try and hold a class for, so when we had engineering or programming focused classes, it wasn’t much fun for me. However, we did have our last class this past week and it was a panel of women in STEM fields, and it was actually really great! A lot of them talked about how there careers didn’t have a straight path but now they’re in great places. One of them even mentioned that she got an F in physics in undergrad but now has a Ph.D, which was literally the most reassuring thing you could have told a group of first-years approaching their second-semester finals.
I definitely recommend WiSE, especially if you are concerned about the living environment for your first year because that was honestly the best part about it.
