Beloit College WI (College Prowler: Beloit College Off the Record) (Off the Record)

Introduction from the Author

Despite Beloit’s pleasant exterior, what with all the brick buildings and trees, this little college has mighty big britches that are wearing them out. Beloit is a haven for idiosyncrasies, quirks, and generally eccentric characters. In short, a lot of weird people go to Beloit. But that’s exactly the spell it puts on you—or rather, the web with which it traps you, and if you struggle, you’ll only get more ensnared. Thank the good Lord (or your DNA) for giving you two eyes, because there’s always more than one way to see Beloit.

The best way to view Beloit is, in my opinion, as if it were your pet, rather than your institution for higher education. Though, one way or another, you will come out of Beloit a well-educated person. Beloit as a single comprehensive unit is adorable in its own right. It tries its absolute best to make the students feel cared for, free to experiment with their education, and express themselves within a non-judgmental environment. This is why you’ll find students calling professors by their first names, people not wearing shoes wherever they go, even in the winter, and students who have made up their major from scratch because the pre-structured ones weren’t exactly what they were looking for. Beloit applies a minimal amount of pressure with elastic and accommodating graduation requirements that allow students to wander freely and as happily through their undergraduate years as possible. That’s the idea, but unfortunately, for Beloit, it doesn’t always rub people the right way. Those are the ones who rely on structure, love deadlines, formalities, and need their institutions to work like an orderly machine. Everything at Beloit is pretty open-ended and subject to interpretation. Don’t think your arrival at Beloit College is your first step into “the real world.” In actuality, it is the farthest thing from it.

Beloit College is like that really nice guy who just wants to be friends with everybody and have everybody be friends. It’s like your mom trying to set you up with the neighbor’s kid. It’s like your dog, who always comes up to greet you when you arrive back home no matter how long you’ve been gone, tail wagging, tongue out. It’s your local political activist, going from door to door, getting you to sign a petition about one thing or another every other day. It’s the kid sitting in the back of the room reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the fifth time in a row. It’s a gem. And when you finally come to the end and reflect back on your experience, the most common utterance and most accurate description for four years at Beloit College is, “Well, don’t that beat all.”

Sarah Maehl, Author
Beloit College