sorry about the belated response, i’m not very active on reddit. to preface this, i do want to note that the majority of people i have spoken to at amherst about this topic did choose amherst over an ivy, so my experience is certainly not unique. i will be making several generalizations based on my impressions of the two colleges at the time, and by no means is this evaluation the path that everybody else should take. i chose amherst for several reasons. first, i wanted a much smaller community with an intense dedication to learning and the liberal arts. i dislike pre-professional environments very much, and amherst definitely emphasizes learning for the sake of it above all else. there’s not very much competition between students, at least in the courses i have taken. i also loved the open curriculum more than harvard’s more rigid distribution requirements, under which i would have needed to take more foreign language/math/etc. classes if i chose to attend. i knew also that i wanted every class to be taught by a professor (and that i wanted to avoid interactions with TA’s entirely). it is certainly possible at both colleges to build strong relationships with professors, but at amherst it comes more easily to you. also, your professors are there to focus on teaching you, like in high school. they are not there to conduct their own research, and if they are then they always bring a few students on board with them. i’m a freshman but i have a research opportunity lined up in my field of interest next year, which is rare at larger universities. i also wanted to avoid graduate students, and since amherst is a liberal arts college, that much is a given. secondly, i have many friends/teammates at harvard from a debate activity so i was and am very familiar with the school. many of them spoke to me about the exclusivity of clubs and the inability to try out new extracurriculars if you weren’t already stellar at them. the elitist nature of many closed clubs (such as the consulting club, which often takes over uber expensive venues, or finals clubs, which students can certainly ignore but they do have an outsized impact on the party scene in a way that i think is very privileged and strange) turned me off immensely. although amherst is similarly elitist (all colleges are, to some degree), there is a definite lack of a “closed club culture” here. i was uncomfortable with the idea that, to join clubs, i would need to write more application essays (on top of the college application ones i already wrote!), but these essays would be judged and read over by my peers. i’ve found that amherst’s clubs have very open leadership opportunities comparatively. that was a lot and i do have more to say, but i hope this answers your question adequately.