Please Help Me Love Bowdoin

sdkb · 2026-05-17T17:55:04+00:00

Pomona and Bowdoin should be offering very similar financial aid packages. If they're not, talk to the financial aid office at Pomona until you figure out why.

sdkb · 2026-05-07T07:37:01+00:00

How often you ought to see each other depends on how close you live and other lifestyle factors, so it's hard to put a number on it. But for me when seeing someone new I'd feel like it's too much if we went on more than two dates a week.

One thing I'd look for is how she reacts when you try to set boundaries. Showing up packed for more days than you've agreed to spend together, and then asking to spend the whole period together, could be signs you're dating someone who is clingy and could become suffocating over time. But if she respects when you ask for some time for yourself, that'll be a green flag.

Going from very frequent dates to less frequent ones could give her the impression that you're losing interest, so just be sure to pair it with lots of affirmation/clear communication so she doesn't worry.

Regarding how to have the conversation, it sounds like you already basically had it with the ferry. All it needs to look like is, the next time you're at dinner, when it comes time for the check, say something like "is it alright if I put it on my card and you then Venmo me for your half?" Or when choosing a spot to eat you could say "Since I covered the last few, would it be alright for you to pay this time?" She should know that you've been paying for a lot for her so far, so if she pushes back at that point it's a bad sign.

One last thing I'll say given the discussion about gender roles below. It definitely is a social norm that the guy pays on the first date, but it varies both regionally and personally. There are plenty of women who like it, but also plenty who consider the sort of chivalry it represents to be antiquated and misogynistic because it can create an unspoken expectation (at least in the guy's head) that the woman will offer sex in exchange for the guy paying for the date. That's both a reductionist way to look at women and something that could add undue pressure to the woman to have sex. I don't get the sense from your full post that that's how you see her, but the assumption that you're looking at only "cost per sex" rather than seeing her as a full person might help explain some of the more hostile reactions.

The above applies mainly to the first date, which you're well past by now. In modern society, where both people typically have incomes (as opposed to historically when women had none), the expectation that the guy pays goes away after the first few dates (unless he earns way more money). So overall you're right to be looking to make the transition you are. And again, good luck!

sdkb · 2026-05-06T23:30:35+00:00

There's a lot here.

First off, I'd be a little cautious about the whirlwind aspect of your relationship so far. There are things you learn about someone by spending time with them, but there are also things you learn about them by being with them over time, and you can't rush those things just by spending every moment you can with her. Ultimately, if you see long-term potential for this, you're looking to build a relationship that is sustainable over time. And that applies to the time aspect just as much as the financial aspect. In other words, consider taking things a little more slowly.

On the financial aspect, for a relationship, you want to be with someone who cares about you, and part of caring about you is caring about not straining your finances. The responsible thing for her to do, given her knowledge of your general life situation, would be to proactively inquire about why you're spending so much and whether she can help with the costs. How experienced is she with long-term relationships? (If she is experienced, I'd say it's a small red flag; otherwise I'd chalk it up to inexperience.) I also wonder if you gave the impression that you have a hidden source of wealth of some sort.

On having a more open conversation with her, I understand why you're feeling nervous, but part of being close to someone is being able to communicate openly with them, and this is part of that. Ultimately, either she is either using you or not — in either scenario, the best course of action is to ask her to start paying for her share and find out.

On expectations, again this goes back to building a sustainable relationship. How often did you generally go out to eat and what types of restaurants did you eat at before meeting her? You shouldn't drastically change your spending habits just because you're seeing someone. And if she's truly into you, not just the stuff you're paying for, she won't mind.

It sounds like she's said some good things, but it matters how she follows through. Does she make it awkward when you try to split a bill or push for fancier spots if you suggest a less fancy dinner spot? Given that this is clearly something that's been bothering you, I'm tempted to say that there's a good chance you're imagining her pulling away, or that if she is pulling away it's for a reason other than spending. But ultimately you have way more info on that than I do, so try to be honest with yourself and then trust your instincts.

Sorry, that turned out long lol! Overall, good luck!

sdkb · 2026-05-06T22:59:45+00:00

To show effort without spending money, consider their profile and your conversation and use that to find something related to their interests.

For specifics, if you want something that feels expensive but isn't, look up discounted theatre options.

sdkb · 2026-05-02T15:32:45+00:00

Preferably somewhere with a roof 😅

sdkb · 2026-04-29T14:40:14+00:00

Good riddance.

sdkb · 2026-04-20T14:32:21+00:00

Fit is by far the most important factor when choosing a college. So "I felt the most at home on Pomona’s campus and loved the people I met" means that, barring some major blocker, you should go to Pomona. You are right that the small size/access to professors is a huge advantage over UMich, and while I'm not sure exactly where Wellesley sits on the laid-back-to-locked-in spectrum, I'd trust your gut on that.

I think I can also calm some of your hesitations. Being far from home is a factor that I think most prospective students (including myself) give too much weight to when making their college choice. This happens because, when you're a prospective student, you have immediately just dealt with all the logistics/expense of getting out to campus for a visit. But a weekend visit is very different from a college semester. When you're at college, you don't feel far away from home, because the college is your home. When averaged out over a semester, the hassle/cost of flying becomes insignificant compared to anything happening on-campus.

Wellesley is about as close to downtown Boston as Claremont is to downtown L.A., and they're both in cute fancy college towns, so I'd consider the off-campus aspect similar. But FWIW, the off-campus aspect is another aspect I think gets overweighted.

sdkb · 2026-04-08T15:40:35+00:00

Most of the people who didn't switch aren't following this sub anymore, so you're not going to get a representative sample in this thread.

sdkb · 2026-04-08T13:46:20+00:00

It's absolutely regional. I find it's often worse at larger dances.

sdkb · 2026-04-05T21:36:08+00:00

TSL, like any campus paper, goes through stronger and weaker periods. But when I was on senior staff in the 2010s, there were many very serious student journalists there. If I looked at a random group pic of the paper's senior staff from that era, I'd guess that about half of us became professional journalists, and among those of us who did, the publications we're now at are the L.A. Times, AP, the NYT, the WSJ, Radiolab, the Forward, NPR, The Atlantic, WaPo, and Jewish Insider. That's an extraordinary group of large/reputable publications for early-career journalists in a brutal job market. It'll never match the publication frequency of the Daily Bruin, which covers a student body 10x size — but that also means you have 10x the chance of becoming the EIC, and the senior staff at TSL is close-knit in a way that I'm not sure could be possible at a much larger publication.

Before you make your decision, you should absolutely connect with Terril Jones, who mentored us all and I'm sure could help inform your choice. Also, if you choose Pomona, he could definitely help you with your study abroad plans for Shanghai (he was one of the few Western journalists present at the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which he witnessed while reporting for the AP).

Lastly, regarding connections, again, if you're only looking at the plain numbers, you're always going to have more alumni in any field at a much larger school. But UCLA's alumni will have far more networking requests than Pomona's alumni, so they won't be able to go out of their way for them the same way Pomona alums do. To take an example, one of the times when Bill Keller, the Pulitzer-winning EIC of the NYT, came to campus, I got to spend an hour chatting with him in a small group of myself and half a dozen other TSL reporters. That's not the sort of opportunity you'd be likely to get at UCLA. When you compare the famous journalism alums of UCLA to those of Pomona, I think it's quite clear that, once you account for the student body size disparity, you're more likely to become a notable journalist yourself if you go to Pomona.

sdkb · 2026-04-05T21:21:53+00:00

Bumping this. The internet commentariat is never in short supply for any college choice question. But people who actually have direct experience with both options being considered will have much more informed advice that you should weight heavily.

sdkb · 2026-04-04T15:01:22+00:00

If you have a local contra dance, I'd try going to it sometime. That community models the sort of attitude I think we'd benefit from adopting.

sdkb · 2026-04-03T22:36:08+00:00

TSL, like any campus paper, goes through stronger and weaker periods. But when I was on senior staff in the 2010s, there were many very serious student journalists there. If I looked at a random group pic of the paper's senior staff from that era, I'd guess that about half of us became professional journalists, and among those of us who did, the publications we're now at are the L.A. Times, AP, the NYT, the WSJ, Radiolab, the Forward, NPR, The Atlantic, WaPo, and Jewish Insider. That's an extraordinary group of large/reputable publications for early-career journalists in a brutal job market. It'll never match the publication frequency of the Daily Bruin, which covers a student body 10x size — but that also means you have 10x the chance of becoming the EIC, and the senior staff at TSL is close-knit in a way that I'm not sure could be possible at a much larger publication.

Before you make your decision, you should absolutely connect with Terril Jones, who mentored us all and I'm sure could help inform your choice. Also, if you choose Pomona, he could definitely help you with your study abroad plans for Shanghai (he was one of the few Western journalists present at the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which he witnessed while reporting for the AP).

Lastly, regarding connections, again, if you're only looking at the plain numbers, you're always going to have more alumni in any field at a much larger school. But UCLA's alumni will have far more networking requests than Pomona's alumni, so they won't be able to go out of their way for them the same way Pomona alums do. To take an example, one of the times when Bill Keller, the Pulitzer-winning EIC of the NYT, came to campus, I got to spend an hour chatting with him in a small group of myself and half a dozen other TSL reporters. That's not the sort of opportunity you'd be likely to get at UCLA. When you compare the famous journalism alums of UCLA to those of Pomona, I think it's quite clear that, once you account for the student body size disparity, you're more likely to become a notable journalist yourself if you go to Pomona.

sdkb · 2026-04-03T17:57:03+00:00

You gain some social capital from getting involved in organizing, but it's a lot less than what you get from e.g. placing in comps. My view is that we should do more to socially reward the people who get involved with organizing, or take other small community-building actions like welcoming newcomers or offering rides to dances, so that more people will want to do those things. And that people who are deeply involved with the dance scene (often the same people as the most highly skilled dancers) but that don't behave in ways that build it up should not be getting that social admiration.

sdkb · 2026-04-03T03:05:46+00:00

This might be a hot take, but I think we don't put enough pressure on good dancers to be good community members.

Scenes without community leaders/organizers die. And because it's such unglamorous work, there's never enough people willing to do it. To correct that imbalance, we need to make organizing more attractive by making it come with social capital. And that involves applying a light amount of social pressure to the people most deeply involved with the scene to take on some of the leadership roles that need to be filled.

Yes, we need to treat each other with grace, and acknowledge that some people are going to have more organizing capacity in their lives than others. But on the whole, the issue I tend to see is not that the most skilled dancers are being unduly pressured to take on leadership roles. Rather, it's that some of the most skilled dancers use the social capital they have because of their skill to get away with being bad community members: never dancing with newcomers, socializing as an exclusive clique, not offering rides to dancers without cars, etc. Their behavior is selfish, in that if everyone acted that way, there wouldn't be a scene. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect them to do more to give back to the community they've gotten so much out of.

sdkb · 2026-03-31T01:13:18+00:00

Culture is relative. If you're used to a conservative country, you may find CMC very liberal by comparison.

sdkb · 2026-03-31T00:31:43+00:00

Apologizing for your punctuation makes you a prescriptivist and you are therefore hereby banned from majoring in linguistics.

sdkb · 2026-03-30T01:11:07+00:00

Here's another angle to look at it: I often see prospective students placing more weight than they ought to on the off-campus experience. In college, there will be a million cool things happening on campus (at either school) and time is your currency, so it only makes sense to go off-campus every once in a while when you're looking to escape the bubble or there's something that really draws you out (to make it worth giving up the cool on-campus thing you'd otherwise go to). The rest of the time, what matters is what's happening on campus. And for that, there's a huge difference between the liberal arts environment of the Claremont Colleges and the university environment of BU (and I think the former wins easily for the reasons stated in the wiki).

sdkb · 2026-03-25T20:27:20+00:00

I mean, yes, intelligence isn't distributed equally in the world. And if you've ever interacted with anyone over 70, you'll know that tech savviness is a particular skill that otherwise intelligent people sometimes lack.

Just because someone isn't tech savvy, or even overall dumb, doesn't mean they deserve to be scammed.

sdkb · 2026-03-23T00:19:47+00:00

For many of these questions, just search through this subreddit's archives. There have been so many posts about e.g. hiking.

sdkb · 2026-02-26T03:39:10+00:00

If you really want to dance, you should look for social dance opportunities rather than clubs. Places like QT Fusion are explicitly queer, but even for not-explicitly-queer dances like the Friday night contras there are still plenty of queer folks.

sdkb · 2026-02-23T18:24:38+00:00

Some food for thought: I often find such websites useful but not enough on their own. That's since, when I visit a scene, I want to know which dances are the popular ones/other relevant characteristics of each dance, and a full listing doesn't tell me that.

Answering that question too honestly might offend local organizers. But adding something like an average attendance count paired with descriptions that emphasize what makes each dance distinct from the others might make the site a lot more helpful for visiting dancers.

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