University of Maryland-College Park Top Questions

Diverse, fun, and smart people.

Cut throat. Class competition for grades is high.

My classmates are at times helpful and the ones I confide in are most definitely there to give a helping hand every step of the way.

My classmates are welcoming, active, talkative, engaging, and helpful. I have made many friends of classmates who are older and more experienced. They share their experiences and always are available for study groups.

My classmates mostly seem to be on the same intelligence level as I am.

I went to a small homogeneous school growing up, so really appreciated the diversity at the University of Maryland - diversity at multiple levels - racial, ethnic, socioeconomic. State-wise though, lots of people from Maryland and New Jersey - especially if you're from Maryland, be prepared to run into random folks from different phases of your life. The student body is overall pretty apathetic - but dig a little deeper and you find active pockets of all sorts.

The political affiliations of the student body probably balance out somewhere just left of center, but not far. Because of the size, the student body is totally balkanized. Once I found my group of intellectuals, writers, artists, feminists, and queers, I delightedly self-segregated as well. It's a survival mechanism and a recipe for happiness in the impersonal city that is the UMD College Park campus. The campus is extremely diverse in every way except geographically: socioeconomically, racially, and religiously. Some of this diversity is visible and some is hidden. The diversity, unfortunately, is not coupled with a general sense of political and social awareness/activism. Students who'd likely feel out of place until struggling a bit to find their niche are humanities-oriented intellectuals and people who aren't interested in college sports and frat parties. After a while, though, they'll find their people. Whether they find their classes is a harder question.

UMD is too large to categorize--any type of person in all the above categories (religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, race, etc) can be found in large numbers at UMD. I also have a very skewed perspective on this since I was a physics major in the Gemstone program--meaning most students I interacted with were extremely intelligent, and most were middle/upper-middle class (although definitely not wealthy).

It's a state school, so obviously you have a lot of MD kids. But, there is a substantial population of students from the North-East (NY,NJ,CT,PA) and a rapidly growing population of students from the Mid-West and Atlanta areas. Whatever demographic you'd gravitate toward individually, there probably exists a strong cohort/community of that group at UMD. As a Jewish student, that aspect of community was central to me and I couldn't be happier with the UMD Jewish environment.

There is a place for everyone at Maryland. With such a large campus, it's easy to find people that you relate to. Class is really casual but it depends on the person, it ranges from pajamas to really stylish and well dressed, but no one cares what you're wearing either way. Some students are extremely politically aware but a great deal of students are really apathetic, which is unfortunate being so close to DC. I would say that most students are center/left,