University of Notre Dame Top Questions

Work hard, play hard.

Great, fun loving, hard working people who will be my best friends for life.

Most people are very studious and willing to work together, so there is a very supportive learning environment.

My classmates are very intelligent, very driven, and very focused on making the world a better place through unique uses of their different skill sets.

As discussed above, Notre Dame is fairly homogenous. It's common to joke that everyone on campus shops at the same stores, listens to the same music and has the same political views, and there is some degree of truth to this. When I was there in the late 90s-early 00s, it seemed like everyone shopped at Abercrombie and loved Dave Matthews. But you would have to put some effort into NOT finding other students who come from different parts of the country, have different backgrounds and hold different world views. And even over the 4 year period that I was there, you could see that the student body was becoming increasingly diverse on many different fronts. LGBT issues is definitely the area where the most progress remains to be made. While I never felt that the student body itself was hostile to LGBT issues, LGBT prospective students should be aware that the administration does not go out of its way to address those issues (e.g., there is no officially sanctioned LGBT student group on campus). Most students are laid back and friendly. Friendship groups are most often based around the residence halls, which function as fraternities and sororities. While people get set into those friendship groups early and stick with them throughout their years on campus, classes, athletics and activities offer plenty of opportunities to branch out and meet different people. Generally, the longer you've been there, the more different types of people you will interact with on a regular basis.

They go out of their way to be helpful and friendly.

Friendly intelligent fun (most) while some are socailly awkward or arrogant

My classmates are hard working, intelligent students but they lack diversity overall.

Several clips of students answering three questions, including their favorite class.

ND students do match the stereotype of kind of preppy upper-middle class suburban white guys, but it's not as bad as lots of people make it out to be. We have a reasonable amount of diversity still. Everyone is fairly intellectual, which creates a very different atmosphere than lots of state schools. Still, you won't be the least intelligent person around. It usually feels like a normal school ought to. One thing that bothers me is that the music taste of Notre Dame is pretty terrible - it's centered predominately on bad eighties music.