Johns Hopkins University. What is your immediate thought when you hear this school's name? Some people only think of the line "I've smoked weed with Johnny Hopkins."
Others imagine a school filled to the brim with pre-med students. Some people think of a really competitive, cutthroat environment where it's almost impossible to become friends with people because all they want is to be better than you. After completing one and a half semesters at this school, I can say that most of the preconceived notions are not true.
This school is tough--there is absolutely no way of getting around it. The introductory level courses are more difficult than most of the ones at other colleges. We have to spend hours on our homework, trying to figure it out for ourselves, and if that doesn't work, it takes a few more hours of talking to TAs and professors to understand it. The thing about Hopkins students, though, is that we don't give up easily. We want to understand why people act the way they do, or why it makes sense to do this or that problem a certain way. It's difficult, but after figuring out the problem, we build on that knowledge and use it for the rest of the year. We are trained early on to work hard, and while it is a pain for us freshmen at the beginning of the year, we will be thankful for it.
Only about a third of the students at Hopkins are premed students. That's it. There are a lot of kids studying art, history, anthropology, and how to write short stories, and then there are students designing robots and the newest technology to look at space.
There are students trying to pioneer a new frontier in medicine as well, but if you want to come to this school and you are interested in writing a novel or becoming involved in the government, you are absolutely in the right place for that as well. Hopkins is not as limited as people think.
It is cutthroat, but not in the way you may have imagined. I pictured kids looking down on me when I struggled through math courses (so not a math student) and everyone fervently working by themselves because they didn't want anyone else to receive credit for using their ideas. None of those worries were true. The kids at Hopkins take pride in what they do, but they never want to hold someone else back. If a classmate doesn't understand something in class, we are happy to help explain it to them. Spreading the knowledge is a normal activity to see on campus.
Hopkins is a tough school academically, but we still manage to have fun. We spend our afternoons on the beach, the sloping lawn in front of the library when we need a break from the studying. We can attend concerts in DC or go down to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore for an afternoon. While we need to spend a lot of time on our studies, that does not define the student body.
To summarize, if you are considering attending Hopkins but you are worried because you think you won't have any fun, or you don't want to be a doctor or because you are afraid of the competition, you should reconsider. I'm not saying it's the school for everyone, but those particular worries should not hold you back.
