Welcome back to The Rival Rundown! If you’ve always wanted to give props to your school on CC, now’s your chance! Shoot us an email explaining what’s awesome and unique about your school (or what stinks about Rival U) at rivalrundown@collegecandy.com!

We’ve featured many a sports-related rivalry in weeks past, but what would College Candy be if it were not for our strong, beautiful twentysomething female readers? With that in mind, let’s pit legendary women’s colleges Barnard and Wellesley head-to-head (er, tit-to-tit?).  All my single ladies…

1. Mascot Matchup

Barnard- Millie the Dancing Bear is the official mascot for Barnard College, but given the athletic consortium between Barnard and Columbia University, Barnard athletes are lady Lions.
Wellesley- School pride is exclaimed in enthusiasm for the Wellesley Blue–simple, but true!

Three credits to: Barnard which has not one but two mascots!

2. Terrific Traditions

Barnard- Pre-meds (and their roommates) the world over dread the required organic chemistry final exam, a rite of passage about as painful as, say, childbirth.  On the evening before the exam, called Orgo Night, the boys from the Columbia band march over to the Barnard quad to play music to disrupt Barnard girls’ studying.
Wellesley- Every year, the course of the world’s most prestigious marathon, the Boston Marathon, snakes through the Wellesley campus. Known to runners as the “Wellesley Scream Tunnel,” the deafening shrieks of Wellesley girls cheering can be heard from miles away. Classes are canceled on the day of the marathon, and many girls stand roadside with signs offering kisses, bottles of water, and a whole lot of school pride.

Three Credits to: Wellesley, since kissing sweaty strangers is about as type-A collegiate as it gets! Read More »

In a little under two weeks, I am going to college. Between the time I received Wellesley’s acceptance envelope and this very moment, I seemed to go through two basic emotions: excitement and terror. Excitement for the obvious reasons—no more telling my parents of my every location, no more taking classes just to make my college application look good, and no more dealing with the social drama of public high school, especially being around fourteen-year-old freshmen who think they know it all.

But wait.

Now it’s my turn to regress back to being a freshman, to leave the comfort of seniority to once again be pushed into a world where I am at the bottom of the ranks. This drop in status happened in middle school. It happened in high school. And I have no doubt it will happen in college. Read More »