Economics at Swarthmore

interesteddad
Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:47:28 +0000

mom:

OK, I checked with Swattie daughter.

She does not have any close Econ major friends, but her belief is that there would be plenty of non-mathy Econ majors and plenty of mathy Econ majors. Both tracks are viable types of Econ majors. Swarthmore has many students interested in policy/social science kinds of fields including public policy, Poli Sci, Soc/An, macro Econ, etc. The calc class and Statistics would be sufficient for most of these majors.

She recommends that your daughter talk to her adviser and/or go sit down and chit chat with a professor in the Econ department. My daughter’s experience (typical? I don’t know?) is that students can shoot straight with their advisors and professors and professors will shoot straight in return.

BTW, she also believes that students should trust their gut on college math after Math 25. There are many examples of students who breezed through high school calculus, got 5s on the AP test, and just aren’t wired for college math. The next course in sequence, Linear Algebra, is notoriously challenging for non-mathy types.