<p>Thanks for sharing your experience B@r!um. It’s always nice to read your posts and to know the bi-co relationship working to its fullest potential with you.</p>
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<p>Roderick, I think you have to remember that HC is consistently noted among the top LACs and, as such, a bread and butter department such as economics (or political science, philosophy, English) will be outstanding. I think will be distracting for you to compare such departments between the (generically) top 10-15 LACs as all of them are wonderful and likely exceed the needed resources to teach undergraduate studies.</p>
<p>IMO, I think HC stands out among LACs in the natural sciences (particularly, molecular biology/ bio-med, chemistry, physics, astronomy and the integrative disciplines of bio-chem, bio-physics and physical chemistry) and religion. I am not aware of any LAC better than HC in these fields and only 1-2 perhaps who may be as good (excluding HMC which is a unique science school). I’ve written too much about the sciences already in past posts, but, for example, regarding physics, it should be noted that in the last 3 years, the only LAC representative to the Cambridge University Churchill Scholarship (for sciences) for 2 of those 3 years were 2 HC physics majors.</p>
<p>[Winston</a> Churchill Foundation](<a href=“http://winstonchurchillfoundation.org/index.php?hide=1§ion=Scholars&type=php]Winston”>http://winstonchurchillfoundation.org/index.php?hide=1§ion=Scholars&type=php)</p>
<p>Religion at HC has always been/ and will be one of HC’s strongest departments. In the last 30 years, the head of Religion went from HC to lead Harvard’s Divinity School in the 1980s and, in the 1990s, Michael Sells left HC to go back to his alma mater U Chicago to head their department. Other than Prof Anne McGuire, who I can personally vouch for, I am not familiar with the new faculty but am confident from what I’ve read about their scholarship, HC’s tradition with its religion department will continue.</p>
<p>As a HC student, you are able to major at BMC and they are strong in several departments and are particularly noteworthy among even top LACs in the fields of art history, classics, geology and archeology. In addition, departments that are excellent between BMC and HC are made outstanding by the combined resources of both schools… back in the 90s, BMC had a lot of econ classes that focused on policy and global econ (while HC’s had/and it appears according to b@r1um has more business-type classes) so much so that my brother, at Swarthmore econ/math double major, took a semester at BMC to take some of these policy/ global econ classes and Japanese at HC because they were no offered at Swat at the time. For psychology, HC’s is behavioral based and BMC’s psych department focuses on developmental. </p>
<p>At LACs, because of their size and limited faculty #, the education you get also depends on the resources that the LAC is able to attract to come onto campus or allow students to get off campus to enhance their classroom learning. Given HC’s ideal location close to an major city and within the northeast corridor, HC/bi-co brings a huge # of impressive academics/scientists, policy makers, authors, artists, activists, current event makers onto campus. It’s much harder to attract such talent if your campus is not so ideally located. For something like the sciences, bringing in current major researchers onto campus and allowing students to talk to them is really a big deal in terms of a student’s development.</p>
<p>Finally, I’m sure you recognize this as well, but a college confidential “hot list” should not be a go-to guide regarding what schools have strong departments. Seriously, some of the stuff written on this site makes the milk in my AM coffee curdle :)</p>