@skieurope thanks. He likes Davidson and it’s also about 30 min from “the city”. Is there a town attached to Swat? Like a few streets to grab a burger or see a movie?
@homerdog Swarthmore Town itself is totally fine, and, hello there.
D19 and her mom visited Swarthmore in the “spring” (they got there after being bumped off two canceled flights and taking a connecting red-eye thanks to one of their March snowstorms). D19 visited Haverford (and a little bit of Bryn Mawr) on the same visit, and Swarthmore was D19’s least favorite. Campus/students seemed too stressful and (from my wife’s perspective) not nearly as friendly. Quickly dropped off her list. (Haverford remains.) [As always: personal impressions!]
My sense from their pictures and talking with them was that Swarthmore was definitely its own campus, but with a trainline literally at the edge of their campus, super easy to get into Philly proper. (Of course, pretty much the same thing can be said about Haverford and Bryn Mawr.) I think there’s a little bit of food, etc., but I’m guessing it’d be easier for a freshman to take a train into Philly itself to see a movie than to make their way into the rest of Swarthmore for a theater.
@BorgityBorg Oh no. The kids in the look book look friendly and fun. LOL!!! Guess advertising the stress isn’t a good move.
Good to know your family’s opinions for sure!
Just looked at our Naviance and it seems high stats kids here get waitlisted. And some kids with just a little bit lower stats get in. I’m betting they are athletes. Need to find out.
I will also note, @homerdog, that based on D19’s experience and other things I’ve read online, I think the two campuses (Swarthmore and Haverford) seem to have self-defined themselves under those stereotypes – the overworked Swat student and the not-as-overworked-as-Swat-but-still-hardworking Haverford student. Hard to tell how accurate those stereotypes are, but it seems like at least some of the students at both schools want to embrace them.
@homerdog (Class of 2020 parent lurking here!). We visited Swarthmore in the spring, great location and beautiful campus full of trees (they call their campus an arboretum), the train station to Philly is right outside the school, and it took about 25’, the stop in Phily is also walking distance to Amtrak station (we took the train).
Swarthmore students could take courses at UPenn, not sure how many students do that in reality but it is there. We stayed at the Inn at Swarthmore, giving discount to Swarthmore visitors and it has a very nice restaurant on site. Super quaint little town with a movie theater/coffee shop/ice cream place at the least, very friendly town folks there.
We didn’t feel the students there to be stressed or unfriendly. There was a current student (very mature junior double major with a minor kind of gal!) along with an AO at the info session, which is nice as the student would give her perspectives and made the info session more personal.
Small school though, even with the consortium, because the distance among the three schools (with shuttle bus), it might not be that practical to go to other colleges for classes. (My guess would be more students coming to Swarthmore from Haverford and Bryn)
Well this Swat discussion may all be for nothing. I just looked at the AOs schedule and they are coming to Chicago to visit schools but only to the city schools. I emailed our GC to see why they aren’t visiting our school. We have most of the top 30 universities visiting but our school doesn’t seem to make the cut for the top LACs outside the Midwest. Our poor GC. I’m such a pita.
LOL @homerdog I literally started my last email to my D19’s counselor with, “Hello, [name,] your favorite pest [my name] here.”
@JenJenJenJen Our poor GC is so calm and nice. I’m sure she is looking forward to my girls graduating this year. I had no clue how much GCs actually do until last year.
My S18’s GC emailed me and said, “I can’t wait to work with you and your son this year.” Then attached his schedule to the email. Ummm. Threw me for a loop. Either I became one of “those” parents or I’m paranoid and the GC is just on the ball.
Transcript requests are done by filling out a paper form at our HS and there is no procedure whatsoever for guidance counselor letters of recommendation. Yesterday S19 took all of his transcript requests and a list of the schools which require a letter from the guidance counselor up to the school and personally handed everything to his GC. GC said everything will be ready by the first day of school next week. I remain confused and frustrated how our highly ranked school district seems to be so far behind most other schools in use of technology (i.e. Naviance) that would make things easier for both students and staff.
@mindatwork I don’t know if the nontechnology would bother me. Transcripts required a paper form but were free when my D14 graduated. Then the district went to electronic transcripts which now cost $3 each. We don’t have Naviance, but I’m not sure of its usefulness for the average nonCC student/family. A good librarian can provide the resources for families through workshops that would rival Naviance. Something I plan to provide on my hs campus this year. Regarding the counselor LOR, on my kids’ campus, they must fill out an entire packet (parent questionnaire, student questionnaire, 3 teacher recs, student resume, and attach college apps) BEFORE the GC will write an LOR. Seriously. Getting a GCs LOR is harder than 9 of the 11 college apps for S19. Technology doesn’t make the grass greener.
Proud Swarthmore alum here. The campus is an arboretum, a living garden, maintained by the Scott Horticultural Foundation. The founders of Scott are Swarthmore alums. The regional train line, SEPTA, has a station on one of the far edges of campus. It’s about a 30-minute ride into 30th Street (where Penn is), and a bit further to Center City (the “downtown” area). The school is very small, with super small classes. It offers an extremely unique honors program, consisting of seminars in the major and minor. These often meet at professors home, involve rotating study-break goodies provided by students, and are seldom more than 5-7 students. There are no grades. The program ends with final exams, written and oral, prepared and administered by outside professors from other elite colleges. While Swarthmore has a reputation for being high stress, I did not find it to be any more so than any other elite college I have been over the years. There are always students who are just short of the deep end, but there are plenty of students there for a well-rounded college experience. Swarthmore is not known for athletics, but it has an enthusiastic DV3 program (the Garnet), and an active intramural program. If anyone has specific questions about the school, please feel free to ask on this thread or to PM me.
I thought Swarthmore was beautiful and my S18 really enjoyed the class he sat in on during our visit. What put us off was the repeated insistence during the admissions presentation that no one worried about grades and you could take as many courses pass/fail as you wanted, when that evidently wasn’t the reality (a friend’s daughter attends and that has been her biggest bugbear too). IMO it’s fine to be an intense/pressured environment, but a college should own it like Chicago, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
@homerdog, my daughter is a current student at Swarthmore and loves it. Yes, the workload is heavy but everyone is in the same boat. She loves her classes, gets off campus to the “ville” and hops on the train to Philly occasionally. She likes the mix of students, all of whom are very academically serious and curious. She does not find the stress culture too heavy, and she finds that her fellow students are motivated by more than grades
Common App Activities question :
Does this year’s Summer activities count as 12th grade or 11th grade (during school break)?
I think it is for 12th grade since he is a rising senior and finished with his junior year in May, but he is putting them as 11th grade school break.
@payn4ward Although your son’s inclination to indicate this summer’s activities as 11th grade seems logical to him and many other students, I believe you are correct in advising that the 12th grade box should be checked. I have read this online from several sites:
"If you participated in an activity over the summer between grade levels, choose the rising or later grade level (e.g., the summer between 10th and 11th grades should be listed as “11th grade”).
I am sure, though, that many students complete it the same as your son. I doubt it makes any difference to admissions.
Back from our New England college visit road trip.
To say that it was rainy the day we had scheduled to tour Yale would be an insane understatement. It was a gullywasher. Tropical. There were bouts of clear skies, but on the whole it felt like we ought to have brought wetsuits. My husband and I opted to stay in the admin office and read books while the kiddo ventured out to see the campus. Despite the rain, the kid still loves the place and wants to spend his EA bullet there. Husband is less happy about it. The day after we were there there was an incident right off of campus where 76 people got overdoses of some synthetic drug. And yet the kid still wants to go there. Shrug, we will still let him apply.
Yale bookstore got 7/10. It had some good selections, but it was tough to reach some shelves and there was no comfortable seating or cafe.
Wesleyan was our second visit, and the conditions couldn’t have been more different. It was clear and breezy in the morning though it grew hot later in the afternoon. We had a very, very good tour guide, a lovely bubbly film major from Georgia who is going to go far in life. When I visited Wesleyan 35 years ago on my own college tour, I never even got out of the car. The arts buildings are a series of concrete blocks and I still think they’re immensely ugly and weigh down the rest of the campus. Kiddo thought that they looked cool, go figure. He loved the library and the performance spaces and the sledding hill. He had previously been ‘meh’ about the college, but I found out this morning that he had been writing all the way home, and now he has a short story to submit for the Hamilton Scholarship. It’s not #1, but it’s shot up to a clear #2.
Wesleyan bookstore got 8/10. Good selection, great cafe, comfy seats, a good discount section (though that may be because the semester is just about to start). Docked them points for not actually being on campus otherwise it would have been my perfect college bookstore.
Brown was another nice but hot day, pretty campus. Kiddo loves the artwork all around campus, enjoyed the performance spaces. All of the tour guides were STEM kids, but kiddo found another theatre kid on the tour and they forced the guide to tell them about theatre opportunities. My husband and I got into a great conversation with a guy who works at one of the libraries on campus. We had an amazingly nice lunch at a Korean fried chicken place.
Brown bookstore got 8/10. Not technically on campus but very close, coffeeshop in the store, good discount section (although, again, that may be because school is about to start).
We were scheduled to tour Tufts as our last college on the list, but I’m afraid that they were a victim of their placement on the itinerary. We got to campus and found a parking spot. I got out, my husband got out. The kid didn’t get out. Kiddo said, " Do we really have to do this tour? I am never going here, my legs would kill me." Back to the car and spent the day at Salem instead.
On the car ride up, kiddo is checking his email and finds an application fee waiver from Fordham. “Can I apply there?” he asks. I told him that they were an audition-only theatre program and he said, “That’s OK, I don’t mind doing one audition.” So this ‘free’ application is going to cost me a trip to NYC to do the audition. Wonderful.
@ninakatarina I read about that incident in New Haven. Those people didn’t know what they were smoking. Its sounds like they thought they were smoking pot and then it was laced with K2. It’s a good reminder. I tell our kids all of the time that doing any sort of drug is a risk. You have NO idea what’s really in any pill or pipe.
There is only 1 time where we allowed our son to skip out on a college visit. S19 was invited to an elite football camp, where all of the Ivy League football coaches evaluate the players. Anywhoo, players had the option of touring the hosting university after the football camp. Well the football camp was 4 hours of grueling football practice in 95 degree weather. Kids were throwing up, being treated for heat exhaustion…it was not pretty. By the time the players finished, they could barely make their way up the hill to the car to change out of their sweaty clothes, let alone participate in a 11/2 - 2 hour campus tour. My son turned to me and his dad and asked if we could reschedule the tour and apologized to us for being so tired. He obviously had nothing to apologize for. We told him…not a problem. Other than that, if we have made plans to travel, then the visit goes on. It is non-negotiable…even when his blood sugar was acting up (he’s Type 1). We simply corrected the issue and pressed on because that’s what he will have to do at college anyways. All of the campus visits have been invaluable as we have learned something new at each one. My husband and I definitely lean towards small colleges that provide a personal touch, gave us a private family tour, where professors stopped what they were doing to talk with our son, and where AOs or financial aid has sat down with us. The large schools that drove us around in golf carts while pointing at the various buildings…make us cringe. Our son leans towards private Christian schools that have that D1 football program and school pride factor. But without visiting 11 schools, he probably would have still been stuck on UCLA.