<p>Hi guys,</p>
<p>I just thought I’d respond to some of the comments here so far:
- I still do not think my review was extremely negative; I think it’s pretty much as accurate as I can make it, given my less than one semester here. My review 3 years from now probably won’t be the same as it is now.
- Yes, I still think the weather is too sunny (It’s November, gosh darn it!).
- I don’t necessarily think the financial aid people here are corrupt–I mentioned in the review that I’ve never really talked to the administration. My point was that the students who are active in this kind of stuff–Students for a Democratic Society, for instance–might. You can sort of get a sense of this when you read the fliers that have been posted on Parrish Hall–a lot of them say stuff like, “I can’t afford their financial aid,” or “It’s really upsetting to see people much smarter than I am having to leave Swat because they can’t afford it,” or “The financial aid office made me want to cry.” In other words, a lot of the fliers paint the picture that the financial aid office is cruel to students–you didn’t see many positive remarks about the financial aid office. But, haven’t the students considered that this is a private college, and private colleges and universities are generally more expensive than public ones? Or the fact that the average student aid package per year is somewhere like $30,000 (something like that)? Or just consider that they should be grateful that Swarthmore, for its being the 3rd-highest ranked liberal arts college in the country according to USNWR, and 4th best college/university according to Forbes (both of which aren’t necessarily accurate), generally is more generous than a lot of other schools? In other words, a lot of students have to face the reality–just because you get accepted doesn’t mean that your family can afford it. So, the point was not that I thought the financial aid office was corrupt (in fact, I am grateful that the financial aid this first year was so generous), but that the students who do such things might paint a picture that basically shows them as the good guys and the financial aid people as the bad guys, rather than listening and absorbing what the financial aid people have to say about it, and going from there.
Or the people who basically just listen to Obama’s speeches and not McCain’s–in other words, people who don’t consider both sides.</p>
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<li><p>I don’t think I ever said in my review that I don’t like the students. There are students here whom I don’t like–that’ll happen at wherever I go, even if I transfer. It’s not a huge population yet. It’s more that I don’t like those students’ approach to solving problems, e.g. the fliers in Parrish. I don’t know these students personally. There are people who think they’re superior to pretty much everyone in the school, however; I tend not to like them very much.</p></li>
<li><p>About the “world class education”: I’m not sure whether I’m getting a world class education, but I think I’m close to getting one, if I am not. I said in the review that other students might not think that they’re getting a world class education, and I was referencing one of the reviewers on the website, who said that he/she didn’t think he/she was getting a world class education. And I said that that opinion may have arisen because lots of people tend to associate world class education with a big university, or somewhere like UCLA, or Harvard, or Yale, of the University of Chicago, or Oxford, or Cambridge. My point was that the education people get at Swarthmore might be the same, might even be better than what they’re getting at the other places, but students might not feel that way because they’re not in a big university setting, and so it doesn’t feel like they’re getting a really outstanding education.</p></li>
<li><p>About the popularity: Yes, perhaps I should have gone into more detail about that. One of the suggested questions on the website was “What kind of people wouldn’t fit in at Swarthmore?”, and I thought about some people in my high school who probably wouldn’t fit in here, and most of the people I thought of were popular in my high school. Not because they were popular, but because
(a) they generally didn’t care that much about learning–for example, they were perfectly willing to cheat, and cared more about their grade in calculus than learning the Fundamental Theorem of it,
(b) they weren’t as hard working as people here tend to be–in other words, they’d probably get sick of all the work that’s required (provided they take a standard course load), and would want to transfer,
(c) they probably would not want to be in the Swarthmore bubble; they’d really like to hang out all over the city during the weekends, which is possible, but not all the time, especially if you have lots of work,
(d) they wouldn’t like the small size of the school, and are probably looking for a much larger university, and it is true that a lot of the popular people at my high school did end up going to places like the Univ. of Washington, Northeastern University, a UC school, Western Washington University, places like that. </p></li>
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<p>And so I was making a gross generalization, which was that popular people in generally are like the people I described above–what I really meant was the popular people in my high school probably wouldn’t like Swarthmore. If your kids are popular but are smart and love learning (braniac), then Swat might be fine, but I do want to mention that a lot of people here probably weren’t that popular (the popular ones would not be at Swarthmore), and that on average, people here probably don’t know how to interact with other people as much. That’s why I said, “Some of my high school friends really would feel out of place here–among them, pretty much all the popular kids in high school. You’ve really got to enjoy learning and be willing to work very hard to like it here, I think, because that’s largely what Swarthmore’s about, based on my not-even-one semester here.”</p>
<p>Okay, I hope that clarifies some things.</p>
<p>Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!</p>