Schools for Classics and/or Ancient History

bclintonk
Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:34:23 +0000

I think Bryn Mawr and Haverford are well worth considering; their combined resources in classics are excellent, and whichever you’re enrolled in it’s very to cross-register for classes at the other school—in fact, it’s a unified course registration system, no bureaucratic hassles, no extra paperwork. They’re only about a mile apart, there’s a regular shuttle service running between the two campuses, and your campus ID will even swipe you into the dining halls on either campus. And if that’s not enough, Penn is a 20-minute train ride away, and Swarthmore about a 25-minute shuttle away; they’re all part of a larger consortium. So that makes for a really extraordinary concentration of resources, but with the personalized attention of a small LAC.



warblersrule:

In fact, a field like classics is one of the instances in which I would recommend some publics along with smaller private schools. While it’s all too easy to fade into the background in political science or biology at many medium and large schools, even the largest universities tend to have relatively few majors and small classes in programs like classics and geology.



I totally agree. I majored in philosophy at Michigan and had top professors teaching small classes, including classes at the graduate level by my junior and senior years. It’s completely the opposite of the stereotype of the large, impersonal public university with mega-lectures and TAs doing half the teaching. I know it’s the same in Classics at Michigan which actually has fewer undergraduate majors than philosophy. And to be honest, apart from the majors and some grad students, you’re just not going to get a lot of non-majors enrolling in that advanced Latin poetry class to round out their distribution requirements. So it ends up being a pretty intimate group, with small classes and an extraordinarily low student/faculty ratio.