Swarthmore, Brown, Pomona, or Amherst?

dchow08
Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:59:12 +0000

It seems like Swarthmore fits most of your criteria. Let’s take a look. Swarthmore’s definitely liberal arts, and people here do care about learning because they enjoy it–people here take their work seriously, which is a pretty big change from my high school. One of the nice things here is that grades are de-emphasized; actually I don’t know any of my grades right now. I’ve heard that Swarthmore’s good for biology, but I’m not interested in majoring in it and I don’t know what’s particularly good about Swarthmore’s biology department. I am in Intro to Bio, however, and I was told by my sister who went to the Univ. of Washington that the lab reports we do here are of higher caliber than the ones she did there–the bio department here, I think, emphasizes strong writing and critical thinking skills. For example, we write rough drafts and meet up with Writing Associates to polish our work, and we try to make our writing high quality.
I also don’t know about those particular fields that you mentioned, but for astrobiology, a good person for you to talk to is Amy Cheng Vollmer–maybe you can find her e-mail on the Swarthmore biology homepage.
About Swarthmore’s location, I think it’s actually quite isolated. There is the Ville, but that’s really nothing and the mall is nothing to be proud of. There are houses around, though, so it’s possible to take walks around the neighborhood if you want to. You can go to Philly; most people I think go every few weeks or so. Social life definitely revolves around campus, though. It’s not a college town.
Yes, professors are devoted to teaching undergrads, and that’s pretty amazing on its own. You probably won’t get very many extremely formal teachers–think 3-piece black suit–but they’re still great. Lots of research in bio, I think. Not overly intellectual.