Haverford College Top Questions

What sets Haverford apart from other colleges is our Honor Code. It allows the students, faculty, and administrators to all engage in conversation to make the college experience better, safer, and more enriching for everyone involved. The Honor Code creates an atmosphere of trust and respect at the college and creates a greater sense of community than any other college I visited. It creates an environment that is extremely conducive to success without the cut-throat competition to which many other high-ranking institutions are prone.

The honor code allows the administration to put more trust in students than at other institutions.

We have an honor code. There are no "rules" at this school, just a social and academic trust system.

Haverford has a consortium with Bryn Mawr College and Swarthmore College, so you can take classes and enjoy the social life at either one. Haverford students can also take classes at the University of Pennsylvania or enroll in the 3-2 engineering program we have with Caltech. These consortiums are really useful because they open up access to departments that Haverford does not have. For example, you can take Art History or Archeology at Bryn Mawr or go to Swarthmore for a more comprehensive linguistics program.

Jerks exist everywhere, sometimes you would rather bash your head into a wall than finish a problems set, you can be jealous at friends at party schools with 4.0 GPAs and you don't always like your professor. Still, life sucks sometimes but overall, I am glad I was there. Make sure you have fun.

There is no Theater Department at Haverford although there is one at Bryn Mawr. It is "Bi-Co" department so Haverfordians can act in the "Mainstage" productions as well as take Theater classes at Bryn Mawr. But theater as well as the arts in general really does suffer in the Bi-Co. It's a problem that gets talked about a great deal. There are often a few student-run shows per year, but they are very few and far between. We did just get a new performance space, a 55-seat theater in the basement of the dining center, with a lighting booth, curtains, backstage and speakers, but still, institutional backing for theater could be much stronger.

One of more the interesting things about Haverford is the guy/girl ratio. Although Haverford guys are only slightly outnumbered by Haverford girls, when you factor in Bryn Mawr (an all-girls school, five minutes away, buses run to and from there every ten minutes, any Bryn Mawr student can take classes at Haverford and vice-versa, etc), the ratio becomes about 4 girls to 1 guy. For straight men, this is good news. A disproportionate number of my straight male friends have girlfriends. For gay men and straight women, the dating environment is less hospitable. A couple of my gay male friends are really dissatisfied with the dating environment at Haverford. Because Haverford is such a small school and guys are so few, there's usually only around 15 out gay men at Haverford each year. And while there are many more straight men, many of them have girlfriends, so there's usually a bit of unfriendly competition between Haverford girls and Bryn Mawr girls over the remaining guys.

I love Haverford, but it is a small school and the students are very focused on academics. If you want to party a lot, this is probably not the place for you.

As a Fine Arts major, I feel terribly overlooked in terms of academics. There are few option in terms of classes, the major requirements are a joke, and the facilities are shabby. Yes, we are able to take classes at Penn, but with the numner of students at Penn already taking these classes and rigidness of each schools scheduling, it's nearly impossible. And the heads in the Fine Arts Department feel like you're giving them the finger if you try to take a class there.

It tries to be perfect and ideal, which helps improve things a lot, but Haverford is certainly not perfect, just like everywhere else, but maybe its closer than most. This perception of ideal though doesn't help when students assume it can be true and get disappointed/burned out. You just have to explore and definitely visit a college is you think it's right for you. It's not in the rankings or any guides, it's all about personal feel.