Swarthmore College Top Questions

In small classes professors will know your name, and class participation is a large part of grades in most classes.

yeah, most of my professors knew my name, i wasn't close with all of them. my favorite class ever was probably evolution or my food class. my least favorite might have been statistics or developmental psychology. i studied constantly but it seemed like people had varying work patterns. some people procrastinated constantly, some worked all the time, some just blew everything off. class participation was definitely very involved, i can remember only one class where everyone was apathetic, and that was the professor's fault. oh, you can't shut a student up about intellectual crap, so the answer to that is yes. hmm, i'd say individual students were competitive but it was generally acknowledged that you were competing against yourself and your own expectations. i took one class that had only TWO PEOPLE in it - literature of dissent. that was pretty awesome and unique. i was a special double major in psychology and biology, i now wish i had just majored in bio and done a lot more neuro. the psychology dept. isn't very good. a lot of our professors had optional study sessions or such and i went to those a lot. i think swat's academic requirements are fine. i'd say the education is more for education's sake than about providing practical background, but a lot of employers want an employee with the varied background and writing skill that comes from a liberal arts education.

My professors all know my name, which is great! They really care about the success of each of their students in the classroom. Students study A LOT (you have to if you want to do well in your classes). Depending on the class, participation varies, but overall, there is a good amount of participation. Yes, people have intellectual conversations outside of class (often they carry over from class). Students are not really that competitive, which is a nice change from high school. The most unique class I have taken was a first year seminar entitled "Battling Against Voldemort."

I have actively known a number of my professors, some I would even call my friends. There is so much respect for students here, it's hard not to feel the same for the professors who pick this environment. We study a lot, and it can be your life if you want it to be, but it hasn't been mine and I've done well here. Grades are not something I discuss with anyone in specifics because that's not what my classes are about and comparing myself to anyone else is completely useless. Swarthmore fosters a sense of academia that I don't feel like I want to continue in after graduation, but it has been a great learning experience.

All of my professors know my name. My class size has ranged from 6 to about 100, which is as big as classes get. My least favorite class was Into to Peace Studies - I just didn't feel that it was taught well, and the material was too abstract. Theories about peace.. come on! My favorite classes are all tied: World Texts and the Critic, an English class about globalization; Reason, Power and Happiness, an intro polisci/philosophy seminar; and Intro to Education. Students are generally not competitive. Swat doesn't calculate GPAs or have class rank, so it's pretty hard to compare yourself to other people anyway. Students study a lot - maybe 2 to 3 hours a day for me usually, more if I have a paper or a test. However, it's the extracurriculars that eat up most of my time. Students have tons of intellectual conversations outside of the classroom. I would say that one of the defining characteristics of Swat is how much students want to take academics into the real world. I'm a double major: Honors English Literature and Women's Studies. The English department is kind of stinky because it doesn't really offer enough classes for the size of the department. They offer tons of First Year Seminars, which are only for freshman and thus not very helpful for me right now. Women's Studies is interdisciplinary and in the process of switching to being called Gender and Sexuality Studies, so it's kind of in a disorganized inbetween place, but I don't mind. The Swarthmore education is not geared toward getting a job or learning for its won sake. I would say the education is mostly about making change in the world, whether thats through doing Physics research, going into politic or being a teacher, or whatever. People don't come here to get the credentials to go right into a professional job - almost all students go to grad school. However, the learning isn't just for fun. Swatties are very dedicated to doing something with what they know. Swarthmore's academic requirements can be a little annoying if you already have a very specific focus. I hate science and math, so I wasn't thrilled that I had to take three credits in one of those departments. I took Genetics, Statistics, and Physics, which weren't too hard, but I still would rather have devoted those credits to something else. Still, there's no core curriculum, which is nice, and Swat basically just tries to get you to take a variety of things and explore your interests.

The rumors are true: Academics are strong and difficult at Swarthmore. Students spend a lot of time working for classes, but I think most people enjoy it. Even though people always complain about how much work there is, I think most students are interested in what they're working on, especially once they get into their majors. I know that all of my classes this semester are incredibly interesting to me. So, even though I bitch about the amount of reading and the papers piling up, I am honestly interested in what I'm learning about. I'm taking 3 classes for my Sociology/Anthropology-Education major right now, and I really enjoy each of them. Two of the courses are on the larger side, with about 30 students, while the other has 12 students for a seminar. My fourth class, Social Psychology, is a lecture with about 80 students, so I have a wide range of class dynamics this semester. They're all good in their own way. The lectures in social psych are interesting and entertaining, and the large class size means that there are tons of people to study with. The 30-ish classes give small groups opportunities for discussion and presentations, which allow you to get to know people in this larger class. They provide a good combination of lecture and group discussion. Finally, the seminar gives me an opportunity to really think critically on my feet. It's a challenge, but it's also an awesome chance to get to know the students and the professor. Professors at Swat work really hard to get to know each of their students. Even in the 80+ person lecture, my social psych professor tries to remember students' names, and he's getting pretty good. Plus, at such a small school, you see your professors outside of the classroom. Although it can be startling to see your professor at the gym, it does give you a unique opportunity to interact in a non-academic setting, which is really cool. Swarthmore boasts having an "ethical education" meaning that you learn about life and how to address issues of social change in addition to learning about academia. I think they can do a better job of this, but there are definitely aspects of this in a lot of courses. For me, it was most clear in one of my first year seminars called Social Change and Social Responsibility. It was an awesome class that really made me think about the different avenues of creating social changes in different communities. On a different note, Swat's requirements are pretty reasonable. They aren't too much, and they give you a good opportunity to learn about different subjects.

Swarthmore has all the benefits of a small liberal arts college: super-small classes, professors that are invested in teaching (as opposed to solely their own work), and lots of individual attention. Professors are super-available at office hours and really do develop personal relationships with their students. I think that something unique to Swarthmore (as opposed to other LACs) is that professors are super-appreciative of the fact that their students are invariably really smart and really nerdy, and therefore are particularly fond of their students. There are people who study A LOT at Swarthmore. My friends in the natural sciences, in particular, seemed to spend most of their waking hours working on problem sets or in the labs. As a humanities major with the ability to read fast, I didn't spend the majority of my time studying, but definitely a couple hours every day, and a couple of all-weekend sessions when a big paper was due (this happened maybe twice a semester). Do Swarthmore students have intellectual conversations outside of class? Oh, and do they. This is one of the big reasons why I ended up at Swat, and was not disappointed - though I was sometimes sort of overwhelmed by it. Ultimately it's a good thing, but there's definitely no escaping it. One of the secret things about Swarthmore is that students are - at least in my experience and that of my friends - emphatically NOT competitive, at least not with each other. People work very hard and often have ridiculously high expectations for themselves, but there's not a sense of having to be best in the class or compete for the best GPA. The learning environment is very collaborative, students study together and want to help each other. The one exception to this is the Honors Program: this optional cumulative experience gives each student a final, and very public, grade (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors). This was my one taste of competitiveness among friends and colleagues, and while the Honors experience was worth it in certain other ways, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Academics at Swarthmore are incredible---for the person who wants to be an academic. My main interest is social theory, so I am all set, but I know people who want to know how to make films, or how to organize laborers, or how to run a business and they do not get these skills from Swarthmore. Is the education at Swarthmore geared toward getting a job? Nothing could be less true. You learn the most useless things possible at this school. Of course you can major in Computer Science, Engineering, or Education, or you can attend grant-writing workshops, or you can learn a language, or complete the pre-med or pre-vet requirements, but otherwise you will have to rely on your privilege, connections, and wits to get a non-menial job after graduation. Swarthmore students do have intellectual conversations outside of class, but like most of the "intellectual" conversations held between educated people, they are pretty paltry and basically amount to a lot of grandstanding and pretension. Don't come here thinking you'll have a bunch of really enlightening conversations. You will read a bunch of really enlightening books and meet a bunch of really incredible people, but those two worlds don't really intersect.

Most of the professors I've taken classes with so far are extremely approachable. They make themselves very available to their students. For larger classes, students just have to take the extra effort to go during the professor's office hours to form a more personal connection with the professor. I'm on a first-name basis with most of my professors, which was weird for me at first, but I've gotten used to it. Students study whenever they can make time. When students aren't busy committing to some extracurricular activity, they're probably studying. Even if there's nothing immediate to get done, I think most students feel guilty and find some form of work to do. Although the atmosphere feels far from competitive, the fact that everyone is always working makes one think he/she is doing something wrong when he/she is not. I usually feel like I'm falling behind or something. Swarthmore's academic atmosphere is far more intense than it is at most schools. I've spent time with a few professors outside of class. I had a professor during my freshman year that has been playing Ultimate since graduate school. After speaking with her about it, we decided to play on the same summer league while I was doing research on campus. When I took Japanese, the professors always had fun things for us to attend and practice our Japanese. For example, every Thursday, there was a "language table" set up in the dining hall for students who wanted to practice Japanese. There were also frequent Japanese film viewings and a skit performance at the end of every semester. At the end of the year, the class gathered together and followed directions in Japanese to cook a meal of curry rice, and then ate together. I occasionally run into my drill professor in the dining hall. Running into her feels like running into an old friend.

Academics are the strength of Swat. Professors are consistently good and even when they're not "good" they're probably a lot better than professors elsewhere. Students are not overly competitive and it's very much an individual challenge to do well in class. Swarthmore classes are intense but not cutthroat. Some intro classes are not too bad but there are a large group of classes offered that require you to study more than you ever thought you would've had to. And if you're an honors major, then you can expect even more. A word should be put in about Swarthmore's small size and it's openness to student-professor contact. There are a few professors here that I see at work until midnight every day and who come in regularly on the weekends. They are literally always around. Every professor has office hours for students to come see them, and even outside of those hours students can usually drop in whenever they want and talk about class. This is, after all, what distinguishes a small liberal arts college from a huge state school.