Cornell, Hopkins, or Swarthmore?

College Search & Selection
1

I’m interested in Creative Writing and Linguistics (but mainly creative writing.)

I have been accepted to Cornell, Hopkins, and Swarthmore, and I’m trying to decide which one to attend. I have visited all their campuses; I like all three, each in their own way. Financially, all three colleges gave me comparable aid. Strange as it may sound, I think I could be a great fit for any of them.

So I’m wondering about the quality/prestige of their Creative Writing and English and Linguistics departments. Any input would be dearly welcomed! I have already some heard great things about both Cornell’s and Hopkins’ MFA programs.

(I would be a Tanner Dean’s scholar at Cornell. It’s not really a financial thing, but it will allow me to know the faculty better, to basically get assured funding for research, and maybe even to get an advantage when applying for fellowships and the such should I wish to do so. Part of my concern with Cornell was getting lost in the crowd, and this would help negate that. I would be a Bloomberg scholar at Hopkins, but that is purely financial.)

Edit: Emory and Vanderbilt are also options for me, but I would prefer somewhere Northern or coastal.

2

Cornell because you have the Tanner’s Deans Scholar thing going for you

3

JHU creative writing is stellar, but I’d probably still pick Swat, where it’s almost impossible to spend four years without getting very, very well educated.

4

I think it comes down to what experience you’re looking for in college. Cornell and JHU have over 21,000 students each…Swarthmore less than 1,600. Your intro classes at the larger schools will be larger than your entire class at Swat. I’m a big believer in Swat…but it is too small for some. For linguistics, keep in mind Swat is a heavy participant in the tri-co…so you’ll have access to Haverford and Bryn Mawr professors in the field.

5

Those numbers are a little misleading. It’s true that JHU has about 21,000 students total, but only about 6,000 undegrads (I didn’t realize they had so many grad students!). And many/most of the grad students are not on the main undergrad campus (and some of those undergrads aren’t either, apparently – I did a quick search, but couldn’t find exact numbers.) Cornell, on the other hand, has over 14,000 undergrads, and most of their students are on the same campus. Still, there’s obviously a difference in size between these schools – one small, one medium, and one large. That could be a significant factor.

6

They’re all very good for what you want.

Do you prefer the small size of Swat or the relatively larger campuses at Cornell and JHU?

Cornell and JHU offer a strong education, but few places are as rigorous as Swat. Do you want that and can you handle it?

JHU is urban, Cornell is rural, and Swat is suburban. Preference?

Swat is in the Quaker Consortium with Penn, Haverford and Bryn Mawr. Does cross-registration interest you?

You can’t make a wrong choice as long as you answer those (and other fit-related) questions honestly and then choose accordingly.

7

I would argue that JHU is more rigorous than Swat

8

For writing, a top 4 LAC like Swarthmore is pretty much the perfect situation.

9

@ThankYouforHelp Could you explain? Thanks.

10

At JHU, at least, the humanities are looked down upon by other students. Since all of the humanities are housed in one building, humanities students are viewed as less intelligent or less hardworking, and their isolation makes it difficult to prove to other students that these tumors simple aren’t true

11

Which school has the best outcomes for your program?

12

OP I don’t mean to disparage Hopkins, where you have found that its program is strong. I don’t know much about JHU. My comments are limited to Cornell and Swarthmore.

At Cornell you MIGHT have access to grad level writing classes. Not sure – you should look into it. The faculty is surely much larger than at Swarthmore. Ont he other hand you would have to compete with MFA grad students for professors’ attention. Then again – playing devil’s advocate – between students and profs you would meet more writers in terms of numbers. Don’t discount TAs automatically because the grad students of today are the connections you make for tomorrow.

However…There is always the possibility that you might decide to do a different major. You don’t even have to do a major in creative writing as an undergrad to get into an MFA program in creative writing. You mention linguistics. If there are other areas of study that you would like to pursue, it is conceivable that you complete significant coursework in other disciplines. For humanities my vote would go to Swat.

Writing is a career which can be difficult to “translate” into jobs. For undergrad yes, dive right in. But don’t close the door on other options (teaching? specialized/technical writing? journalism/media?) which you might explore later.

As others have pointed out, the settings are quite different! Yet you can see yourself being happy at any of these three schools. Do you have a gut feeling?

13

To clarify a few things about Hopkins:

The undergrad is 6500 students and nearly all undergrad students are located on the Homewood Campus except for a few hundred music students at the Peabody Conservatory about 5 minutes away by shuttle (additionally, the School of Nursing, School of Education, etc offer “undergrad” programs with a professional focus and students (mainly adults) take most of their coursework on site). Hopkins has a ton of graduate students, but they are all over the city of Baltimore at their respective campuses (School of Medicine, School of Nursing, School of Public Health, School of Education etc.) The grad students on the Homewood campus are for the various biological and chemical sciences, humanities, engineering and math, which is another 1800 students on campus. Many people don’t know this, but JHU is one of the largest providers of graduate and professional online courses in the country. As a result, about 5,000 of the 15,000 grad students are either online or on one of a few satellite campuses in California or Maryland. Anyway, goes to show that the Homewood Campus is clearly the undergraduate campus and is dedicated to the undergrad experience. While I was there the graduate students blend in and I never even noticed them except for their assistance in research lab courses and in the Introduction to Fiction and Poetry (IFP) course I took (which was the only grad student-led class I had).

While Hopkins calls Gilman the “Humanities Building”, there are many buildings where humanities courses are taught. Don’t forget that often the #1, #5, #6, #8, #9, and #10 most popular majors at the School of Arts and Sciences are International Relations, Economics, Writing Seminars (Creative Writing), Political Science, History and English, respectively. Hopkins may be known by the layman for the engineering and sciences, but it has a great mix of stellar and well-respected programs that undergrads (and grads) study. While there is a running joke that science/engineering majors look down on humanities majors (probably because humanities majors have higher GPAs and the job market does not reflect nearly as high a demand for many of these majors), you’ll find this view at most schools (most definitely at Cornell, which is another large premed powerhouse producing more premeds each year than Hopkins, albeit a slightly smaller amount per capita). Hopkins describes itself as a liberal arts school with significant amounts of “distribution requirements” for graduating that require students to take coursework outside their program focus. For example, I was a Neuroscience premed major and I ended up taking IFP I and II, a Philosophy course, two years of French and a half-dozen History of Art courses. I would hardly say that humanities majors are isolated since there were also a handful of science majors in these classes adding their perspective and experiences. Honestly though, who cares what ignorant, sleep-deprived people think of them? I would also add that most schools organize programs by department, so if we want to call this “isolating” then we should appreciate that this is the rule and not the exception.

Besides IFP, your courses will be almost exclusively taught by professors and you will have the option of taking grad courses with grad students if you’d like (most do). One of my best friends was a Writing Sems major and she thoroughly enjoyed the rigor of the program, the small courses (IFP will be the largest at about 20 students and afterwards most upper-levels are 5-15 students), and the access to professors (dinner with professors, open door policies etc.). The graduate MFA program is consistently in the top 10, which is especially impressive given the program was started in 2004 (much of this is due to the large funding the program receives which attracts stellar faculty and stellar grad students). While in IFP we had to attend readings by JHU and visiting faculty all the time, and I even remember speaking with James Franco who was working with a JHU professor, John Irwin, who specialized in the writing of Hart Crane. JHU is definitely a happening place for creative writing.

14

^ bump

Current info for OP and for other prospective creative writing students