<p>I applied RD this year and was rejected, as at pretty much most of the places I applied to.</p>
<p>Anyhow I am really interested in Swarthmore and I was planning to apply ED this year, for fall 2006. I think I'm in a better position to articulate why exactly I want to go to Swarthmore - and having been through the process once, put in a better application overall.</p>
<p>I might also enroll at a college here meanwhile. But when I apply I would probably have had say 2-3 months of college. I can apply for freshman admission, right?</p>
<p>Any comments on taking a gap year, intl/ED/finaid, etc. highly appreciated</p>
<p>How should I talk about it in my app? I guess I must be able to convey that I have used and plan to use the time in a worthwhile manner</p>
<p>Could college-level intro courses in engineering be a hook? ;)</p>
<p>"I can apply for freshman admission, right?"</p>
<p>I would e-mail the admissions and find out for sure. As hard as it is to get in as a freshman, it is much easier then to transfer. Also, they might not accept your credits from the other school if they do let you apply as a freshman. I don't know, how important it is to you.</p>
<p>ED might be tricky for an international with a need for fin. aid. Some schools don't take ED apps from internationals unless they agree in writing to pay full tuition all four years. I am not sure how Swarthmore handles this issue.</p>
<p>If you take a year off, use it to pursue something you are really "into". You can take classes of course, but maybe try finding something you would not have been able to do if you started college this year.</p>
<p>Good luck, I hope things will work out for you in the future.</p>
<p>I am sure that Swarthmore gives aid to foreign students applying ED because Abhay (on CC) applied EDII and got in with financial aid. And there were others too.</p>
<p>There is a young woman my son knows who got rejected from Swat in 2007. She decided that Swat was the only school for her, so she took a gap year, worked for an environmental non-profit and then reapplied. She got in. So I don't think they look at it negatively.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, what do you think? I am bumping this thread, Astrix is a great candidate and too bad he did not get into Swarthmore. This has been a brutal year of admissions in the US elite colleges.</p>
<p>astrix,
I think re-applying as a freshmen is probably the best way. </p>
<p>Not only that transfer admission to Swarthmore is extremely hard and unpredicatble, but Swarthmore also does not accept International students who are applying as transfer student and need fin aid.</p>
<p>Best Luck and your passion to swarthmore will pay off :)</p>
<p>I don't feel that I understand international admissions at all. </p>
<p>From everything I can tell, international admissions operates as a totally separate track and nothing that we think we know about domestic admissions is relevant.</p>
<p>My sense is that international admissions centers around a small number of feeder schools around the world in same sort of "arranged marriage" system as the most elite US boarding schools. But, as soon as I think I understand that, nobody from the feeder school in Katmandu, Nepal was accepted to Swarthmore this year after averaging two or three per year as far back as I can find. Why? </p>
<p>So, all I really think is, "I don't know." That's why I am reluctant to offer advice on international admissions. There are just too many issues (funding, for example) that may come into play. I try to steer the international kids to experts in the field, ideally guidance counselors from their school who understand the game. Failing that, all I can really do is recommend a dialog with Swarthmore's International Admissions adcom.</p>
<p>i find some merit in your theory of feeder schools. top of my mind:</p>
<p>DPS RK Puram, New Delhi, India
Raffles Junior College, Singapore
United World Colleges..</p>
<p>that could play against me since i'm from a school that hasn't seen any applicant to the US as far as i know</p>
<p>ETA: hmm no actually, i know many people who've gotten in from schools other than the well known ones, but definitely no intl from a school that hasn't seen any applicant so far.</p>
<p>Astrix, my feeling is that, these are feeder schools only by virtue of the fact that kids from there know enough to apply. I don't think there is a 'I'm your golf buddy' kind of relationship between the international adcom and the GC. The reason I say that is, Abhay (who is from Buddhilanka) said he did not know if his GC knew anything. Abhay was as much in the dark as any kid from abroad.</p>
<p>And his (Abhay's) anxiety level was high as well. I think Buddhilanka has kids going to elite universities but that's not a function of the school per se (aka golfing buddies) but more a function of who goes to those schools and how much these kids know.</p>
<p>it really is about the exposure as you say, i had to spend loads of time figuring out how to go about the whole thing (and got myself addicted to cc in the process!)</p>
<p>i just emailed stacey kutish, the intl adcom. will post update.</p>
<p>My mistake. I misread the Swarthmore press release. There were four students from Nepal accepted this year (and I would be willing to bet they were all from the Buddhilanka School).</p>
<p>I didn't mean that the feeder school admissions result from a "golfing buddy" relationship. Rather, I think it's more a function of a track record that makes it easy for adcoms to have confidence in the students from those schools. Not that other schools wouldn't provide equally strong students, but there simply isn't a mechanism for an easy evaluation.</p>
<p>As a comparision. Nobody from my daughter's high school had ever gone to (or even applied to) Swarthmore as near as I could tell. However, it is a pretty simple exercise for the regional adcom to pull up the list of Mass. high schools and see where her school ranked by SATs or MCAS testing. So even though Swat had never taken a student from her school, I'm sure they have taken students from many other essentially identical Mass. schools, so it wasn't a big leap of faith.</p>
<p>The number of kids accepted from overseas schools is so small that it's easy to fill those slots from schools the adcoms already know. And, on the flip side of the equation, those schools know the colleges.</p>
<p>Astrix: I think you can probably be successful initiating a dialog about your situation with the international adcom at Swarthmore, although it may have to wait until the admissions season dies down a bit come May 1st. I would recommned taking the approach that the international admissions process is so difficult to understand that you are just looking for some honest guidance, regarding your application and reasonable steps for the future.</p>
<p>yes, I agree about asking the international adcom for guidance. I think that also sets him up as someone who is very very interested in Swarthmore - which he is.</p>