main concern about swarthmore

Colleges and Universities A-Z Swarthmore College
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<p>so i'm choosing between swarthmore and uchicago, and time's quickly running out. i'm definitely leaning towards swarthmore at this point, but i've got one pretty central concern: location. i already live in a small isolated college town, and for awhile i was unwaveringly certain that i would attend an urban school...i.e. i basically refused to consider any university/college not in a major metropolitan area. </p>

<p>i've obviously begun to get over this strong preference, but it's still a consideration. on the other hand, i love swat so much that i'm probably prepared to overlook the fact that the immediate town is depressingly small. for me the main redeeming quality is the relative accessibility of philly, an opportunity i'd like to take advantage of frequently. </p>

<p>and yet i'm still worried. how isolated is swarthmore, from the students' perspectives? how often does the typical swattie travel to philly? how suffocating is the swarthmore bubble? how overwhelmingly claustrophobic is the campus? do students find that swat is largely self-sufficient, or lacking in activity and monotonous? yes, these are shamelessly loaded questions. i'm just articulating the most extreme possible forms of my worries about the campus. thanks for your help and advice.</p>

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<p>While you are waiting for the students to chime in, let me say that I did not get an isolated feeling when I visited last weekend. There is a train station right at the bottom of campus, so Philly is a $10 RT away. The interstate is a quick hop, if you have a car. It feels much more suburban than isolated small town.</p>

<p>I thought the campus had a great feel, despite the fact that it was raining like all get out.</p>

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<p>yeah i absolutely loved the campus when i went for RTT and the proximity of the train station was pleasantly surprising. i was a bit worried that my favorable impression might’ve been related to the gorgeous weather…</p>

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<p>i think that the idea of swarthmore as isolated is relative to each person. i know people who go into philly every week, i know people who HAVEN’T gone into philly. the two main ways to get there are by train ($10.50 roundtrip) or by the philly shuttle (free, but you should book a space at least a day in advance!). i found myself going into philly 3 times a week at one point last semester, and now i go in about once a month. so that’s the logistical stuff – now for the more intangible, hard to tackle stuff.</p>

<p>the town of swarthmore sucks in my opinion. the co-op’s a sweet grocery store but that’s about all that the town offers me. target is about a 10 minute walk away, and there’s a shuttle that runs a few times a week to that as well. that being said, when the weather is nice you come to appreciate the suburban surroundings. philly’s nice but it’s not exactly pretty. aesthetics aside…</p>

<p>the reason why anyone would be driven (or… shuttled) to go into philly or get off-campus in the first place – is there anything going on during the weekends? (because i guarantee you, there is very little time/reason to go into philly, or to even go off campus, during the week… unless you’re not doing ANYTHING outside of your classes). swat has plenty going on on the weekends – parties, movies, shows and plays, concerts, talks… let me expand. olde club (concert venue – local and swat groups play there), the frats (we have two, they are friendly), paces parties (funded by SAC (student activities committee), hosted by lots of different groups around campus), movies being shown by the movie committee, different performances by the drama department, student-run shows, a cappella groups, rhythm n’ motion (awesome dance group), are staples events on the weekends in my opinion (though the a cappella concerts and RNM perform less frequently than how often parties and olde club concerts happen). we actually get people from bryn mawr and haverford (though less of the latter) who come to swarthmore on weekends. i’m not sure how much that tells you, but to me it says that at least people outside of swat think that we have vaguely interesting stuff going on :). that being said there have been maybe 3 weekends here where there was nothing going on that interested me – those were weekends where i knew that i wanted to go into philly. </p>

<p>you’ll go into philly based on what is going on (that may not interest you) or what might not be going on (though this is a much rarer occurrence, i assure you). personally, i’ve gone into philly for restaurant week (x2), for a lecture, and generally to get dinner or visit friends at penn. students are generally not going into philly EVERY weekend because there’s plenty going on around campus (plus ALL SAC funded events/everything except for pub nite on thursday are free. which is sweet). </p>

<p>so where does that leave us. you can go into philly as often as you want, it is nice to get off of campus every now and then. but swat is not so suffocating that you need to do so at every given opportunity.</p>

<p>hopefully this helps give you a better understanding of the issue.</p>

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<p>Swarthmore is hardly in the boonies. It’s an inside-the-beltway neighborhood, 11 miles from downtown, in a metro area of 5 million people. As far as top liberal arts college’s go, it’s one of the very few that provides easy access to major urban areas – not just Philly, but also NYC. I would say that my daughter went to NYC for a weekend probably once a semester while at Swarthmore.</p>

<p>Also, don’t discount the easy and cheap air fare out of Philly (20 minutes from campus). She also took advantage of cheapo airfares (Southwest and others), to visit friends in Atllanta and Miami and never spent more than $160 roundtrip to fly home to Boston.</p>

<p>I went to an isolated LAC and I believe that Swarthmore’s easy access to “the real world” is one of is major selling-points. Just getting away a couple times a semester makes all the difference.</p>

<p>Is it an urban campus? No. To me, it’s the best of both worlds. Beautiful suburban campus with easy access to major cites when there’s something you want to do.</p>

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<p>I am not sure where you are from, but it would be hard to beat Chicago as a college student. (I attended Northwestern years ago.) Chicago is just a world-class city, in a different league than Philadelphia. Hyde Park is sort of a world unto itself–a gorgeous campus that is urban but sort of protected. Yet it is just a 10-minute L ride downtown. I lived in Chicago for 11 years…it is just an amazing city.</p>

<p>I also hate to get into the “which is the better school” discussion but where else besides U of Chicago do you have Nobel prize winners teaching undergrads? I loved Northwestern but if I had known about U of Chicago I would have gone there in a heartbeat.</p>