<p>She sounds like a delightful young lady. I hope you will encourage her to aim high. Very high.</p>
<p>Bryn Mawr is the gold standard when it comes to Classics in this country. Your D is definitely on the right track. Princeton is absolutely first-rate as well. Be a little wary of the political/ideological bent of some schools that push Classics. It can be a Trojan Horse (couldn't resist) for a conservative bent. Which is fine if you are comfortable with that.</p>
<p>When researching last year, I was also very impressed with Harvard and Duke in terms of their classics departments. Duke's has a fabulous library and an affiliation with UNC Chapel Hill with a strong archeology emphasis.</p>
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<p>Good one! Bryn Mawr is very high on her list, as is Barnard. But who knows if she can get admitted or we can afford. She visited Seton Hall and liked it a lot. Her head was turned by the Museum Studies master's there. A lot of kids who did undergrad at "better" schools were there for the master's. I'm not sure what to make of that either, though. She liked Seton Hall, but we've heard that's not the best reputation. We're going to visit Catholic because it was on the list of top classics programs along with schools like Bryn Mawr, et al. You've all been so kind and helpful.</p>
<p>I'm putting this out there though don't know how useful it will be. I don't know that many people whose life goal is to be a museum curator, but one of my good college friends wanted to do just that. Her interest was in art history, not classics and that was her undergrad major. When she talked to her professors and to people at museums they told her to go on and get her PhD in Art History rather than museum studies - they said that if she wanted to curate shows she'd do more of what she liked as a guest curator than as the museum side person. She now teaches art history (in Michigan) and has put on several shows that I know of (mostly here in NYC musuems). For each show she's also put out a book.</p>
<p>Another area from which museum curators can emerge is anthropology. The theory and design of museums is currently something of a hot anthropology subspecialty.</p>