<p>"collegialmom" - </p>
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<li><p>the people make the place. the people i met at swarthmore are, collectively, by far the most intelligent and interesting people i've met in my life. the professors, also are outstanding, and really care about how you're doing (this isn't universal, and there do exist a handful of bad professors. or, at least, ones i didn't get along with.) academically speaking, swarthmore breaks you before putting you back together - i've alluded to this in my previous posts, and while it's not particularly pleasant to go through at the time, the outcome is certainly worth it. </p></li>
<li><p>the most negative experience at swarthmore was getting screwed in the housing lottery and being forced to live in mary lyons basement (pre-renovation) my sophomore year. this i blame on the administration, since they've been pretty sneaky about increasing enrollment. interesteddad can spit statistics at me telling me that i'm wrong, but the housing situation got worse every year, with spillover into strath haven my junior year and many juniors being forced to take doubles my senior year. the administration isn't exactly as clean as they'd like to think they are (though i agreed with the eventual decision, i have to admit that the football cut was also a bit underhanded.)</p></li>
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<p>3/4. i actually didn't do the honors program. i majored in philosophy, which allowed me to take four honors seminars (it's a less popular major than, say, political science, where you're out of luck if you want to take the more popular seminars and aren't honors. a lot of students actually declare honors and then drop it at the last possible moment just so they can get the classes that they want). i took the seminars, and took two oral exams with professors in the department (which were less confrontational than they would have been with external examiners). why didn't i do honors? just didn't feel like it, honestly. i'm a little tired of my song and dance where i proclaim how philosophy is a great major that, more than anything, teaches you how to think, and how it's a wonderful preparation for just about anything. does it have any direct application to what i'm doing now? no. will it ever have any direct application to what i'm doing, unless it's being a philosophy professor? probably not. but, like i said, i think it was a great major, the department is outstanding, and i'm glad to have done it.</p>
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<li><p>the answer to your serious question also happens to be none of your business - i don't really feel like commenting on exactly how i did or did not manage to have sex with my girlfriend in spite of having a roommate. also, you're either asking because you want to provide tips to your son/daughter on how to get around having a roommate (which is creepy) or you're hoping that it's difficult and you need reassurance. college kids, even at swarthmore, even those in SWIL (particularly those in SWIL, actually) are going to have sex. no matter what, your son/daughter is going to find a way - swarthmore students are outstanding at creative and intelligent solutions to complex problems like this. (re-reading this, i don't mean this to sound as harsh as it does.)</p></li>
<li><p>for a long time, swarthmore and chicago were 1 and 1a on my list. i wound up getting into chicago, being waitlisted at swarthmore (as was somewhere around 30% of the class of 2004, actually - three of us in my freshman quad got in off the waiting list), and accepting at nyu. had i not gotten into swarthmore, and gone to nyu instead of chicago, i think that would've been a mistake. going to swarthmore was far from a mistake, and i'd do it again in a heartbeat.</p></li>
<li><p>the thought of transferring never even crossed my mind. even when it was a living hell (five and a half credits junior fall) i knew it was the best place for me. </p></li>
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<p>interesteddad - you can doubt all you want that ten students at swarthmore know the per student endowment, but the fact is that "it's just not something that's really on the radar screen" is patently false. sure, there's no strictly "endowment" portion of college rankings, but i think it certainly counts in the "financial resources rank" (what's the endowment if not a financial resource?) - a healthy endowment also means that you can add that islamic studies department, or the visiting professor of german, driving down the % of classes with 50 or more and driving up the % of classes under 20, and increasing the faculty resources rank. also, like i said, a healthy endowment probably means that tuition increases will be kept to a minimum. i got pretty significant need-based financial aid, and as the endowment suffered, my aid went down (and my parents didn't make more money - my dad was essentially out of work the my sophomore year, meaning that my aid should've gone up, if anything, for my junior year. instead, it was slashed from around 1/2 tuition to a few thousand dollars). so you're just wrong about that - among students, it was an infrequent but not insignificant or ignored subject of conversation.</p>
<p>i'll agree that on the face of it, "sagar" isn't that big a deal, but for someone who goes around spouting "most paces parties go from 10pm to 2am, and are proceeded by a movie" and "be sure to go early to get a seat to 'the graduate' the sunday before classes start in the fall!" like you're mr. swarthmore, consistently spelling "sager" incorrectly is kind of indicative of the fact that you don't really know what's going on.</p>
<p>i'm also terribly sorry that these three things are all i've come up with so far as to why you have a warped view of swarthmore. if you really want me to, i can go through your posts with a fine-toothed comb and come up with more gross distortions and outright untruths. i would like to continue to point out, however, that your mischaracterization that "i don't think burn-out or apathy are common at swarthmore" is a distortion of one of the most fundamental truths about swarthmore. i've said it before and i'll say it again: burnout is universal. the real truth is to tell specs that, "at some point you will hate swarthmore with every fiber of their being. that said, it's still a pretty great place most of the time." </p>
<p>i'll let you in on a little secret, too: my freshman year, i visited my girlfriend in new york pretty frequently. after that, i made one weekend trip to new york (again to visit her when she took the spring 04 semester off to go abroad, but hadn't left for her program yet). one thing that swarthmore touts pretty heavily are the mythical vans to philly. when i got there, they didn't exist, because the previous year they had been so sporadically used that they cancelled the service. by my junior year, i think, they started it up again, only no one used it that time either and they cancelled it again. philadelphia may be 25 minutes from campus by train, but students don't go in nearly as frequently as they could (or, arguably, should). this is due to academic pressure (no matter what, you always have work you should be doing - "swarthmore: guilt without sex") and to the fact that septa shuts down relatively early (11pm on weekends, unless it has changed). regardless, i probably got off campus more than your average student, since i had lots of friends with cars, and i still didn't even leave that frequently. i guess the "swarthmore bubble" should get chalked up as another one of the negative things about swarthmore. this kind of complacency also rears its head with these two phenomena: there's a dramatic dropoff in relationships starting after late september, because by that point people are so busy. also, the relationships that do get formed tend to last a long time, since people are frequently too busy and too absorbed in their own thing to break up with each other. it sounds weird, but it's true - much like most things about swarthmore that interesteddad doesn't seem to understand.</p>