<p>Hi,</p>
<p>How strong is Sarah Lawrence's hard sciences program? An alum who concentrated in phil and english told me it sucks. Is this true? If I want to go to a grad school science program after SLC, would I be at a distinct disadvantage due to the poorness of the program?</p>
<p>Nobody wants to weigh in? Seriously? I know that Kanwal Singh is known as a great, great physics teacher, but it’d be nice to have some input on this matter.</p>
<p>It’s always been my impression no one goes to Sarah Lawrence intending to major in science though I suppose some must. Everyone I know who went there is a writer of some sort.</p>
<p>Hi, I’m an alum who graduated in 12’ and is currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto (in social psychology technically, but social/cognitive neuroscience more particularly; and for what it’s worth, QS World rankings always puts UofT psychology somewhere in the top 30 schools, from 22 this year to 12 last year). I originally came to Sarah Lawrence to study writing and literature, but after my first cognitive science class there I knew what my true calling was.</p>
<p>Sarah Lawrence does not have a poor science program at all, in fact honestly some of the best teachers in the entire college are part of the science department. The only real problem with SLC’s science program is that it is small and gets little press, so you will not have a large amount of freedom in terms of choosing classes. That is, if you wanted to exclusively focus on physics, for example, you might have trouble specifically getting the variety of courses you’d see on the transcript of someone who went to a school with a larger program. Many of the courses available come down to the specialties of the teachers involved. However, this lack of variety hardly creates problems in the end, because if you are interested in a subject or area that is not being taught that year (or has been taught before at the school), you can often explore it through your “conference work” with one of the teachers.</p>
<p>My focus was mostly on psychology and neuroscience (cognitive neuroscience especially). Although after four years, the classes on my transcript made me look something of an intellectual/academic “mutt”, many graduate programs welcomed my eclectic background. What was and is more important to graduate schools (and to any research-related industry) is that you get research experience before applying. Sarah Lawrence does have limited summer research opportunities for science students, although there is no guarantee that the research opportunities will be in the subject which you are interested in (or that you will get the opportunity, even if they are). In my case, I applied to external summer programs, and got to do behavioral neuroscience research at Duke University during the summer before my junior year.</p>
<p>So long as you make it clear to professors (and your “don”) that you definitely want to go to graduate school, they can help tailor your academic trajectory to something that graduate schools would like to see (depending upon what you want to do research in). But anyway, the limitations of fewer classes to choose from is not as important to graduate schools as you’d think – they are interested in you demonstrating competence (with high grades and good GREs), a good work ethic, good writing skills, a good match with the Principle Investigator, etc. The good writing skills I acquired at SLC were critical for being able to write an application that let me stand out amongst the hundreds of other applicants for the programs to which I applied.</p>
<p>And just for the record, I took many classes that weren’t related to what I am now in graduate school for (including art and literature), and while most of the time they didn’t help my application, they also did not hurt it. In certain cases some classes helped in ways that I did not expect until after I took them – in two computer science classes I learned programming, and programming is very desired (or required) in many psychology and neuroscience labs, and even more often in research assistant/associate positions outside of academia.</p>
<p>Thanks for the wonderful response! Good to know that things really worked out for you. Honestly, though, does psychology qualify as a hard science? Or neuroscience for that matter? Not trying to disparage those fields or anything (in fact, I am perfectly aware of how difficult psychology is) but it would be more useful for me to know about biology, chemistry or physics. I’m not interested in physics much, but what about chemistry and biology? If I want a PhD in biochemistry, would SLC prepare me well for that? Any of your friends go through that route? </p>
<p>The conference work sounds interesting given the latitude it gives to students to explore new areas of the subject but how does it appear on the transcript? Say I explore particle physics or something in my conference work. Will the transcript list out the material covered in that conference work then?</p>
<p>The more important point is that graduate schools in science work similarly from sciences as “soft” as sociology and anthropology to ones as “hard” as physics. You work in laboratories (or out in the field, you get the idea), you receive funding from the government or from various scholarships/fellowships to do experiments and publish your work, etc.</p>
<p>Well both psychology and neuroscience today qualify as “hard” more than they ever has before, but I would invite you to study more philosophy of science before we got into that question – the distinction between “soft” and “hard” is actually very incoherent, for the most part, and most people seem to think psychology in particular is less scientific because of its historical relationship to enterprises like psychoanalysis (which is certainly not scientific). However, psychology today is very different and very closely connected to physiological, and has largely detached itself from its historical roots (then again, this implies that physiology is somehow “more scientific”, although this would be misleading depending upon the criteria you are using the define science).</p>
<p>When you say “useful”, do you mean useful to “you” and the life you are trying to make for yourself, or useful to society in general? Most people actually go into science because they want to know the truth, unrelated to the truth’s usefulness (although the ability to spin your research as useful to society usually gets you the grant money you want). The entire point of “basic/fundamental” research is actually not to explore things that have direct relevance or important today, but might be important in the future by providing foundational knowledge now. Additionally, most research in academia you are likely to go into (if you do choose academia) is basic/fundamental, and not applied, unless you do some kind of engineering. However, what is basic and what is applied is less clearly distinguished in biology and chemistry than in other subjects.</p>
<p>The point I am trying to make is that you should not distance yourself from something because it is not as “useful to you” or because it is not a “hard” science. Funnily enough, the reasons you are distancing yourself from these things is something that is already studied in social psychology (see social identity theory).</p>
<p>Let me message you the name/info of one of my friends who did biology at SLC (and she also may have originally wanted to be premed, which implies she would have taken physics-chem-biology-etc, but I am not sure).</p>
<p>Conference work does not appear on your transcript, it’s simply a component of another class, and in your case it is intended to edify you in subjects that would normally not be available to someone studying (say, biochemistry) at SLC in a given year. But my point is that it does not need to be, because you can demonstrate your knowledge of subject X in other ways (either through interviews, or by writing it directly on your resume, etc). And you can also do independent studies/undergraduate thesis in your junior and senior year, which will appear on your transcript as such, if you believe it matters so much (which it doesn’t, because research experience is more important for graduate schools than extensive background knowledge of the subject. In contrast, all that matters for pure mathematics is background knowledge, because you cannot even DO research in pure mathematics unless you have years and years of the correct and relevant background knowledge).</p>
<p>I am distancing myself from psychology? Where did you get that? I just wanted to gauge how well SLC would prepare me for grad school if I choose to concentrate on bio/chem. Therefore, I felt it would be more “useful” for me to learn about SLC’s bio/chem/physics departments because it would better clarify my questions. Obviously, though, I was a bit vague about the context in which I used the word “useful” that has led you to explore an interesting tangential issue.</p>
<p>That said, thanks for the response, and for the email of your friend.</p>