<p>How does Scripps stack up against a Smith or a Wellesley? Any opinions would be greatly appreciated :)</p>
<p>Two GREAT choices! Scripps is drop-dead gorgeous, and, given its small student body, has terrific resources, especially in music, dance, and art, and are well-known in Romance languages. The joint science program is also said to be very good. Social life (i.e. guys) is easier. Climate is good most of the year. And, if you like, you can get into L.A., and to the beach. The food is extraordinary; the housing amazing (which is saying a lot, because it is great at Smith too.)</p>
<p>There are differences in curricula, with Scripps having its required humanities sequence. Some students will like that; others won't. (And I think they also have distributional requirements on top of that?)</p>
<p>Having said that, from our visits, you just don't feel the intellectual excitement at Scripps that you do at Smith. Some of it has to do with sheer size (Smith has triple the number, including 250 older students ranging in age from 24-69), some with Smith's socio-economic diversity, some with the depth of curricula options, departmental offerings, choices. (And, as I remember, there are virtually no international students at Scripps?) Some of it may just be the east coast "thing".</p>
<p>Town is different, too. I would love to retire to Claremont, if I could ever afford it. But, with 5,000 students in town, it is really very sleepy! Northampton is a huge attraction - funky, bohemian, 9 bookstores, folk clubs, etc. etc.</p>
<p>Can't speak much to Wellesley, except that I think in curricula matters and requirements, it is closer to Scripps than Smith is, and on weekends it seems to empty out.</p>
<p>You can get a great education at any of them. Good luck!</p>
<p>When my daughter visited Scripps, the guide explained that it was modeled after Smith (essentially the Smith of the West). Mini is right, a truly beautiful place with great resources via the Claremont system.
Biggest difference from Smith is size (Smith among the largest and Scripps the smallest of the major women's colleges) and student body composition. Check out the student stats - Scripps is quite a bit less ethnically/internationally diverse, and West coast kids are heavily represented.
D got into both, with a STRIDE scholarship at Smith. My guess is she would lean to Smith unless a close friend winds up going to Harvey Mudd. She would be quite happy at Scripps though.</p>
<p>Congrats on the STRIDE.</p>
<p>Some things to bear in mind about Smith:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>it has more course and majors than most LACs its size (ie: the only engineering program at a women's college); my d, a serious athlete is interested in the the coaching program usually offered only at large divI schls</p></li>
<li><p>you can take courses at 4 colleges (Amherst, MHC, UMass and Hamp), each of which has many more offerings than Mudd, CMC, Pitzer and Pomona</p></li>
<li><p>Smith had no distrib or general ed requirements (all of the Claremonts do, except for Pitzer)</p></li>
<li><p>unbelievable study abroad (including fin aid for non-Smith programs)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand Scripps has weather and boys (I'm not being sarcastic).</p>
<p>Although the Claremonts may not offer as many offerings as the Smith consortium, it is a ten minute round rip walk not an hour or more waiting for bus schedules.. so they may be more accessible to the students. Air quality will be better at Smith on many days, temperatures will be better at Scripps through the winter for those who prefer shoes or sandels to boots.</p>
<p>Which college did you end up attending? If Smith, how do you like it there?</p>
<p>Uh…you <em>do</em> realize the last post in this thread was five years ago this Saturday and that the posters are likely long gone? Folks like me are the rare exception and I was around when Gandalf was in knee pants.</p>
<p>Yes, my daughter choose Smith. She majored in Latin American history and minored in Spanish. Did her Junior year in Mexico, and is now in the Peace Corp in Costa Rica.
She enjoyed Smith and would go there again. Felt she got a very good education, and made lots of friends.
Best of luck to your daughter!</p>
<p>Okay, I was wrong. Nice to have you still around, LD. Didn’t connect you to LL.</p>
<p>Reinaali, you haven’t really participated on the Smith forum, but I noticed from your other posts you were accepted at Smith. Do you have any questions or any interests you’d like addressed? I don’t know much about Scripps, but of course it’s very different from Smith.</p>
<p>LuckyDad, I’m impressed–you didn’t miss a beat and chimed right in! Thank you for answering Reinaali’s question from out of the blue. It’s neat to see how your daughter has been so focused in her interests, flowing right into the Peace Corps; I’m sure you’re very proud of her. My daughter’s a first-year and I can imagine that I’ll be on CC doing the same thing four years from now. 
I am so thankful that Smith is offering our daughters such amazing opportunities that I want other young women to consider the possibilities for themselves.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for posting this thread, even if it was 5 years ago. I’m in the same boat; deciding between Scripps, Smith, and UCSD.</p>
<p>Yellowpeep, I was going to talk about the sizes of the three schools but with Scripps being part of the Claremont Colleges, Smith being part of the Five College Consortium, and UCSD probably being pretty large anyway, size may be not entirely important, although the experiences would be very different. What I notice is that you’re from San Diego, so you’re most likely already familiar with UCSD and Scripps but Smith is more of an unknown. What do you imagine college to be like–a similar environment to what you already know or something completely different, exciting and new? People have varying comfort levels in dealing with change; perhaps it would be helpful to assess what your comfort level is. </p>
<p>Did you get a chance to visit Smith? Have you ever lived on the East Coast before? It has a very definite rhythm and pace from the West Coast. Would you like to experience the changing of the seasons for four years of your life? Would you like to see snow, if you’ve never seen it before? Plenty of students come from the West Coast and the western states and thrive here. One of my daughter’s Smith good friends is from Idaho and she loves it here. If you’re worried about maintaining contact with your family from such a distance, I recommend setting up Skype on yours and your parents’ computer. We have regular wonderful, lengthy FREE conversations face-to-face with our son who attends college about a six-hour drive away (comparable in time to a day’s flight across the country). In fact, our relationship with our son is even better than it was when he was in high school; he needed the distance to “have his own space.” If you go to college in California, would that give you enough “space” to grow?</p>
<p>Both Scripps and Smith are going to give you an all-women’s college experience, although I imagine that because of its size, Scripps students would tend to have more of a co-ed experience because they’d use the Claremont Colleges more regularly than Smith students use the Five-College Consortium. Smith, being about three times the size, offers more courses so students don’t need to go off-campus as much to find them.</p>
<p>Feel free to ask questions on any of the previous Smith threads or start a new one; you don’t have to be confined to this one simply because the topic deals with two of the your three college choices. We’ll try to answer your questions. As a Smith parent who is thrilled with her daughter’s college experience, I’m happy to share what I know. We’re aware you’re under pressure to figure out what feels right, so ask away! Is there anything in particular that’s important for you to know about Smith? Good luck in your decision and let us know what you decide.</p>
<p>YP, you have three good choices and where you go depends on temperament and philosophy. About the only “rule” for D was “no school within 200 miles,” so that would have been easy for us, LOL.</p>
<p>Fwiw, Scripps was designed to be “the Smith College of the West Coast.” I don’t have any good second-hand experience from there however.</p>
<p>UCSD is a very different experience. It has all the plusses and minuses of a large university. TheMom has worked at UCLA for 30+ years and our initial biases were in that direction…all I can say is that we realize the qualitative experience that an LAC can give that a UC can’t match.</p>
<p>One small datum: I was talking to a client, a UCLA professor, just last week. I mentioned that in four years at Smith, D never had one test that used Scantron (fill in the bubble) forms. He shook his head. He’d love to do it but there’s no way that he could due to class sizes. The implications of this for how tests are given, what is expected, and therefore how material is taught, are significant. </p>
<p>The Smith “house” system rocks. There’s a reason that when Smithies meet, the first question after comparing graduation years is, “What house were you in?”</p>
<p>Well, ladylazarus, Sylvia Plath didn’t go to Scripps.</p>