<p>Continuation of AE's comment on the dining hall staff: When I was on my visit, there was an adorable little elderly lady who let me use a breakfast voucher for lunch (even though she technically wasn't supposed to). She was so grandmother-y.</p>
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And, don't forget that you "heard" that Bowdoin has good food. That's almost as rich as your internet surveys!
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Well, is it true or isn't it? Bowdoin ranks #2 at The Princeton Review for "Best Campus Food." Are they wrong? Is it all just a big myth that Bowdoin's food is better than Swarthmore's? What is going on in that kitchen of theirs that isn't going on at Swarthmore? Could it be... no, it couldn't... OMG THEY EMPLOY CHEFS!!! Should I just accept that "all college food is bad" just because you say so?</p>
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Here's an idea I bet you hadn't thought of.... Tell all the vegetarians to jump in a lake so dining services can put all its effort into better food for the meat eaters. That would probably work. But, those incompetents running Swat's dining hall try to provide a range of options three times a day, including salad bar and a custom grill man for cooked to order stuff. God, they are SO incompetent. Oh, the humanity of it all!
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Here's an idea I bet you hadn't thought of... Eat at Swarthmore for four years and get back to me after you know what you're talking about.</p>
<p>I've never eaten a meal at Swarthmore, but I have a very hard time believing that the food is so particularly bad that is it relevant to a prospective student's evaluation of the school. (I have eaten a meal at Bowdoin - it was mediocre. Sort of what I expected. It was fine.)</p>
<p>AE, do you keep in contact with friends from there? It will be nice to know. Thank you. :)</p>
<p>Haha, maybe the quality of the food will discourage Swatties from gaining the typical freshman fifteen?</p>
<p>I've heard that at least the breakfasts in ML are excellent.</p>
<p>I bet they are. Even if they are not, im sure you will enjoy it with the amazing scenery outside, as AE mentioned.</p>
<p>
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Here's an idea I bet you hadn't thought of... Eat at Swarthmore for four years and get back to me after you know what you're talking about.
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</p>
<p>No thanks. I did my years eating college food. Only back in the stone age we didn't have things like salad bars or chicken vindaloo or greek bar. Just mystery meat and gruel.</p>
<p>I only did two years in the Williams dorms before moving off campus. We shopped and cooked for ourselves. Now, I'm way too spoiled to eat college food. I'm too fat and happy cooking out of my Bobby Flay cookbooks, thank you very much.</p>
<p>One of the curious trends at Swarthmore has been the mass movement of students moving back on campus in recent years...to the point where virtually nobody lives off campus anymore.</p>
<p>AE: Thank you so much for your viewpoints, positive and negative. I personally really appreciate all of the time you are putting into this forum, in presenting what you see as the plusses and minuses of your Swarthmore experience.</p>
<p>
Yeah, and even a professor or two as well.</p>
<p>
I can think of a few possibilities for that. First, quite a few of the local apartments have been the same for decades, with little or no refurbishing. Second, given the state of the rental market all over the nation for the past two years, it's entirely possible rental prices have risen at a higher rate than room and board expenses at the college. Also, I think the total number of dorm rooms has risen in recent years, so the possibility of more sophomore singles/two room doubles and better options for juniors may keep them on campus, or in some of the expanded college housing.</p>
<p>A.E.: as an alum, i agree with many of your complaints. i also disagree with a few. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>the dining services issue is NOT trivial. it's not just that the food sucks - and it does, and it's extremely difficult to eat healthy when your only non-fried option is a "salad bar" where everything looks ancient, they have the worst quality of fruit i've ever seen and i never, ever had a non-stale piece of bread that didn't come from a bag. the food's bad enough that no one wants to use their full benefit, so they lose meals. there's no flexibility and a lot of the money spent by students on the meal plan just goes to waste. the college makes money like this, so i don't imagine it'll ever change, but still.</p></li>
<li><p>i had mainly good experiences with professors, and even the ones i didn't like were accessible. that said, it's very possible to have a crappy experience if you continually pick the wrong professors. also: the workload is at time ridiculous, and while i don't know if they pile reading on to make up for their own shortcomings, the professors can be a bit excessive. at the same time, it's at the very least a good test to see what you can handle.</p></li>
<li><p>the social scene does completely suck, and if your #1 priority isn't learning, you're going to be miserable. swarthmore brings out the worst in people in a lot of ways - they're at their most disheveled, most selfish. (what's reassuring is that people seem to resume being human beings after graduation.)</p></li>
<li><p>career services is abysmal, ABYSMAL. the erecruiting website has an incredibly crappy selection of jobs, and there aren't really that many companies that come on campus. i'm not sure if gigi simeone is associated with the career services office, but she's even worse - she coordinates law school applications (and i think med school applications too). one former classmate who's about to graduate from stanford law contacted her with the idea that he could come back to campus to give a presentation for stanford. she grudgingly accepted, even though "no one from swarthmore could get into stanford law." there are, i think, five swatties in my friend's graduating class. i have a friend who left her office in tears after talking to her about med school applications - a year later, she was accepted into nyu's md/phd program. there's a weird tendency to discourage future plans like that.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>swarthmore doesn't prepare you to have a job - swarthmore prepares you to realize that you have to go to grad school. most of my classmates have gone back to school at this point, and they're mostly in amazing programs. one kid who was completely "lost in space" is doing his phd in islamic studies at princeton. it's kind of neat to see.</p>
<p>that said, swarthmore does not cater AT ALL to people who know they never want to go to grad school. the classes teach a lot of wonderful skills, but are short on tools you can directly apply to a workplace, and there's almost no name recognition. i'm currently at an ivy for an IR masters in finance policy, and i know it's going to play a much bigger role in opening career doors for me than my B.A. in philosophy from swarthmore - even though swarthmore provided what in many, many ways was a superior education. </p>
<p>finally, i'd like to point out how interesteddad should maybe consider relaxing a little bit. why do you take it so personally when an alum says anything contrary to your perfect vision of swarthmore, a school you never attended and never experienced first-hand? it's a wonderful place, but very much a flawed place, and it serves no one's purposes to deny that. moreover, you can't dismiss the initial survey that A.E. cited just because they're "disgruntled students" - even if that's true, that swarthmore creates such exceptionally motivated disgruntled students seems to indicate that people aren't always all that happy there? i know i wasn't, and for long stretches. i know that all of my friends had long stretches of misery, and almost everyone had one or two breakdowns over their four years. and, no, i wouldn't trade it for any of those schools on that list.</p>
<p>
Yeah, it would have been nice if I'd had some sort of good resource for knowing who the better professors were. Students didn't seem to be openly critical of professors, and so getting accurate reviews was kind of tough. Also, I guess it depends a lot on your department and what your schedule can accommodate. Sometimes, you just have to take whatever professor is teaching the class or seminar you need for your major/minor requirements in the semester or year you need to take it, and you can get stuck with a dud. This happened to me numerous times. There were a few courses where I'd have literally been better off academically if I'd used the time to just sleep instead of going to class.</p>
<p>On the career front, I consider myself lucky because I'm self-employed in a niche market. I didn't really require any assistance from Career Services to get any connections. Some of my friends, however, did, and it's safe to say most of them were rather let down. Maybe Career Services could do better about attracting recruiters, or maybe that's just life, and 90%+ of jobs you get right out of college suck. Ultimately, as I've mentioned before, the greatest skill and preparation you take away from Swarthmore is a heightened proficiency at critical thinking. This is universally applicable, whether you go into grad school, into a job, or whatever. This doesn't excuse Career Services, though.</p>
<p>I would love to hear the factual basis for a statement to the effect that S'more could never get a graduate into Stanford Law: on the contrary, I would bet that leading professional (as well as graduate) schools would give their eye teeth for S'more grads. True, the college graduates a very high percentage of academically serious (and quite bright) individuals who go on to PhD programs and the like (hence a leading per capita proportion of nobel laureates, University presidents- including Stanford, BTW: Lyman), but pre-professionals matriculate at leading schools and become leaders in law, medicine, business, etc. It's just that the majority of bright kids who are accepted at and choose to attend S'more are less likely to have finance as their life's goal than at some other elite undergraduate schools.</p>
<p>
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one former classmate who's about to graduate from stanford law... ...here are, i think, five swatties in my friend's graduating class.
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[quote]
most of my classmates have gone back to school at this point, and they're mostly in amazing programs. one kid who was completely "lost in space" is doing his phd in islamic studies at princeton. it's kind of neat to see.
[/quote]
[quote]
i'm currently at an ivy for an IR masters in finance policy, and i know it's going to play a much bigger role in opening career doors for me than my B.A. in philosophy from swarthmore - even though swarthmore provided what in many, many ways was a superior education.
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Swarthmore is not for everyone - you have to know what are you getting into. But the above quotes make it sound like a pretty good choice IMHO...</p>
<p>
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Sometimes, you just have to take whatever professor is teaching the class or seminar you need for your major/minor requirements in the semester or year you need to take it, and you can get stuck with a dud.
[/quote]
That is true for every single college if you are in a major that requires taking classes in a sequence.</p>
<p>
OMG lawyers have eye teeth? Yet another reason to think of them as demonic.</p>
<p>
Even if this were true (which I doubt), so what? My point was that Swarthmore has dud professors and you can get stuck with them. I would have liked Swarthmore a lot better if the dud professor ratio were lower, which I would have expected from a place as esteemed and academically oriented as Swarthmore. But, I had plenty of classes that were literally a total waste of time.</p>
<p>Nancy_Reagan: you are starting to scare the crap out of me. The most important department at swat is career services and you're telling me that it sucks?</p>
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Nancy_Reagan: you are starting to scare the crap out of me. The most important department at swat is career services and you're telling me that it sucks?
[/quote]
How do you figure it's the most important department?</p>
<p>I'm really considering attending Swarthmore. If career services at Swarthmore is so bad, how do you recommend going about finding a job out of Swarthmore? Do you think I should be very rigorous in finding internships in the summer, or getting a job at Swarthmore, or anything of that sort? Is there anything you would have done at Swarthmore that you didn't do, regarding not just jobs but anything in general?</p>
<p>It isn't great, but it isn't horrible either. Swatties manage to find some pretty awesome jobs right out of school.</p>
<p>Finding internships can be touch no matter how good the career services office is. Yes, you need to work at it (start early. Like in the fall.).</p>
<p>The last question is sorta broad. I think the key is going to Melissa Mandos (awards) and Career Services EARLY. Don't wait until Sophomore year. If you start thinking seriously about it early, you can start setting yourself up for your dream job right out of school.</p>
<p>With a web browser, an email address, a phone, and some determination, you can do a lot to make up for Swarthmore's lackluster career services. The answers to the questions and concerns really depend so much on the individual and the career area being considered, that I don't have any great general answers. For instance, one poster recommends starting your job search as early as your freshman year. That would have been completely pointless for me, because, by my senior year, almost nothing I thought about my future in my freshman year was relevant anymore.</p>