<p>I am a strong senior in high school, and I'm applying to a variety of schools including UChicago and Brown to major in applied mathematics/some sort of biology. However, my father is really encouraging me to apply to Swarthmore and highly ranked liberal arts colleges. I love the sound of Swarthmore and it seems like a great school with great programs, but I was wondering if it was even worth applying if I'm planning on majoring in science/math? I don't know much about this whole thing, I truly apologize if this question is a waste of time.</p>
<p>Swarthmore is very very strong in the sciences and math. The only caveat is that if you are planning on going to graduate school for a PhD in pure math, Swarthmore and other liberal arts colleges have a difficult time placing their graduates in the very top PhD programs because in pure math graduate admissions tends to put emphasis on grades in graduate level courses - which liberal arts colleges don’t offer.</p>
<p>This link will show you some of the post graduate plans by major for the past 8 years (not every graduate fills the survey out, and not everyone goes directly to graduate school)</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/careerservices/Post-Graduation%20Plans%20by%20Major%202004-2012.pdf[/url]”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/careerservices/Post-Graduation%20Plans%20by%20Major%202004-2012.pdf</a></p>
<p>For bio, you’ll see people going to PhD programs at places like UC Berkeley, Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, etc. Placement is also very good for physics majors. Haven’t checked chemistry, but I imagine it is pretty strong as well.</p>
<p>Definitely apply if this is what is giving you hesitation. I was a math major / chem minor myself, and while I didn’t have any personal ambition of pursuing academia or a career in the sciences, many of my friends who did are extremely successful and would speak very highly of it. Beyond that, pretty much all of the science courses I took (and I took about 25 of them) were fantastic, especially the honors seminars.</p>
<p>Bio is one of the largest majors at Swat, and one of the strongest overall IMO. Physics is one of the best at getting people into top PhD programs (at least it is in my friend group); CS is pretty good as well, both in academia and in the workplace (in my LinkedIn extended network, the 3rd most popular employer of Swarthmore grads is Google, behind only UPenn and Harvard which comprises mostly researchers and grad students). dadx3 makes a good point about the math major (of which I was one), although I will say I do recall a 2009 grad who turned down MIT (I think) for a different school because he wanted to be close to his girlfriend. Chemistry is pretty good as well - but it’s relatively small compared to the other sciences (especially if you take out the pre-med students who just picked it because it’s pretty easy after getting the 4-5 credits you need for pre-med anyway).</p>