<p>Anyone enrolled or know how doable it is to double major or music major plus say a science at Swarthmore? How is their music department? for a kid who is gifted in both areas and doesn't want to give either of them up, used to high performance in both?</p>
<p>Some combination of major/major or major/minor in music and something else would be no problem at all. The only exception might be a double major with Engineering, just because there are so many required courses for Engineering....although an Engineering major/Music minor wouldn't be unusual. Your scenario kind of typifies why someone would choose Swarthmore for music.</p>
<p>The Music department is small, but the students really like the department. Nice facilities, Steinways in the practice rooms, private lessons that the college pays for. Very personalized department. Curtis Conservatory is 20 minutes away in Phila, so there are resources for teachers beyond those on staff. In fact, one of the staff working with the college orchestra is a Swarthmore grad in the third year of the conducting program at Curtis.</p>
<p>The best thing to do would be to contact the head of the music department Gerald Levinson directly...by e-mail or, better yet, go visit. He'll shoot straight with you whether the music department would be right for you or not. If you apply, you need to contact the Music depart. anyway because you have to submit a recording for evaluation in order to have music count as a "tip" on your application.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for the info. BTW, I'm the parent of the student, only a soph now, but we're already had experience with audition tapes for summer music programs, a good practice run-exhausting cause we did it at home, with pretty good audio quality. I'm glad to hear that colleges such as this one encourage the scientist-musician types.</p>
<p>Actually, I would guess that music-slash-[something else] or [something else]-slash-music students are probably more the rule than the exception at Swarthmore. It's probably not the school you would choose if you were single-mindedly focused on a music performance career. </p>
<p>Here's a bit of trivia. Swarthmore's first ever music major was P.D.Q. Bach.</p>
<p>bookcases, your son should also look at Williams, excellent music department and excellent sciences. Dual majors are common as are performance opportunities even for non-majors.</p>