<p>siusplau, I'm sure you're right that duhvinci is a sophomore rather than a junior. My math is really bad! ;)</p>
<p>It's just that I distinctly remember when he/she (or zie!) came up hard against the brick wall of Swarthmore's academics--and that was last year!</p>
<p>So much great information here!! You all are extremely helpful. I can't express sufficient appreciation.</p>
<p>I think I ultimately feel like I am more of a Swarthmore person, but like Carleton might bring out good things in me? I think the former carries more weight, ultimately.</p>
<p>Swarthmore also no longer uses loans in FA, which is a pretty huge advantage for anyone receiving FA.</p>
<p>Neither Swarthmore nor Carleton gave me any aid, unfortunately. My financial circumstances are going to be considerably more dour next year, so I hope that whichever school I choose has a flexible FA office...</p>
<p>siusplau, did you say your two kids went to swarthmore and olin??? if so, that is quite bizarre, because my final choice is between those two schools, and its giving me a really hard time...any insights over which one appears to be having the better experience?</p>
<p>i just left mccabe because i couldn't take it anymore. i don't know that any of my classmates still read these boards, but i do because it relaxes me and reading all the "eager beaver" posts from new acceptees reminds me of good times. that said, i have found my experience here to be not exactly as i had expected. as a point of reference and not to beat my own tom toms, i was an academic machine in high school. i didn't work too hard in high school because i wouldn't have wanted to embarass my friends, it was that easy. i didn't get a perfect sat score (but i almost did as a sophomore on the old sat's, missed one question, i think) that said, this place is unbelievably difficult. i have friends at hyps who take similar classes with the same texts and my class is usually five to ten chapters ahead. ok, i'm getting good grades, not what i used to get, but good. i read every single page of every single assignment (because i want to) and it's killing me. i can't imagine the work i would have to put in to appear coherent in an honors program. i know some uppers who love it, many hate it (but won't dwell on it because there are no whiners at swat except for myself) and some indifferent. did i mention that the kids here are incredibly smart (and intense for the most part)? i routinely go to bed at 4 AM (school work) weeknights and 6AM fridays and saturdays (saturday and sunday?) because of parties. as a result, i am fairly much nocturnal at this point. i love coming back here after breaks, but hate going back to college if that makes any sense. i barely notice the weather here, i might be in minny for all i know. rarely do i go to philly, everything i need is here. there are no jocks here (why do you think i applied ED?) and even the athletes on the teams don't really seem to let it rule or define their lives. Sharples is better that everyone makes it out to be. their indian menu does leave a certain amount to be desired (if that is a make or break thing.) i hope that gives you a little insight into my existence here, but the op is a chick, and most of the girls on campus appear to be quite happy (probably because the guys here are so studly.) so to answer the original question, if you're going to choose between two schools that noone has ever heard of, you may as well...oh what the hell do i know?</p>
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i read every single page of every single assignment (because i want to) and it's killing me.
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<p>You don't have to be superman! </p>
<p>Your professors don't expect you to read every page of every single assigned reading. Part of a Swarthmore education is figuring out what has to be read, what would be nice to read, and what can be skipped. Nobody reads all of it, every week, for every class.</p>
<p>Take the available study hours and triage the assignments accordingly.</p>
<p>Professor Burke has an essay on skimming at his blog.</p>
<hr>
<p>My daughter says that what drives her nuts is when a professor freelances with the assignments. Depending on how the class schedule falls, the only way to be prepared for three Wednesday classes is to take the coming week's assignments and do something over the previous weekend. Which is OK unless the professor changes the Wed. assignment at the end of Monday's class, when Monday and Tues. nights are already blocked out for the assignments in other Wednesday classes. I think she and a couple of friends have had to go have a word with a visiting professor who was doing that too often, telling him the facts of life if he wants his students to be prepared for class.</p>
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i can't imagine the work i would have to put in to appear coherent in an honors program.
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You can do just fine doing exactly 1/2 the reading you get assigned. I know this because my friend got high honors in English and just read the front of every page of assigned text and never bothered with the back. That's a time-honored method of cutting down your workload.</p>
<p>
How, exactly, does this work? I realize this is a trend among a number of colleges -- to eliminate student loans from FA -- but, what does this really mean for students? If Swarthmore offers a financial aid package that isn't quite generous enough for a student's family to be able to realistically afford Swarthmore, the parents will probably just try to get other loans (such as home-equity loans) in order to cover the difference. What are the exact mechanics (at Swarthmore) of student loan elimination, and has Swarthmore adjusted its FA metrics/generosity at all in doing this?</p>
<p>My understanding is that the loan component has been replaced with a "grant" component, something which does not need to be repaid.</p>
<p>My D also does all her assigned reading and more--because she wants to, and, as I said, she is a masochist! This is why I hesitated to say she loves the program--it really is stressful if you will not ease up on your own high expectations. Duhvinci--I do know what you mean! (And there are plenty of girls who whine at Swarthmore:)</p>
<p>Pchan406--tough choice! Son is turning down Caltech and HMC for Olin--which was his immediate first choice since the first time he learned of it! He didn't apply to Swarthmore for many reasons--I think it would also be a great place for Engineering, just not for him. I will try to PM you a little later to give you my full perspective. I don't know what kind of person you are--or whether one school would suit you more. But you cannot make a wrong choice--they are both wonderful schools!</p>
<p>So, I'm a senior honors history major/course music major and I do all my reading. If there's one thing at Swat that drives me crazy, it's the amount of work. That being said, I don't regret my decision to come here. Also, as you can tell by my majors, I could have picked a more sane program of study.</p>
<p>The bottom line is this: I love Swat, but that doesn't mean you will love Swat. Are you happier doing something all the time than having lots of time off? Are you capable of restraining yourself from overwork? Those are the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself. Do not go to Swat just because you think you should. If you genuinely believe that you would be happier here, then you should come. Also, chances are, you'd be pretty happy both places.</p>
<p>A.E., like Mof 3S said, the FA remains the same in amount, but all the loans are replaced with grants. I guess it is how Swarthmore prefers to spend their money (as opposed to spending it on "proximity cards", etc.)</p>
<p>My daughter is also a senior honors major and loves it. </p>
<p>She does all the assigned reading for SOME classes. I know that she had some classes for which she didn't do almost any reading (and still did well in them). You do have to learn to choose your battles, and budget your time if you want to enjoy Swarthmore. That said, you have to LOVE doing the academic work, otherwise you will spend a lot of time doing things you don't enjoy and be miserable.</p>
<p>Thank you for going into such detail, Duhvinci. It's nice to get the slice-of-life perspective. I can tell pretty easily that Swarthmore will be a challenge, but I hope a fairly welcome one. Skimming definitely will need to be perfected.</p>
<p>I am one of those strange people who goes a little bit crazy when she doesn't have a thousand things to do--my schedule's insanity is usually tailored. I think this has always been a part of what drew me to Swarthmore. I am less worried about personally being unhappy with that kind of environment than being surrounded by peers who are, but it seems as if most Swarthmore students are a self-selecting lot. </p>
<p>The only thing that's really been preventing me from making my decision is something a little more nebulous than number of hours spent on work or that kind of thing. I guess my limited experience with people attending Carleton is that a lot of them seem to have the kind of smarts I've always wanted to have--unexpected brilliance, whereby they seem normal, or on the silly side of normal, but possess considerable intellect, which they do not like to parade around. I am not really one of these people. I hope my vanity has been limited over the years, but I care about people perceiving me as intelligent--perhaps too much--and I revel in the promise of intellectual conversations and misery poker and being forced to contemplate things I never have before. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have always kind of wanted to have the fun-loving, unassuming, quiet Carleton intellect, but that I don't feel that I do. I'm loud about a lot of things and I'm particularly loud about intellectualism, which has always drawn me to Swarthmore. I thought, I think, that going someplace with a lot of people like (or perhaps considerably more brilliant than) me would be fascinating, scintillating, phantasmagorically stimulating in all the ways I desired--but that it would make me more intense, more competitive (even just against myself) and more self-aware in ways I didn't want to be, without granting me the kind of escape from self-consciousness and second-guessing I've always desired. --Or if I did want to be these ways, I feared/fear that it would make me a less attractive or personable individual. But I don't know that I would fit in at Carleton...I don't know that being in a non-native environment would change me into some other person I would theoretically prefer to be, or merely shut away the part of me that yearns for greater challenge and greater parade and make the part of me that MAKES me me feel stifled.</p>
<p>Um, sorry, that was a bit of a ramble. Thank you againnn, to everyone!! Random other things:</p>
<p>Indian food isn't really that big a deal--I'm an upper-middle-class white girl--but it's the subject of interest. There's none in my hometown or anything, I just enjoy it. I didn't know Sharples served any, though! That is definitely a plus.</p>
<p>It seems to me that the FA revamps do considerably less than they aim to. Swarthmore students/parents, I have heard that Swarthmore is usually fairly generous about on-campus things; printing is free, there are occasionally travel stipends, food is not gratuitously expensive. Is this true?</p>
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You do have to learn to choose your battles, and budget your time if you want to enjoy Swarthmore.
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<p>Time budgeting is my daughter's key to sanity, too. She has explained to me that, going into crunch time around exam week, she plots out what papers and tasks have to be done and how much time she has to do them. If she has twelve hours for a paper, then she does a 12-hour paper and moves on to the next item on the list.</p>
<p>On reading, my D says it's pretty easy to figure out three levels of assigned readings in a course: stuff definitely on the agenda for class discussion (must read and prepare), stuff that might come up in discussion), and stuff that is so far down the pecking order it will never be mentioned. If you can read it all, great....and it's usually all worth reading. But, start with the high priority stuff and triage to fit the allocated time for the week. I know she's taken some lit courses where she reads some of the novels during breaks before and after the actual semester.</p>
<p>treesnogger:</p>
<p>Basically everything is "free" at Swarthmore, except coffee in the coffee bars Kohlberg and the Science Center. I think you can even use meal-card points for that. And laundry. Need coins for that.</p>
<p>The only other exception is Pub Night. I think that's $3 to cover the kegs. Any party or event with campus funding (virtually every party) has to be free, although I guess they sometimes take donations to cover beverages.</p>
<p>With a couple of Target gift cards from relatives, you could probably go a whole semester at Swarthmore without spending $50 cash.</p>
<p>About the Indian food - the only people who don't like the Swarthmore version of it are the Indian kids. Everyone else thinks it's great ;-)...</p>
<p>treesnogger,</p>
<p>From your description of yourself, you'll fit right in at Swarthmore. I am not sure that picking college as a tool that you hope will reshape you into a person you <em>think</em> you might want to be is the right way to choose a school.</p>