<p>I know the thread has been inactive for a while, but I thought I might as well chime in: I’m a junior at Reed right now. I think I can speak to a few things.</p>
<p>1) Minors</p>
<p>Reed does not have minors, but that doesn’t mean you can’t “create your own.” I’m a physics major, but I’ve taken five classes through the Chinese department (some lit, some language, some history), and plan to take at least one more. (Song dynasty history, religion, and poetry! I’m excited.) A friend of mine who graduated last year was a physics major who did lots of studio art classes. A word about studio art — the program strikes me as really unusual but thoroughly excellent. Oddly enough, it seems like one of the more practical programs.</p>
<p>2) Math. </p>
<p>I’m taking a 400-level (essentially graduate school material) math elective, and doing research with a math professor. Math at reed strongly resembles the math that professional mathematicians do. (This is also true of U Chicago, for what it’s worth.) To wit, I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a mathematician while here — but lots of math majors take upper division classes in the physics department, because physicists heavily rely on computation, where as (if I may generalize) mathematicians see computation as secondary to understanding. There’s a great class in the physics department which is basically “all the math you need for a career in physics” (unless you’re a theorist, in which case you need a bit more) – when I took it, we covered differential equations, linear algebra, Fourier analysis, and other good stuff.</p>
<p>That being said, not many people can know while still in high school whether they like mathematician’s math; if you would like to peruse, though, Reed’s 100 level math sequence is here: [Math</a> 111 and Math 112 Course Notes: Reed College](<a href=“http://people.reed.edu/~mayer/]Math”>Math 111 and Math 112 Course Notes: Reed College), its 200-level math sequence is here: [Course</a> notes for multivariable calculus](<a href=“http://people.reed.edu/~jerry/211/vcalc.html]Course”>http://people.reed.edu/~jerry/211/vcalc.html), and an example of an upper division math class is here: people.reed.edu/~davidp/homepage/321.pdf. (As an aside, the last of these has a chapter called “celebrity deathmatch,” referring to the integral as defined by Riemann and Lebesgue and which is more versatile. I find Reed professors have charming senses of humour.) </p>
<p>3) SATs
I got a 2340. I do not feel out of place at Reed. If you like data, College board research says that the correlation between SAT+high school GPA and college GPA is 0.62. Reed has a division called Institutional Research that crunches admissions stats vs. how kids do here, and we do a lot better than that. I think it’s great that Reed is willing to admit kids that are brilliant but bad at taking standardized tests; I suspect lots of other schools would love to have such students, but are worried about hurting their rankings.</p>
<p>4) Money</p>
<p>Reed’s financial aid office can be capricious. I personally do not believe an undergraduate education is worth 200k, unless you view that sum strictly as an investment and your daughter plans to go into certain areas of high finance (in which case, silly as it is, that 200k pays itself off very quickly). Reed is a wonderful place, but many other schools are too. </p>
<p>5) Smoking (as if it hasn’t been discussed in this thread)</p>
<p>My suspicion is this is actually Portland’s influence on Reed. Reedies and Portlanders dress absurdly, smoke more and get more piercings than the average American, tend to be left-of-centre, and so on. My home city was the first in North America to ban smoking in restaurants; in this respect Portland was a bit of a culture shock. That being said, in my experience the smoker population seems larger than it is — because they all have to be outside thanks to a certain state law.
Many of my friends will point to smoking as the thing they dislike most about Reed, and campus surveys show more people are annoyed by smokers than smoke themselves. I feel that Reed has blessed me in a lot of ways, and while I’d prefer if people would smoke less, I can’t say it’s bothered me all that much during my time here.</p>
<p>6) fit
The strongest reasons were that its academic strengths matched my interests, and I felt the community was an extraordinary one — people whom I love living and studying with. Your daughter should go somewhere where she’ll be challenged by her classes and enriched by her peers. The admissions process is a hard one, I know; I wish you and your daughter the best of luck.</p>