Swarthmore College

Date: Oct 30 2009
Major: Psychology (This Major's Salary over time)
Oh man, where to begin. Swarthmore is a terrible, terrible place. Let me address the school in the order the headings were presented.

My department (psychology) was sort of the fallback department of the campus. Don't know what you want to do with your life? Haven't found anything better to do? Come to Psychology! With no grade requirements and no real personal attention given up to that point (you could apply to the major having taken the intro class and 2 others), this was the major for you if you'd been treading water up until that point. It's important to note this because you'll be spending a lot of time with these frat boys, frat girls, and other assorted mental giants over the next 2 years. I was assigned an advisor who was head of the department. Impressive, right? Well. As it turns out, professor's are not great at budgeting their time. My advising experience with him was punctuated by missed appointments, and a lot of shit being thrown my way about dealing with issues on my own. From my ADVISOR. To quote him once, "Matt, you're a nice guy, but you're not very smart". Thank you for that advice. Another incident that sticks out in my mind came about when I wanted to discuss with another professor an idea I had for an experiment. It quickly degraded into a "there's nothing new under the sun" conversation, and my creativity was effectively staunched. That semester went so poorly I was forced to take a semester's leave (thank goodness for APs) just to regain my sanity. The one thing I will say to psychology's credit is the large class sizes keep the other students from ruining the experience. You see, nearly everyone you run into on campus has some sort of agenda in the form of some social cause or another. I made the mistake of taking a literature class, and all anyone could talk about was how the work related to spousal abuse, or animals, or some other crap that was clearly important to them, but not to me, and certainly not to the work being discussed. I often got the impression that the professors were using the students as a crutch. If you're looking for a school where people with PhD's speak at length about a relevant topic, go somewhere else. At swarthmore you will instead hear about some girl from Bethesda, Maryland and what she thinks might possibly be relevant to the topic. For this reason, among others, I spent the majority of my time avoiding the small classes swarthmore loves to brag about. The campus itself is beautiful and fairly well maintained, because it's also an arboretum, so it receives funding from elsewhere, which is something to feel good about. The dorms are sort of hit or miss, same as any campus. The rooms are of a decent size and they're reasonably well maintained. No complaints. The social life at swarthmore is extremely nuclear. You'll have a group of about 5-7 friends who you will spend all your time with. The entire school social life is dorm based. I myself hung out almost exclusively with the kids who lived upstairs from me my freshman year for my entire duration at swarthmore. The small community SUCKS if you're looking for a bit of anonymity. Saturday and sunday morning all of the one dining hall is abuzz with who cheated on who with whom, who decided to try girls/guys this week, who hooked up with who and its so awkward now etc etc. The extra-curriculars are just as cliquey as you'd expect, with all of the clubs being dominated by one or two people. I myself was involved in drama, and since I was not lucky to be one of the 2 blessed ones, I was lucky to get 500 dollars to put on a full length show. and the club was none-too-friendly about it, since their power structure was heavily involved in another show.

I really must urge you, if you consider yourself normal, to stay away from this school, and I welcome you, if you have any doubts about going here, to please contact me before you rush into anything. I've counseled many people against going here, and welcome the chance to continue.