Swarthmore College

If you are looking for passionate students in a rigorous liberal-arts or engineering environment on a beautiful campus close to Philadelphia, you really need not look any further.

It would be pretty impossible to do Swarthmore College justice with mere words, simply because words do not evoke the environment, the people, the vibrancy, and the uniqueness that makes the campus what it has come to mean to me. Regardless, writing this affords me the opportunity to reflect upon my four years there, and perhaps share with you a sliver of what one might experience on its campus.

Swarthmore College was founded in 1864 by a committee of Quakers from Philadelphia. At 11 miles southeast of Philadelphia, it takes about half an hour by commuter rail from the Swarthmore station to get into the vibrant city of “brotherly love”. But those 11 miles provide Swarthmore with the beautiful 400-acre campus that is also recognized as an arboretum.

As an international student, I never did get to go to campus before applying to attend, and the first time I set foot on Swarthmore College’s green grass was the first week of orientation. I found out about Swarthmore at a college fair in Paris during the fall of my senior year of high school, while I was composing my applications for other, more “famous” schools. I later met with a college representative, with whom I had a thorough conversation on what the school was like, what it looked, and how I would apply.

I could bring up statistics about Swarthmore, including its standing among other, similar colleges, and how it is generally recognized as one of the best liberal arts colleges in the United States. But accolades and awards seem somewhat antithetical to the Swarthmore spirit, where academic competition is not a race against others, but a race against oneself. To be fair, Swarthmore is a community of passionate, intellectual social activists - students and faculty who dare dream and work towards a better world. The Genocide Intervention Network and War News Radio, for example, were started by Swarthmore students. This is perhaps even more remarkable when you realize that in 2011 there were a total of 1545 students on campus.

Swarthmore is unique in that it is one of the few liberal arts college to offer an ABET-accredited Engineering program as well as both a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degree. There are 50 majors available to choose from, as well as the ability for students to design their own “special major” which would involve interdisciplinary study. Finally, Swarthmore College provides a competitive Honors Program modeled on the tutorial system at Oxford in which students, who prepare for it during two years of small discussion or seminar sessions, would at the end of their senior year be evaluated on their studies by outside scholars. Students also have the flexibility to take courses at nearby Bryn Mawr and Haverford through the Tri-College Consortium, as well as attend classes at the University of Pennsylvania.

While I chose to pursue Engineering and Linguistics as my majors, I was also given the opportunity to participate in several extracurricular activities, including Swarthmore IEEE and War News Radio. However, by far the most rewarding and humbling experience was spending time as a volunteer firefighter and, later, emergency medical technician of the Swarthmore Fire and Protective Association. Spending a couple hundred of hours of training to certify for the national exams, and then learning emergency medicine and life support at the nearby community college gave me a powerful sense of purpose and belonging in the community.

Where do Swarthmore students go after graduating? For an institution its size, it sends a sizeable number of students to graduate school, with 8 in 10 attending some graduate study after graduation. Others go on to start their own initiatives, work at companies across the United States and beyond, or volunteer with groups such as the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Every year, several individuals earn Watson or Fulbright scholarships to pursue personal journeys and academic endeavors around the world.