BY DYLON CHOW

In print | October 2, 2008

Last Saturday, the Parrish parlors were packed with approximately 175 high school seniors waiting to be assigned to student hosts. Every year, the admissions office organizes Discovery Weekend to give high school seniors of color a preview of what may very well be the college they choose to attend. High school students from around the country participated in thee days of programming designed to introduce prospective students to the college’s social and academic environments through faculty panels, social events and classroom participation.

Swarthmore’s admissions office is one of many across the United States that organize annual programs for high school seniors of color in an effort to increase the diversity of the applicant pool and ultimately of the matriculating class. According to Calvin Ho ’11, a multicultural recruitment intern for Admissions, “We’re trying to get more students of color on campus.” Reed College, Grinnell, Tufts and Washington University in St. Louis are among the institutions that offer students a weekend on campus at no cost. Swarthmore covered the transportation and dining expenses of all Discovery Weekend participants, many of whom flew great distances to visit the college.

The Admissions Office and various student organizations on campus wanted visitors to receive an authentic feel of what life at Swarthmore is like, both academically and socially—in other words, according to Ho, to inform visiting students “what Swarthmore’s all about.”

The weekend was packed with a variety of social events sponsored by different campus organizations. These events included an ice cream social organized by MULTi, a screening of new Latin American music videos by ENLACE and a teahouse hour hosted the Swarthmore Asian Organization. There was also an open house hosted by the Swarthmore African American Student Society, a “Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream Social,” and “Mehndi Night with DESHI.” Through these events, visitors were introduced to the range of campus organizations that cater to students of color.

Prospective students learned about Swarthmore’s academic culture and liberal arts curriculum through a faculty panel and an alumni panel. The alumni panel, called “The Value of Liberal Arts at Swat,” discussed the virtues and the practical applications of a liberal arts education. The alumni presentation was followed up by a panel of six professors who guided a discussion moderated by Professor Vollmer. The panelists addressed student questions concerning academics at Swarthmore and tried to give participants a feel for the tempo of academic life on campus. Discovery Weekend also featured a faculty and staff lunch, during which visiting students were encouraged to ask questions in an informal setting. Harry Wang, a high school senior from Hartfield, PA, said that the lunch was particularly beneficial. “The professors gave a lot of interesting insight into academics and the courses available,” Wang said.

Discovery Weekend also featured an informational session on the college’s financial aid policies. On Sunday morning, Director of Financial Aid Laura Talbot gave a brief overview of the financial aid program and the procedure for securing aid packages.

Visiting high school seniors also had the opportunity to hear the perspectives of current students in a panel on student life that was closed to administrators and faculty members so that current and prospective students would feel comfortable engaging in a candid discussion of the campus social scene.

The closed panel made a strong impression on many of the prospective students. “My favorite event was probably the student life,” Alyson Chu, a high school senior from Mechanicville, NY, said. “You totally got an honest response about the school. You could see the discrepancies between what students said and what professors and admissions staff said,” she said.

Nevertheless, in a weekend teaming with structured activities, some students preferred to define their own agendas and spend the weekend exploring the campus independently. “I liked the time [without] required events,” Poojith Padmaraj, from Aurora, IL, said.

In the final hours of the busy three-day weekend, students visited Monday morning classes to get a firsthand impression of the classroom environment. Many courses were offered to visiting students, ranging from large classes like Introduction to Economics and Introduction to Biology, to first-year seminars such as Religion and the Meaning of Life and the Linear Algebra Honors Seminar.
Students took away different experiences from Discovery Weekend.

“I didn’t learn that much new information about the school,” Chu said at breakfast on Monday, the last day of Discovery Weekend. Padmaraj, who was sitting across from Chu at the breakfast table, had a very different response. “I enjoyed the whole experience and learned a lot about a college I barely knew about before,” he said.

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