I’ve been looking to apply here and I’m kind of wondering what the curriculum is like specifically. Isn’t changing a full curriculum to be based around western canon kind of reductive? Would it not be better to learn Eastern culture? Does it really matter that much?
How strong of a candidate would you be for graduate programs at higher-tiered (Ivies, Oxford, etc.) institutions?
My sister went there for one year, >40 years ago, before deciding it wasn’t her cup of tea. Hopefully someone here has experience with St. John’s that’s both more recent and more direct.
No experience, but you might want to expand your search to New Mexico as well.
I believe it would be a positive for grad school, but maybe less so for the sciences. Their graduate program does have an Eastern Classics option. It’s supposed to be a good education, if maybe partially because the students are self-selective.
I know a small network of people who went there. They are all smart, quirky, service-oriented types. Most seem to come from well off families (though I may be wrong there.) The alumni network seems strong in DC, I’m not sure how it would translate elsewhere. I don’t think it is the most direct route to a high-prestige grad school, but I doubt it’d count against you.
My wife and I graduated from SJC in the early 1980s. I’m going to bed now, but I’ll be happy to answer your questions tomorrow. Or you may PM me.
The Western Canon (in the sense of the material in the Great Books) is already a lot to learn in four years. There are also other things to learn for a St. John’s bachelor’s degree like music, language, and laboratory science. Why would you want to further overstuff your time doing the Eastern Classics too? They have a master’s program for just that.
I was doing some research on it a couple days ago after the name popped up in another thread; I had never heard of the college before and it sounded like a eally interesting place. I read somewhere that it one of the highest percentages of students who go on to earn Phd’s,(top 2%) I can’t remeber where I read that though:(
All students take the same program. There are no electives. Everyone takes four years of seminar, four years of math, four years of language (ancient Greek for two years, French for two years) three years of lab (science), and one year of music. (All of this was true when I graduated in 1984, but there may have been some minor changes since then.)
All classes are discussion classes, no lecture classes. Seminar meets two evenings a week for two hours, with two faculty members (all called tutors, no “professors”) and about twenty students, to discuss one of the primary “great books,” which range from Homer to Faulkner, and include works of philosophy, scripture, history, politics, fiction, music (e.g. Tristan und Isolde), and more.
The other classes, known as tutorials, are all small groups of 12-15 with one tutor, and all work from the primary sources in their areas, not from conventional text books. That is, in Math you read and do the proofs from Euclid, not a book *about *Euclid. In Lab, in Junior year, you read Einstein, and so on. Again, these are all discussion classes. All students are expected to participate. The tutor merely leads the conversation.
In Junior and Senior years, there is a five-week break from Seminar for preceptorials, a close study of a single work or topic. Tutors post the subjects they will hold precepts on, and students sign up for them. This is as close as we get to electives. One of mine was on James Joyce’s Ulysses, and believe me, five weeks was not too long a time to study it.
Grades are kept for the sake of graduate schools, but are not given to the students unless they ask for them, and asking is discouraged. You are expected to be learning for the sake of learning, not for a grade. Instead of grades, you learn of your academic standing twice a year in the Don Rag, a meeting of all your tutors in which they report on your progress.
Despite my St. John’s education, I’m not sure what you mean by reductive. 
Would you care to elaborate?
I agree with this. But the standard reply to the question about Eastern works is that most of us in the West have grown up immersed in the cultural influences of the Western classics, like the Bible, Aristotle, Shakespeare, etc., even if we’ve never read a word of any of them. Also, to a very great extent, most of the “great books” of the West have influenced those that came after them; they are a conversation, as we say. As great as they may be, Eastern classics were, for the most part, not part of that conversation.
And, as Wendell and thelurkinghorror mention, the SJC graduate program does have an Eastern Classics option.
About the Graduate program, it is intended for people who already have a Bachelor’s degree, but who want to experience the Great Books program. It is offered over the course of two summers, or as an evening program over two years during the regular school year. (Again, this may have changed.)
If you want the SJC undergraduate degree, you have to start as a freshman and do all four years, regardless of how much previous undergrad work you have had. Your can’t transfer in to sophomore or upper classes.
A very large percentage of SJC undergrads go on to do graduate work. I didn’t, but my wife earned two Masters and was ABD (all but dissertation) for a doctorate. The SJC Web site probably says something about how the program prepares students for graduate work.
The college has two campuses, Annapolis and Santa Fe, and they offer the same basic program, with some minor differences. You can transfer between campuses for full years. (I.e., you can do one or two years at the other campus, but you can’t transfer mid-year.)
Many people feel that Lab is the weakest part of the program, and when I was there it was the most confusing, because it wasn’t arranged chronologically, like the rest of the program. (Things may have changed in the last 30 years.) However, one of my classmates went on to become a particle physicist at a major research lab.
The point is that no part of the program is seen as training for a specific career path. It is intended to provide a classical liberal arts education: the basic things that a person should know to be well-rounded, not a specialist. St. John’s didn’t make me a philosopher, mathematician, a physicist, a historian, or an expert in Ancient Greek. It exposed me to the seminal works in those and many other areas, with the idea that all of that would prepare me for anything I wanted to do after I graduated.
And it did. For people who want more from college than specialized career training, I can’t recommend SJC highly enough.
I have to confess, I lied in this thread when I said I had never heard of St. John’s College. I had actually heard of it, but completely forgotten about it, so it was not an intentional lie.
I have a friend on facebook I met through a TH group and I knew he had gone to college in Annapolis. When I heard the name it was not one I recognized so I completely forgot about it.
He is very articulate and he is unusual among people I know(even the most highly educated) in his ability to articulate and discuss things in a way that he can explore a topic fully and succinctly in many ways from many angles and come to a coherent conclusion that mitigates and balances several opposing views.
After reading about St. Johns College, I did not make the connection until today when I was reading some of his postings - I remembered he went to college in Annapolis and so I checked his profile and lo and behold he was a St. John’s alumnus.
So anyway, if you go to St. John’s it will probably enhance your abilty to impress offbeat intellectual types and serious academics more than, say, your average soccer mom.
“Far from it.”
What’s the admissions process like? What are they typically looking for? Given the, well, more old-fashioned curriculum and grading practices, I would suspect that they might be unusual in more ways than one.
Minstrel, I graduated from St. John’s Santa Fe in 2009, and I’d be happy to answer any questions or chat about it.
When I applied, they strongly, strongly encouraged students to visit for at least a fully 24 hours, to sit in on a couple classes and experience the culture on campus. There was an interview, but I’m not sure how much weight it held towards an admissions decision rather than as a general meet-and-greet type thing.
They did look at your transcripts (if you had them - I knew a guy there who was homeschooled and had no grades to speak of), and SAT scores if you elected to submit them (but it was option, IIRC). There were three essays: why you want to go to St. John’s; the role books have played in your life with an emphasis on a particular book that’s resonated with you; and the obligatory ‘talk about a life-changing experience.’ There are no minimum or maximum word limits and they are genuinely going to look at what you have to say.
When I was there lab was mostly chronological - I’d be interested in how your experiences compared. Freshman year was your basic intro to physical sciences: biology (Aristotle and Harvey were some of the biggest readings), chemistry (Lavoisier, Gay-Lussac, Avogadro, Mendeleev, etc), and a touch of very basic physics (I know we read Archimedes, I’m not sure who else). Junior year was all physics: a bit of Galileo, then pretty much working in straight chronological order: Newton, Franklin, Maxwell, Coulomb, Faraday, etc.
Senior year we continued with physics for the first semester, which intertwined nicely with senior math - lots of Bohr, Shrödinger, de Broglie, Heisenberg, while we were reading lots of Einstein and Minkowski; I think that part of the program compliments itself very nicely (and makes students like me come dangerously close to some sort of mathematical crisis of faith in which you decide nothing is real). Second semester is back to biology - lots of Mendel and Darwin and accidental fruit-fly genocide.
I read somewhere that the curriculum gives you a lot of extra time to study other subjects independently. Is that true? Would it be possible to maybe find a tutor willing to study with you on certain subjects that aren’t covered extensively in the curriculum?
What’s the student life like? Is everyone busy reading? I know it’s a small campus, so how is Annapolis as a city?
I wouldn’t say that there’s a lot of extra time. SJC is the only college I went to, but I would assume that the work load is about the same as at other colleges, although with perhaps somewhat more reading and less writing.
You might be able to do so, but I wouldn’t count on it in any particular subject without checking out the faculty members first. IOW, if you find you have lots of spare time (I didn’t) and want to study the mating habits of black widow spiders, you might not find an arachnologist on the faculty. But if you found a tutor you liked who happened to be an expert in the Phoenician language, she might very well be happy to work with you on it privately, or start a small study group, if others were also interested.
It’s a small school – about 400 students total – so everyone pretty much gets to know everyone else, even across class years. This is reinforced by extracurricular activities in which the classes are commingled, such as the intramural sports program. All students are automatically assigned to one of several teams, which include people from all four years. Participation is entirely optional (in four years, I didn’t play in a single game), but those who do will be playing with upper- and lower-classmen.
There is a lot of reading, of course, but also plenty of parties, including waltz and swing parties. The campus backs onto a small creek that leads out to the Chesapeake Bay, and there is a boat house with a number of vessels students can use.
When I was a student, the drama club or other ad hoc groups put on at least one or two shows a year, of widely varying quality. There were also archery, fencing, chess, and other similar clubs.
And since my senior year, one of the biggest events of the year is the annual Croquet Tournament between SJC and the Naval Academy. I never played intramural sports, but I was on the croquet team that beat Navy in 1984.
Annapolis is a charming historic town that has become much more touristy since I was there 30 years ago, but is still very pleasant.
If you want to study subjects independently, I recommend my undergraduate college, New College in Sarasota, Florida. Independent study is one of the basic ideas of the college. There are many courses for you to take in each major that New College offers, of course, but independent study is a significant part of everyone’s time. You have to do a certain number of independent study projects in your time at the college. You have to do a senior thesis. You can set up courses that you design yourself with the permission of a professor who will evaluate your work. You can create your own major. You can do courses at another university with the permission of one professor. A course at New College is anything you and one professor call a course. A major is anything you and two professors call a major. A successful senior thesis is anything you and three professors call successful:
It does very well at getting its graduates into top graduate and professional schools. It probably has the largest proportion of Fulbright Fellowships among its graduates. It definitely has the largest proportion of Fields Medalists among its graduates. It’s a fascinating, weird place that is consistently ranked as one of the best buys for the high quality of its education.
Thanks, that’s quite interesting!
One thing that might be really neat would be a university guide that classified schools by potentially quirky or interesting aspects rather than the standard criteria. Anyone know of any? There are plenty of guidebooks and websites that will let me research schools by major, degree levels offered, school size, location (urban, rural, online, etc.), affiliation (e.g. state, religious, secular private nonprofit, private for-profit, etc.) and ratings (e.g. 4 stars for Electrical Engineering, only 1 star for Psychology at Podunk U).
What there isn’t much of is what we’re discussing in this thread - universities that have <x> feature where <x> is potentially quirky or appealing to a limited subset of students. So maybe Johnny Highschooler is interested in getting a bachelor’s degree at a school that would allow him to travel on the high seas doing research, that allows one to substitute independent research for what are traditionally “lecture” courses, and allows one to “test out” of most first and second year general education (GenEd) courses by oral challenge exam. He then consults the Big Book of Quirky Colleges and finds out that the Eastern Maritime University of Maine has most of that, including a “semester at sea” as part of their BS in Oceanography, and is widely known to accept transfer credit from the Industrial College of Kansas, which has a robust “credit for research” program where you can write papers on your own and submit them for credit consideration (“Yes, this paper on tactics at the First Battle of Bull Run is worth 1 credit in US History, and your essay on WW2 recruitment practices in California is worth another. Complete one more essay to finish a three-credit sequence that is generally acceptable for transfer.”).
A big part of college is learning the academic thought process - how to do research, develop an argument, find support, make a hypothesis, investigate it, evaluate what could have been done better, and speculate on what could be done later. That’s something that you can learn regardless of what you study. That’s why a degree, even in a “career” major, is a real degree, and not a vocational training program. Someone with a BS in Computer Science is someone who can write software and is also a halfway-decent thinker and might be trusted to think logically about the culture of ancient Rome with respect to toilet humor or about the potential social ramifications of making Internet banner ads illegal. Probably not an expert, but he can start thinking about it and learn more. Someone with a career certificate in C++ is someone who can write OK C++ and might otherwise be brain-dead.
Well, there’s this…
Ah, looking back at my post you replied too, I feel as if I worded it strangely. :smack:
A better way to sum up what I was asking for would be:
“Am I missing out on anything in a top-tiered liberal arts education by completely disregarding eastern works?”
And I appreciate your insight commasense. However, I feel that your experience is a bit outdated and I’m really interested in finding out what kind of life will be within a walkable distance of St. Johns in Annapolis. How are the art and music scenes? How’s the social life on campus right now?
(I’m kind of looking for a sort of a “beat generation” discovery at college like Ginsberg at Columbia and I feel like St. John’s College might be the place.)
If you feel SJC might be right for you, you’re probably right. The best way to know, and to find out more about Annapolis, is to visit the campus, which the school strongly recommends for all prospective students. You’ll come for a couple of days, stay in a dorm, get a tour, sit in on a seminar and some classes, and get a feel for the place and the Program. The admissions office can help arrange it for you.