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The Traitor in your Pocket

Between mobile technology advancements and the exploding availability of public Wi-Fi, it’s never been easier to stay connected. It’s also never been riskier. Can you afford to lose nine months’ work to a data breach?

$3.86 million and nine months’ work. According to IBM and the Ponemon Institute, that’s the average cost of a data breach in 2020 (some reach tens of millions), and those numbers are going up each year.

Security is important, but it has a tense relationship with convenience. You could secure your home by installing a moat, but how quickly would your patience for a drawbridge run dry? 

Luckily, you don’t have to go medieval to drastically reduce your risk of a data breach on your mobile devices. You do, however, have to accept trading a little ease for a lot of peace of mind and reduced risk.

Many of us still have a late-90s view on cybersecurity: make sure no one knows your passwords and you’re A-OK. Not so. Our devices communicate wirelessly with email servers, web servers, database servers, even printers, and each of these connections is a crack in the armor; any vulnerability anywhere compromises the entire system. The most tempting, most dangerous, most ubiquitous vulnerability?

Public Wi-Fi. On airplanes, in Starbucks—even grocery stores and parks now often have free Wi-Fi networks. Conducting business on them is leaving your front door (and wall safe) wide open. The most effective safeguard is abstinence. Simply do not use them. Period. Pay a little extra for unlimited cellular data, or better yet, to use your phone as a password-protected mobile hotspot.

If your IT department has VPN or 3-factor authentication protocols, use them without exception. You’ve likely heard “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” For our purposes, make that “logging in twice is better than a $3,860,000 clean-up.”

Your next best option, if using a public network is truly unavoidable, is to make sure everything you do is SSL encrypted. Thankfully, that’s easier than it sounds. Examine the full URL of every site you visit and ensure it reads “https,” not just “http.” That “s” is critical—it means whatever you do is encrypted, and while dedicated hackers could still decipher it, it would take much longer to accomplish, and for many it won’t be worth the effort.

To borrow a phrase from the founding fathers, “vigilance is the price of liberty.” We enjoy unprecedented ease of access to information, communication, and the tools of productivity. Taking a few moments, or paying a few extra dollars a month, is not too high a price to avoid an expensive—and embarrassing—catastrophe.

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It takes a village, not a metropolis

At Swarthmore, most classes are small enough to meet in a freight elevator, or the basket of a medium-capacity hot air balloon, or three gondolas.

The average class size at Swarthmore is literally the perfect number for a game of musical chairs, or dodgeball.

Just our opinion, but: we think it’s probably not ideal for individual student engagement if professors need a lapel mic to teach. The image of academia as a sprawling lecture hall, stadium seating packed to the brim under fluorescent lights, just doesn’t work for us.

Our ratio of faculty to students (8:1) and an average class size (17) mean your professors know you, personally — and equally important, you get to know your peers, the folks you’ll collaborate with both in college and beyond. Mentorship, to us, is not just what professors can offer students, but what students can offer one another.

(Dodgeball rivalries notwithstanding.)

Hurry up and meet the people who are going to shape your college career. Apply to Swarthmore today.

Do NOT wait your turn

Swarthmore sophomores Alora Young and Jemille Duncan didn’t need anyone’s permission to begin building the world they want to live in.

Young, published author and youth poet laureate, is using her gift with words to chronicle and speak out on climate change, race relations, women’s rights, and the thread of her own family winding through American history.

Duncan has been active in local politics since before he was old enough to drive, using his skills as a columnist and activist to influence legislation and policy in Philadelphia.

Waiting your turn — super important social skill! On the playground, in line for coffee, at a four-way stop sign. No argument there.

Putting your knowledge and talents into action? Speaking your mind? The very best time is right now. Apply to Swarthmore today and let’s get started.

Sometimes ‘fun’ begins with a silent p

Every autumn, for one night, Swarthmore campus becomes a forest of make-believe. Swarthmoreans with formidable foam weaponry hunt and battle creatures of prehistoric and mythical origin: orcs, trolls, and ferocious pterodactyls.

It’s part scavenger hunt, part prank, and 100% shenanigans. If you think that sounds rad, stop reading and just apply to Swarthmore. You’re gonna fit in great here.

But if you’re scoffing at such a juvenile premise, stay with us for a moment. Consider this:

A funny thing about learning is that, for at least the first chunk of your life, it was indistinguishable from play. You figured out basic motor skills by rolling around, enthralled by your first taste of agency. You learned the alphabet by singing. You learned shapes and colors by playing with blocks, learned to read by falling under the spell of fantastic stories.

The pursuit of knowledge, we say, is significant, not serious. Not all the time, at least.

If you think big-league academics can coexist with brazen tomfoolery, that the two balance and even enhance one another, apply to Swarthmore, and spread your wings.

Your terrifying, leathery wings.
The Various People of the Swarthmore Admissions Office

Grade point shmaverage

Sally Ride (Swarthmore ‘72) aspired to play professional tennis, but it didn’t work out. She went back to school, studied Shakespeare and quantum mechanics, and then became the first American woman in space.

She didn’t get an F in “tennis” or an A in “NASA.”

Michael Dukakis (Swarthmore ‘55) was the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history. Renowned for his evidence-based approach to enacting progressive policies, he secured the Democratic nomination for president in 1988. Though he fared better than the previous two nominees from his party, the presidency went to George H.W. Bush.

Dukakis didn’t get an A in “governor” or an F in “president.”

Life doesn’t give you a grade. You strive boldly, and sometimes you triumph.

Right now you’re still in the thick of building your high school career to a crescendo. You’re taking the tough classes, putting in the work and heart of extracurriculars or athletics, intending to earn a spot at a top-tier college. Good.

Here’s the thing: if you earn a spot here, we’ll know that you can achieve. We’ll know that your intellect, integrity, and discipline are up to snuff. Nothing more to prove—not just yet. That’s why everyone’s first semester here is pass/fail. Not just to give you a short break from being outcome-oriented, but to make it easier and more enticing to try something new.

Something you might not have a knack for. Something that might even frighten you. Something that might wind up giving you the edge in your field down the road.

To fewer A’s and more awe,
The Various People of the Swarthmore Admissions Office

Doubling down on sustainability

Ambition isn’t always reaching for the stars. Sometimes, it’s digging deep — 800 feet, to be exact.

Swarthmore recognizes that going carbon-neutral is one of the most vital engineering challenges facing institutions of all kinds. (We prefer our dinosaurs goofy and imaginative, not dug up and combusted, thank you very much.

The crown jewel of Swarthmore’s audacious “To Zero by Thirty-Five” zero-emissions plan is a state-of-the-art geoexchange system. It uses narrow, 800-foot-deep holes to tap into the immense thermal mass of our own planet and the inviolable laws of thermodynamics, moving heat FROM campus in the summer (cooling things down), and TO campus in the winter (warming things up). No dinosaurs required.

You should apply to Swarthmore if any of the following applies to you:

• You’re curious about or already understand the science behind geothermal exchange
• You know how pivotal ditching fossil fuels will be for the future of our species and planet
• You want to go to college somewhere that doesn’t just emphasize exciting, futuristic methods of sustainability, but backs it up as a core value with real actions large and small
• You respect dinosaurs and want to let them sleep

To putting our smallest footprint forward,
The Various People of the Swarthmore Admissions Office

Hello, fellow human

Good day, it is I, a fellow human person, as opposed to an AI chat bot. I attend Swarthmore College, and am writing you this email with my human fingers, having just finished one or more normal human habits, such as drinking a cup of coffee or sneezing.

I bet we have many common interests. My favorite artist is multi-platinum pop star Taylor Swift, and my favorite snack is a Sudoku — I mean, popcorn! My favorite book is Dune, because I agree that artificial intelligence should be illegal. Humans rule!

I hope another of our common interests is Swarthmore. It’s one of the only establishments of higher education where big-league academic rigor joins forces with the critical thinking, adaptability, and creative exploration of a first-rate liberal arts college.

It’s a place not only for the next generation of great scientists and engineers, but also the thinkers, policymakers, and creatives who will shape innovation in meaningful and just ways.

You’ll do graduate-level research, because Swarthmore’s average class size is 17. You’ll experience mentorship from and connection with elite thinkers, because the ratio of students to faculty is small.

You’ll have easy, free access via speedy public transit to Philadelphia, the only World Heritage City in the U.S., but you’ll come home to a quiet forest where you can find calm and recharge your batteries (I mean this, of course, as a metaphor, since our human brains run on glucose, not electricity, hahaha).

Gosh, I sure am rambling on like a broken piece of obsolete audiological technology. Just apply to Swarthmore today, and maybe next year we’ll get together to make some AI: a capella and improv.

Now if you’ll excuse me, a human classmate of mine needs help looking at a series of photos and choosing only the ones that contain a street sign, which will be a very easy task for me.

All the intelligence, none of the artificiality,
The Various PEOPLE of the Swarthmore Admissions Office