Sarah Lawrence is a small liberal arts college about an hour north of New York City. As a student, you get a tranquil and nurturing learning environment within arms-reach of one of the most exciting and fast-paced cities in the world. Just under 1,500 undergraduates call the campus home, and hail from 44 states and 53 countries. The college is known for small classes that are conversation-based, often taught around a table to encourage conversation, and require participation. Students at Sarah Lawrence spend more time conversing with faculty, they say, than at any other college in the United States.
Sarah Lawrence is beloved by artists, musicians, writers, and other creatives, including those who identify as creative souls in the STEM fields. And students who attend Sarah Lawrence pursue multi-disciplinary and collaborative courses of study that pull from across the arts, the humanities, history and social sciences, and the natural sciences and math. They also have access to The Writing Institute, where strong students learn to be exceptional writers. “Across all your endeavors,” Sarah Lawrence says, “you will ask important questions, challenge assumptions, gain greater knowledge of the world and your place in it.”
The acceptance rate for first-year admission to Sarah Lawrence is about 50%, which is selective but not stressfully so. We strongly recommend Sarah Lawrence as a fit for students in the top third of their high school class, and as a foundation school for students in the top 25% who want a liberal arts experience and have a particular interest in the humanities.
The best majors at Sarah Lawrence play to their strengths and make the best use of the outstanding resources they have on hand. Below, we break down our five favorite majors at Sarah Lawrence.
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What do we mean by best major?
First off, let’s breakdown what we mean by ‘best major,’ or ‘favorite major’. Sarah Lawrence offers 50 disciplines and programs of study, and you can pick more than one, or choose a cross-disciplinary path that pulls from different departments. So, there’s a lot of good stuff in the mix, and it’s all overlapping. But we picked our top five based on the creativity of the program and how unique it is, the depth of the resources available to students, and the strength of post-graduation resources.
Writing
This one is a no-brainer. Sarah Lawrence is the writing school. While writing is emphasized for all students at the college, those in the writing program make words their world. Students can focus in on fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. Through workshops, students build their practical writing skills. Through seminar-style courses like “Is Journalism What We Think It Is?” and “13 Ways of Looking at a Novel,” students learn the theory behind words. Guest speakers, public readings, lectures, and one-on-one conferences with instructors further augment the experience, helping students discover their own voice through exposure to different ideas, perspectives, and styles. They emphasize “free and open expression” and encourage students to experiment and take risks. They want students in the program to feel supported and nurtured, but also challenged.
Something we especially love about the Sarah Lawrence writing program is the way the college nurtures writing on campus while encouraging careers through the proximity to NYC. Students are supported in getting internships with educational programs, publishers, agents, art agencies, and publications.
Public Policy
We love the Sarah Lawrence Public Policy program because it’s a robust academic program housed within a community that emphasizes progressive ideologies, free speech, and big ideas. Students take courses that are big wide-ranging surveys, like “Introduction to Feminist Economics,” and that are hyper-zoomed in and place-based, like “Environmental Justice and Yonkers: The Political Economy of People, Power, Place, and Pollution.” This is one of the most multi-disciplinary programs at Sarah Lawrence, and it encourages students to pull diverse and complicated ideas together, from studying the rise of the New Right to questioning how to define normal “for an era of global catastrophe.”
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
The LGBT studies program at Sarah Lawrence is one of the only programs of its kind in the country. Students study gender and sexuality theories and issues “across cultures, categories, and historical periods.” The program combines seminars, discussion-based courses, and independent and supported research. Courses like “Queer Theory: A History” and “Documentary Filmmaking and Music as Liberation” We’re especially interested in how the program pulls from the arts, the sciences, and the humanities, bringing courses like “Beauty and Biolegitimacy” and “Performance Art Tactics” into the program to create depth and breadth for those pursuing the program.
Literature
What’s the difference between Writing and Literature, you ask? Well, writing is writing, and literature is the study of writing. The Literature program at Sarah Lawrence immerses students into not only the history of writing, but also the history of writing culture from the first time ‘words’ were put to ‘paper’ through to today. You can study writing across cultures and languages, and there are courses that focus on individual writers (like Virginia Woolf), on particular genres (like comedy, or on periods or traditions). Students may have their favorites, but the program encourages students to go outside of their natural preferences to fully explore the written word. We’re obsessed with the specificity of many of these courses. I mean, who doesn’t want to take “Fops, Coquettes, and the Masquerade: Fashioning Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage From Shakespeare to Austen”?
Health, Science, and Society
The Health, Science, and Society program at Sarah Lawrence brings together not just courses from different departments, but also courses from both the undergraduate and graduate programs. So, yes, students in the program are taking graduate courses as undergrads. They also have access to programs and events “that address the meaning of health and illness, advocacy for health and healthcare, and structures of medical and scientific knowledge.” Students can take programs in biology, chemistry, economics, dance, art history, environmental studies, history, literature, math, physics, and more to fulfill the program. We love the Sarah Lawrence approach to traditional more rigid subject areas, like the sciences and math, because they refuse to accept that rigidity as inherent. Instead, they make everything creative, and we love that.
To succeed at Sarah Lawrence, regardless of program, you need to be willing to push beyond your comfort zone, pull from many subject areas, and have hard conversations with fellow great thinkers. Sarah Lawrence offers such a welcoming and nurturing environment not because they’re a wet blanket, but because they will push you further than anyone likely ever has before. We encourage students who are humanities-oriented, creativity-minded, and passionate about collaboration to put Sarah Lawrence on their college list.
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