One of the best ways to get at the essence of Swarthmore is to look at its people. The ways that they learn, the work that they do, and the lives that they lead offer insight into the habits of mind and values that spring from Swarthmore. On the following pages, you will meet six young students and alumni whose actions in the world reveal the educational common ground that all Swarthmoreans share.

Eternal Student

For as long as he can remember, Jacob Krich ’00 has wanted to know more about the way things—all kinds of things—work. So he’s spending a lifetime finding out.

When Jacob Krich set out some eight years ago to write the essay for his Swarthmore application, he wrote about what he thought would be the ideal college experience. He wrote that he would like to sit down with a college course catalog and work his way through it from beginning to end, from anthropology to zoology, stopping only when he had studied absolutely everything the college had to offer. He wrote that in his perfect world, he would be a student all his life.

When Krich finally sat down with the Swarthmore catalog and learned that curriculum realities would require some narrowing, he set to work paring his list of possible majors to a manageable 20 or so; then, during his freshman and sophomore years, he explored as many of those as he possibly could. When it finally came time to decide on a major, physics seemed the logical choice. Why? Because, he says, “When you ask a physicist why, he doesn’t refer you to another discipline.”

To do physics justice would mean doing it as closely as possible to the way physicists do it, and this meant participating in the Honors Program, a long-standing Swarthmore tradition that encourages learning at the highest possible level. The program, which was revamped in the mid-1990s, has three signature characteristics. One, honors candidates take part in intense seminars designed to foster both collaboration and a high degree of independent thinking. Two, students are required to do a thesis. And three, the award of honors is conferred not by the College itself but by a panel of expert external examiners. What made the biggest difference for Krich was the thesis. “The thesis terrified me,” he says. “It’s the closest model of what practicing scientists do, and it terrified me. But I wanted to lock myself into something that made me do it. It was possibly the most rewarding thing I did at Swarthmore.”

Krich’s work focused on substances called liquid crystals, which are molecules that exist in a state somewhere between a liquid and a solid and that are being used in everything from high-tech optical displays to laser devices. The liquid crystals he was interested in move around while still approximating the shape of a helix. A full rotation through that helix is called the pitch. In some cases, as the temperature increases, the helix completely unwraps and inverts, wrapping itself the opposite direction. Krich’s hypothesis was that any liquid crystal could be made to invert if it could be heated enough without causing it to melt. Unfortunately, he notes, “it didn’t happen.”

So, with time running out on his summer of thesis research, he switched to a side project that looked at the phase transition that occurs as the temperature of a liquid is lowered to the point just before it becomes a liquid crystal. He studied tiny pockets of liquid-crystal-like substances that appeared at temperatures too hot for an actual liquid crystal and set out to make the very difficult measurement of the pitch of these “pretransitional fluctuations.” The success of this project allowed Krich to test a widely used theory. The theory, Krich found, was wrong; his work to reach this conclusion earned him the American Physical Society’s Apker Award, given annually for the best undergraduate physics thesis.

“Jacob is the best model for a modern scholar I can think of,” says his friend and thesis adviser Swarthmore Professor of Physics Peter Collings. “He enjoys the life of the mind without being overly professorial. He has this impressive intellect, but it’s not an intimidating intellect. He won’t push people away—he’ll draw them in. That’s where I think he’s special.”

Those qualities helped him win a Rhodes Scholarship. Now in his third year at Oxford, he’s beginning to feel like he might achieve that goal of being an eternal student after all. After the Rhodes, he’s looking at five or six years in a doctoral program and then a few years at least as a postdoc. Then, a career in an academic environment is almost certainly in order. But whether that career will be at a major research university, where Professor Collings says Jacob would “make a real difference in our understanding of nature,” or at a place more like Swarthmore, where undergraduates would benefit enormously from his intellect and personality, remains to be seen.

Krich himself is putting off that decision for now. But a clue to his eventual direction might be found in a story he likes to tell about a hiking trip he took a few years ago in Costa Rica with his father and sister. They were standing at the top of a mountain on a clear day under a sky that was a sharp and brilliant blue, and that got Krich thinking about physics. “I remembered,” he recalls, “that the light from the blue sky is partially polarized, which you can see particularly well when you have a clear sky. I had polarized sunglasses, which meant that if you looked at the sky and rotated them, the light would grow darker and lighter. I showed this to my sister, and I got the response that every teacher always dreams of [hearing]. She said, ‘That’s so cool!’”

A liberal arts education has prepared Jeremy Peterson ’99 for high-level positions at a remarkably young age.

It was spring 2001, and Jeremy Peterson, newly appointed at the astonishing age of 24 as director of the New York City Parks Department’s Operations and Management Planning (OMP) Division, was having a problem with the excess grass growing between sidewalk cobblestones in Battery Park. Because Jeremy was having a problem with this, and the problem had been duly noted in a report OMP had prepared, it was also a problem for Manhattan Borough Commissioner Adrian Benepe. Peterson believed it was Benepe’s responsibility to keep the spaces between the cobblestones grass free. Commissioner Benepe, many years older and with many more years of experience than Director Peterson, was doing his best to discredit the report and its author at a meeting of all the New York Borough commissioners.

“I was the chief bad guy,” Peterson recalls. “It was my job to kick peoples’ butts. Commissioner Benepe pulled out the report in front of all the top commissioners and said, ‘Look at this picture of grass between the stones. It’s not OMP’s job to deal with these small aesthetic concerns.’ He had a valid point. But I also had a valid point—these were the rules, and it was an offense.”

So Peterson stuck to his guns. When Commissioner Benepe was promoted to commissioner of the entire City Parks Department not too long afterward, the OMP’s chief bad guy feared he might soon become a former chief bad guy. Much to his surprise, and relief, what Peterson got instead of the axe was respect; in his first speech to Parks staff, the new commissioner said keeping park ratings up was his top priority, and he singled out Peterson for his tenacity and toughness.

Precocious leadership under pressure is nothing new to Peterson. His father is a biologist who studied wolves and moose on Michigan’s Isle Royale, where family vacations consisted of collecting random body parts of decaying animals. Once, when the leader of a volunteer team assembled to support his father’s research got sick, Jeremy, who was all of 15 at the time, was recruited to head the expedition, guiding a group of adults off trail through thickets as dense as suburban garden hedges in search of decaying moose. “My parents were very nervous,” he remembers. “They didn’t know if these people would come out alive or dead.” All survived, and he led four more trips before his freshman year at Swarthmore.

At Swarthmore, Jeremy integrated interests in the natural world and human behavior into a major in bioanthropology, an interdisciplinary field that explores the evolutionary roots of human behavior. It was an education, he says, that did a good job of imparting practical knowledge and instilling an ethic of purposefulness. “The hard skills I gained in science classes were incredibly useful. They enabled me to digest problems, break them down, and look for solutions. When I entered the workforce, I was better prepared than others and able to advance rapidly. And Swarthmore imbues students with a sense of responsibility, a sense that you have some purpose in the world. You have this education, and these talents, and this knowledge, and you have this responsibility to use it all in a productive manner.”

One day after graduating, he moved to New York to start his job with OMP. He was at Parks a year and a half before being named director, a job that was every bit as much about human behavior as it was about protecting natural environments. He is proudest of putting in place a system to improve the performance of workers in the agency’s skilled trade shops—blacksmiths, plumbers, carpenters, and other heavy-trade workers—people with high pay and highly unionized jobs who had compiled a 1,000-order backlog of work orders. The biggest challenge, Peterson says, was creating an incentive for change. “The government is better at sticks than carrots, and even the sticks aren’t that good. I mean, you can’t fire these people. But they took pride in their jobs. So we used the tool of competition.” Monthly performance goals were set for each shop, and no shop wanted to face the embarrassment of being the only one to fall short of its goal. In six months, the backlog was gone.

For now, Peterson has left New York for Argentina, a country struggling through economic crisis and political upheaval, where he’s learning Spanish and working for the Buenos Aires Herald while waiting to hear if he’s been accepted to law school. He’s chronicling his experiences on a Web site, http://unglued.org, which he describes as a sort of modern-day travelogue. On one page, he ruminates on a friend’s account of how people at the University of Buenos Aires cheered when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. On another is a story about local protest marchers angry about increased utility costs. And on yet another is an account of Peterson’s own frustrating experience with an uncooperative washing machine. You can bet he saw to it that the laundry eventually got done.

Change Agent

The service ethic is what drew Smitha Arekapudi ’99 to Swarthmore, and it remains the dominant force shaping her life and career.

One of the first qualities that struck Smitha Arekapudi about Swarthmore when she was a high school student in Chicago thumbing through the College’s catalog several years ago was language that connected Swarthmore to its Quaker heritage. It was not so much the “Quakerness” itself that attracted her as the principles underlying it, values of simple living, generous giving, and a commitment to a search for truth. “I felt,” she says, “that they were promoting the idea of seeking intellectual clarity.” And “there’s a general sense that you’re being prepared to be someone who will be an active part of society,” she adds.

Being an active part of society was nothing new to Arekapudi. She attended high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where she was an outstanding student and president of the school’s chapter of Amnesty International. Her activities in and out of the classroom made her an ideal candidate for admission into Swarthmore’s Lang Scholars Program. The program, created through a gift from Eugene Lang ’38, offers financial and other kinds of support to students who are committed to social justice and have potential to become leaders in civic society.

Arekapudi’s civic engagements as a Swarthmore student, both on and off campus, were many. She worked in Philadelphia for the Pro Choice Task Force, which helped escort women seeking services at Planned Parenthood past an occasionally intimidating gauntlet of antiabortion protestors. She served on the Swarthmore freshman orientation committee and became co-president of the South Asian student organization, Deshi. She worked at the William Penn Housing Community in Chester, Pa., with the Chester-Swarthmore Community Coalition, helping to set up a women’s wellness center. She did a summer internship writing policy papers for the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group in Chicago.

Sometimes, these activities were directly linked to her academic studies. Her work in Chester, for example, was part of a political science course she was taking called Public Service, Community Organizing, and Social Change. Other times, the connections were less explicit. “Sometimes, it’s hard to connect a community project to the academic experience,” she says. “It can be a fundamentally different experience. But your courses prepare you to be an educated problem solver, whether in academics or in the real world. Some people say Swarthmore is about intellectual study supported by extracurricular programs. Maybe during certain experiences for me it was the other way around.”

Most Lang Scholars apply to do a special Lang Project, which is designed to meet a significant community need and is eligible for a grant of up to $10,000. For her project, Arekapudi helped launch an organization called the Illinois Public Health Advocate, which sought to educate and mobilize people in Illinois who were interested in public health issues. One of her first efforts was to organize a round table on public health in DuPage County, Ill. “We opened the dialogue and got an overwhelming response,” Arekapudi says. “Some came to talk about noise pollution at O’Hare Airport, which was a huge concern. Others asked about the meaning of public health and specific issues like contaminated food, contaminated swimming pools, and health care access. Others just came and said, ‘What can I do?’” The program’s success drew national attention, and others modeled on it have since been developed in several states.

Arekapudi’s next stop after graduating from Swarthmore with honors in economics was the Harvard School of Public Health, where today she’s pursuing a doctorate. Her chief interests are cancer prevention epidemiology and the effects of tobacco. After she earns her doctorate, she plans to go to medical school. After that, she hopes to work in women’s health and preventive medicine, striking the right balance between teaching, research, and practice.

At every step along the way of her evolving life and career, Arekapudi says, she’s grateful for the influence of her Swarthmore experiences. “The Lang Program encouraged us to be leaders in social and public service. Swarthmore gives you an academic foundation, but, importantly, you learn how to use that information to promote change and make a material difference in your community. You learn to think critically, observe well, speak articulately, and write persuasively, and also you learn to be an active citizen. There’s a sense that you’re being prepared to be someone who will be needed to take on an active and important role in the world. It’s the Swarthmore philosophy I’ve carried around this whole time.”

Mixing It Up

It’s the variety of experience that has made Swarthmore work for junior Matthew Goldstein, who has excelled in the classroom and on the baseball diamond.

Ask Matthew Goldstein to list some of the highlights of his Swarthmore years, and two come quickly to mind. One was winning the College’s Dunn Trophy—awarded to the sophomore who contributes most to the Athletics Program—last spring. The second was a trip he took to Baltimore in fall 2002 as a College representative to the national conference of the American Society of Human Genetics. These two events put some fitting bookends on college experience and signify the importance of Swarthmore to him.

Goldstein, a three-sport athlete in each of his four years at Crystal Springs Upland School in the San Francisco Bay Area, looked at Amherst and several Ivy League colleges, but he chose Swarthmore because he thought it gave him the best opportunity to explore his various intellectual interests fully and participate in intercollegiate athletics. “Athletics are an important part of my life,” he says, “but not the most important.” What made Swarthmore so attractive is that it has the proper balance.

As a freshman, he played soccer and later went out for baseball, when a friend suggested he try out. As a southpaw pitcher with a curve, a change-up, and a wicked fastball that tails away from right-handed batters, he was a welcome addition to a team that was struggling. Part of that struggle, he says looking back, could be attributed to an Athletics Program that was spread too thin.

During his sophomore year, however, as Swarthmore’s Intercollegiate Athletics Program was in the midst of being restructured, he sensed that the perspective on athletics was beginning to change. “This is an intellectual community,” he says, “and we’re here first and foremost to get an education. But after the restructuring, the remaining Athletics Programs are receiving more resources and attention, which in turn is raising the quality of those programs. As a result, the Swarthmore community is paying more attention, and the athletes are feeling better about what they’re doing.”

With the change in focus came stepped-up recruiting efforts; now, up to 30 prospects a year are visiting to look at Swarthmore and at its baseball program. The team members took matters into their own hands as well, holding meetings to decide among themselves where baseball fell on their priority lists. All this has been enormously rewarding, Goldstein says. “It’s a tremendous experience—we’re excited about contributing to the development of the baseball program.”

The turnaround is gradually playing itself out in the team’s performance. They improved from a dismal .200 season in Goldstein’s freshman year to .384 in the Centennial Conference last year, with a young team loaded with sophomores and juniors. This spring, Goldstein thinks they have a realistic shot at a .500 record. “When I compare freshman year to where we are now,” he says, “the difference is significant. There’s recognition that athletics are an important part of many students’ lives—and they can pursue the same high level of achievement in athletics as in academics.”

As an honors biology major with a history minor, Goldstein has experienced considerable success on the academic turf as well, and that too has been fulfilling. “I’ve really come into my own in terms of finding my intellectual and academic passion,” he says. “I don’t think I truly appreciated how much I love learning until I came here. I’ve developed a keen interest in genetics, particularly in the area of neurological diseases such as autism. This past summer, after taking a genetics seminar, I was fortunate to work with an autistic child as part of Cure Autism Now in the Bay Area. The Baltimore conference gave me the opportunity to hear about the cutting-edge research on autism.” He noted that al-though much is known about autism, there is great opportunity as the knowledge and understanding about the disease is in its infancy.

As for what happens after Swarthmore, Goldstein has his sights set on medical school and, after that, possible work in public health policy, research, or international health in developing countries. Goals such as these, he notes, are very Swarthmorean: “There’s an energy about Swarthmore. There’s something unique and different about how people approach their lives. There’s a sense of purpose—a sense that people have the ability to effect change and have an impact on society.”

Of course, if a pro scout showed enough interest, he wouldn’t be opposed to putting off saving the world for a few years, at least while his arm feels good.

Small World

What do a young man from Kenya and a young woman from rural Nevada have in common? Swarthmore—and a desire to understand better the complexity of the world in which they live.

Most girls going to high school in Fernley, Nev., a small town about 30 miles east of Reno on I-80, give little thought to leaving the state after graduating.

But Heather Weyrick ’01 wasn’t like most girls. And some of the literature she got from one very distant college piqued her interest. “They described themselves as different and quirky,” Heather recalls of her first encounter with a certain liberal arts school southwest of Philadelphia. “Among the people I grew up with, I really was weird and quirky. But when I got to Swarthmore, the scale on which they defined weird and quirky was much different from my own scale at that time.”

Swarthmore was an altogether foreign environment to her, even if not quite as foreign as a place like, say, Africa might have been.

Melkizedeck Okudo ’03, on the other hand, knew Africa. The young Kenyan had spent the first 18 years of his life in Nairobi before coming to the United States to attend the United World College, whose two-year program of intense academics, wilderness experiences, and community service attracts students from all over the world to its New Mexico campus. It was there that he first heard about Swarthmore. “I felt it was the kind of place where I wanted to be,” he says. “Academic rigor was the No. 1 thing, they gave financial support to international students, and I could be involved in community service.”

Okudo came to Swarthmore to be part of the Lang Scholar Program, which supports students who show exceptional promise in community service. To date, Okudo has been involved with two service-related projects. The summer after his freshman year, he worked in Kenya for a nongovernmental organization called Eco-News Africa, which monitors and reports on the impact of global policy making on the economies of nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Last spring, for his Lang project, he organized a partnership between a Chester, Pa., nonprofit and a group of Swarthmore students to promote computer education in Chester’s low-income, mostly black communities. The classes occurred during the summer, while Okudo was in New York doing an internship with Goldman Sachs. He returned to his work in Chester last fall, and another set of computer classes is about to begin.

Okudo enjoys the intellectual give-and-take of international conversations at Swarthmore—whether they center on Islamic fundamentalism or the recent elections in Kenya—and appreciates the interest of other students “to step out and find out about me.”

For Okudo, Swarthmore is an international experience. He, in turn—along with the 86 other international students on campus—is something of an international experience for others he meets. For Heather Weyrick, Swarthmore was the gateway to a broader world.

As a double major in theater and sociology/anthropology and a self-described child of pop culture, Weyrick became interested in the ways presentation and performance become part of our public lives. During a semester in Poland on a Swarthmore exchange program, she learned how theater has helped shape its national identity, especially when the country was under communist rule, and ways theater, much of it forced underground, helped the nation hang onto a Polish identity that stood in opposition to the “official” government identity. With the fall of communism, she says, theater took on an important role in rebuilding a nation. “The task of theater was to create an image of what it means to be Polish.”

In today’s world, what it means to be educated increasingly involves developing an understanding of other cultures and the ways they shape our lives. For this reason, international experiences are an increasingly important part of a Swarthmore education.

Weyrick is now back in Poland on a Fulbright Fellowship, studying the role of Poland’s Jews and the Holocaust in shaping the national culture. Okudo is looking ahead after graduating to a job in New York with Goldman Sachs, where he expects to gain investment banking experience that will take him closer to his goal of working in sub-Saharan Africa to promote capital investment in worthy projects. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, the two are in complete agreement about the value of their international experiences. “It’s important to just go somewhere else and get another perspective on the world,” says Weyrick. “I felt it legitimized me as a person.

“I have,” Okudo adds, “a much better understanding of the way the world works.”