Meghan McAllister
Harleysville, PA
High School: Souderton Area High School
Activities: Students’ Council Co-President, Customs Person, work at the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship café, Athletics Center Monitor, Friends in Action, Friends’ Committee on National Legislation, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Working Group to the United Nations, Project for Nuclear Awareness, Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Internship at the Global Security Institute
Why did you chose to attend Haverford?: I wanted to go to a small liberal arts school near a larger city, and Haverford really stood out to me because of its sense of community and its down-to-earth students.
Favorite Class: “I’ve liked a lot of my classes so far…it’s probably a draw between my largest lecture-style class with about sixty students, The Economics of Public Policy, and my smallest class with eight students, Advanced German. Learning microeconomics through applied policy issues was just really interesting, and German was fun because the professor really tailored the class to fit what we, the students, wanted.”
How the Haverford experience is unique: “I think Haverford is unique because of the Customs program and its size, among many other things. The Customs program is a unique orientation program in that most students become really close with the people that they are living with as well as some upper-classmen before school even begins, and then have a quasi-family for the rest of the school year. I think that overall, Haverford has a unique atmosphere with lots of quirky and super-nice students where it is common for people to fight over holding the door open for each other.”
Thoughts on the Honor Code: “I think the Honor Code is great. It also represents one way that Haverford is unique; an Honor Code like ours probably wouldn’t work at a larger school or even some other small liberal arts schools that may have more competitive atmospheres. I don’t know if it directly influenced my decision to come to Haverford, but it is definitely partially responsible for the sense of community that Haverford has, which did greatly impact my decision. I think it has a greater impact on my experience than I expected it to have, and when I visit my friends at other colleges, I find that I miss Haverford’s Honor Code, and conversely my friends are often impressed by our Honor Code when they come to visit me.”