What Others Say

Seminar

“At St. John’s you aren’t just another face
in a lecture hall with 300 or more students; here, the tutors actually care about your performance. When you’re in a class with only 10 other people, your actions really matter.”

—Ms. Vivian Garcia, freshman

“I’ve never really liked math. But [at St. John’s], because the class had started with the very basics—What’s a point? What’s a line?–math wasn’t so threatening. And it was
a lot more interesting.
Being able to see where things are coming from is very different than reading a textbook that says, ‘This is the way.’”

—Ms. Anna Canning ’02,
National Crosstalk, Spring 1999

Studying

“By senior year at St. John’s, we were reading Einstein in math, Darwin in lab, Baudelaire in French tutorial, Hegel in seminar. . . . On weekends I hung out with my friends. The surprise, the wild luck: I had friends. One sat in my room with . . . The Phenomenology of Spirit, reading out a sentence at a time and stopping to ask, ‘All right, what did that mean?’ The gravity of the thing would have been laughable if it hadn’t been
so much fun,
and if it hadn’t been such a gift to find my tribe.”

—Mr. Salvatore Scibona ’97, The New Yorker, June 13, 2011

Dancers

“Life on campus will be what you make of it: there are too many things to do for you to do everything, so it’s up to you to choose how to spend your free time.
Dance parties on the weekends and athletics all year round
are a couple of the ways I’ve found to clear my head. I’ve loved having the free community art classes as a way of expressing myself outside of the program.”

—Ms. Anna Szumiesz, sophomore

“Our faculty are called tutors as opposed to professors [because] they truly are, and see themselves as, part of the learning process.
They share our passion
for the works we read, and they allow themselves to grow intellectually as much as we do.” —Ms. Hannah VanHoose, senior

Photo

“Every job, and I mean every job . . . requires that you think about the situation you find yourself in and be able to communicate your thoughts to others. St. John’s is the perfect place to learn how to do both.”

—Mr. Christopher Bartos ’02

Student Blogs

Visit thejohnniechair.com, or johnnietalk.com, blogs by St. John’s students from Santa Fe and Annapolis—an uncensored look at life at St. John’s College including everything from ski trips to late night chats about Nietzsche.