Transferring to Whitman—the Right Move for Luke Samuels ’24

When Luke Samuels ’24 visited the Whitman College campus for the first time, he immediately felt a sense of belonging.

Samuels was thinking about transferring from a large state school and was staying with a close childhood friend and current Whitman student for the weekend.

“I came to visit after I was accepted, and I liked it,” he says. “The students I met were all really friendly, and I kept running into them over the weekend.”

Samuels didn’t expect to attend a smaller school. When he was initially exploring his college options, he was specifically looking for a big school. Having grown up in White Salmon, Washington, a town of about 2,000 people located an hour east of Portland, Oregon, Samuels was ready for something different. A large state school seemed like the perfect choice.

But after two years, Samuels decided that the school’s biggest draw for him originally turned out to be its biggest drawback.

“The big school size didn’t really harbor good student relations,” Samuels says. “The assumption was you would talk to someone once and then never again. It didn’t seem like people were too interested in making friends.”

Beyond Coding & Programming

Samuels had originally planned to major in Political Science but changed his mind after taking a few computer science courses. He transferred to Whitman as a Computer Science major and quickly knew he had made the right decision.

“The classes are well designed and well structured,” Samuels says. “For example, I took a class called Computer Systems Fundamentals that explained what actually goes on inside your laptop between the time you press a button on your keyboard and data shows up on your screen. It broke down that magic, which I thought was super interesting.”

At Whitman, the Computer Science program is about more than programming or coding; it’s about problem-solving. Students develop computational, mathematical and theoretical skills through a mix of coursework and hands-on projects.

“Something that’s notable about the Whitman Computer Science major is that it feels like a Math major in a lot of ways,” Samuels says. “For me, the math-centrism of it makes a lot of sense. You learn why and how a computer works and what the questions are that computer science as a topic of study is trying to answer. I like learning about the more theoretical side of things.”

Samuels especially enjoyed working on his honors project—creating a computational tool—with Associate Professor of Computer Science John Stratton. The project involved developing a C++ numerical integrator for delay differential equations. “That was a great opportunity that I’m not sure I would have gotten elsewhere,” he says.

Not So Small After All

Samuels also appreciated the opportunity to discover new interests through his General Studies classes, noting that Here We Are Now, Entertain Us: The Music of 1991 and Race, Class, Violence were particularly interesting. In all of his classes, major and nonmajor alike, the low student-to-faculty ratio allowed him to get to know his professors and receive more personalized attention.

“At a large school, you go to a 600-person lecture, and there’s a legion of TAs and one professor. Those TAs are your interface with the professor,” Samuels says.

“At Whitman, I was in a single class of 22 students, and if I had questions, I could just go talk to the professor directly.”

Samuels notes that the transfer process was straightforward and smooth. His biggest concern was being able to graduate in four years, but that turned out not to be an issue.

“After I was accepted, I contacted the registrar and said, ‘I want to transfer, but I have to transfer as a junior,’” Samuels says. “They were willing to make that work. All my credits transferred over really nicely. I had a heavy course load my last semester, but I graduated right on schedule.”

Ultimately, Whitman’s small size and close-knit community turned out to be exactly the environment Samuels needed to thrive.

“Whitman is a small school, but 1,500 people still feel like more than I’d ever be able to know,” he says. “It was way bigger than I thought it would be.”