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He looked at Yale. He looked at Princeton. He looked at Emory, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. So, why was Lafayette the first choice for Frank Cortazar of Coconut Grove, Fla.?
Attitude, says Cortazar, a Marquis Scholar who will join the Class of 2007 this fall with the intention of going on to medical school.
“I did official visits at a lot of schools,” he explains, “and I saw a lot of people going through the motions.” That is, he saw professors standing in large lecture halls, talking at as many as 70 students who mostly sat and took notes.
“At Lafayette, I sat in on an economics class where the teacher was more like a facilitator,” Cortazar recalls. “There were only 25 or so kids and a lot of back-and-forth conversation. The whole environment was very conducive to learning.”
Lafayette does not have as many premed majors as other colleges that Cortazar considered. On the other hand, he noticed, it offers targeted guidance and mentoring for such students. Most important, however, was Lafayette’s above-average acceptance rate at medical schools.
Lafayette baseball coach Joe Kinney recruited Cortazar. A third-base player who has played the game since he was 8 years old, Cortazar was his high school team’s most-valuable player and twice its best offensive player. And, again, he liked what he saw on his campus visit. “When I was there, they were doing weight and agility training,” recalls Cortazar who noted that, even here, Lafayette players were working together rather than independently.
“They were all working in unison, pushing each other to get better,” he says. “That’s when I knew that this was where I wanted to go.”