<p>Unless you desire a small college setting, I would not recommend smaller liberal arts colleges, nor would I recommend Lehigh. I’ve never heard one thing about Oberlin and I’ve been in the Neuroscience field for 15 years. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good, but they have no neuroscience research going on at least in my field which is neuro disease. Although there are many of these very good smaller schools, some that do a little research like Lehigh, they will not have anywhere close to the opportunities for undergrad research that exist at major research universities. Typically, small liberal arts schools also won’t have as nearly as well established neuroscience curriculum nor as many neuro-themed courses to choose from…they just don’t have the faculty to teach the classes. </p>
<p>Taking a quick look at Oberlin’s neuroscience department (they obviously have no grad component and little research going on), they do seem to have a nicely structured department set up with a nice number of neuro courses for a liberal arts school. Their faculty aren’t publishing much, and it looks like only one student has had an authorship on a publication in the last four years (meeting abstracts aren’t the same, although they are nice to have). That said, if you are more comfortable in a smaller school setting, there are many graduates from these types of schools that successfully move onto very highly regarded graduate program at the larger research universities. It just that those student’s won’t necessarily have the background in neuroscience or the research experience that others might. Many students at small college students also do summer research fellowship programs at the larger research institutions to get the exposure to labs, but it is nearly impossible to get anything published at these summer programs. You can do research in labs at some of some of these smaller schools, but even at Oberlin there will be only a handful doing neuroscience (if that) and you will be much more restricted in the type of experiments you will be able to conduct because of a lack of facilities, equipment, resources, and funding. For instance, professors at these schools typically conduct research in cheap systems like flies, and not more expensive animals like mice and rats. There typically no core facilities, and it is just harder to find the type of work you really want to do. And finding a lab doing research you like is important, because the very nature of research is that there is typically exponentially more failures than successes, so if you are already unhappy with what you are working on (or the environment in the lab), you’re not going to like life in the lab.</p>
<p>However, I can’t stress this enough, if you are smart, hard working, an show an interest in research by getting lab experience, you’ll be fine as far as getting into grad school. A small school won’t keep you from your goal, and if you prefer a small school over a larger one, remember you only get one chance to enjoy your undergrad years. Go where you see yourself fitting in best, regardless of everything I stated above.</p>
<p>Regarding schools for neuroscience, and sticking to the Northeast, most of the usual suspects would be good for neuroscience, e.g. the Ivy’s. In Pennsylvania, really your two best choices are, by far, Pitt and Penn, and I have direct experience with both undergraduate programs. Both are excellent and one really isn’t better than the other. </p>
<p>As a quick and dirty indicator of how much medical/bioscience research is going on at a particular university, and thus the overall quality and breadth of research opportunities, the very best indicator is the amount NIH funding. Here are the top 10 schools in the US by NIH allocations.
- Harvard
- John Hopkins
- Penn
- UCSF (no undergrad)
- Pitt
- Michigan
- Washington (Seattle)
- UCLA
- Duke
- Washington Univ. (St. Louis)</p>
<p>You can also do a [url="<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/“]pubmed[/url”>http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/"]pubmed[/url</a>] search by institution and see how they are publishing in your field of interest.</p>
<p>I’d say, as an undergrad, there is also a distinct advantage of having the majority of labs and hospitals on the undergrad campus. It is just physically convenient to be able to pop in and out of labs between classes and other social engagements that one might have as an undergrad. Pitt and Penn both have the major concentrations of research labs and their medical centers right on their undergrad campuses. I believe John Hopkins would be an example where most of the labs are not on the undergrad campus as the med campus is about 4-5 miles away, although they probably have great programs to do research at the labs at NIH (at least they do for grad students). Just something to think about.</p>
<p>Also, since you have an idea of what you’d like to do, it might be a good idea to look into what the faculty are researching at any school you are interested in. If there are labs that really stick out as interesting to you, contact the professor (probably by email is best) and just explain your situation and mention that you might like to meet with them to learn more about their work if you visit the school or end up attending there. It never hurts to make connections.</p>