<p>Why are people so against TAs? I know I’m biased because I am a graduate student, but the majority of graduate students go to doctoral programs because they want to be professors, and they are invested in your education and teaching - sometimes more than your professors are. My graduate advisor is a horrible teacher, but the TA for his class was a third-year doctoral student and she was amazing, better than he was. I’m a grad student and although I’m not yet TAing, most of my friends in one of my departments are and their skills are as varied as the professors’ skills.</p>
<p>In any case, I don’t think anyone should rule out a school because of the presence of TAs. Consider other factors first. It’s generally true that LACs probably won’t have graduate student TAs, but it’s also the case that LACs hire adjunct professors who sometimes are advanced graduate students or post-doctoral scholars without much teaching experience.</p>
<p>I went to Spelman, an LAC, and I had wonderful professors. My professors as a collective were much better teachers there than they are here at Columbia. There was a nurturing environment; this is more of a sink-or-swim environment. It’s partially because I’m in a grad program, and don’t get me wrong I get plenty of support, but even the undergraduate program seems to be less nurturing and more competitive (although certainly not as bad as some other selective universities).</p>
<p>I also agree with spdf - a lot of times it’s not that the class weeds people out, it’s just that people self-select out of the major. They think that being a physician is just all about helping people and working with people, and the rude awakening comes that they actually have to learn a lot of hard science before they can get to the helping part. Pre-med classes <em>should</em> be rigorous and hard because medical school is no picnic (I go to a medical center campus and have some friends in med school, and they are <em>always</em> studying). A lot of those students select out to helping careers that don’t require quite as much science. My LAC had one of the best pre-med programs - it was an HBCU and placed the second-largest number of African Americans into medical schools - and the biology major was the biggest major during the freshman year. There were usually 110-120 majors during freshman year out of a class of like 500-600. By senior year, there were maybe 20-30 majors graduating. Most of the bio majors selected out into other majors (a lot of them came to the psychology department, which WAS the largest graduating major, with 110 majors the year I graduated).</p>