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What’s so terrible about graduate students?</p>
<p>I fail to see how my group of two graduate students and an undergrad is inferior to a group of four undergrads – if anything, I think it’s a huge plus for our undergrad, because the two of us are here 60 hours a week moving the science along when he can’t be here because of class or exams.</p>
<p>^ Perhaps that’s why MIT research renown > Brown research renown</p>
<p><em>I’m in a grouchy mood.</em></p>
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<p>Way to read something that was not at all what I wrote. Each lab had 3-5 graduate students depending on the year, but those students were not working on the project with the undergraduates, their work was separate. The beauty was that I designed experiments, I analyzed the data, I made decisions, I worked out the material with a professor one on one daily. Graduate students at Brown have more time than undergraduates to be in lab, that’s what they’re here for. Especially after their first year you won’t find a graduate student in lab less than 40hrs a week, and there is pretty much no way to be in lab 60 hrs a week as an undergrad.</p>
<p>As for UCB’s grouchy mood, I don’t know why he’s such a pompous ass sometimes when it’s not called for and goes from reasonable to someone who speaks in platitudes. I had a far better experience in my lab in college than I did in high school when I worked under a post-doc who viewed me as someone who can run his experiments. Now the experiments were MY experiments, the background research was my research, the questions were my questions, and I got to bounce them off a tenured faculty member.</p>
<p>Graduate students have had a tremendous and positive impact on my college experience, but their presence in some situations has been as important to my growth as their absence in others.</p>
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<p>Probably the latter. As far as employment goes, Harvard and Stanford’s major advantages are the brand name and the networking which attracts the top employers. Employment success has little to do with ‘advising’. Harvard and Stanford students also enjoy significant grade inflation where it matters the most: in avoiding terrible grades. Let’s face it: it’s practically impossible to flunk out or receive a truly terrible grade at Harvard or Stanford; the worst grade you will ever reasonably get is a C, in contrast to other schools where you can easily do far worse. That sort of inflation is of tremendous benefit when competing for GPA-oriented grad schools such as law or med school, as the best way to avoid bad grades is to simply attend a school where such grades are never handed out in the first place. Finally, I don’t discount both the research opportunities and the opportunities for ‘academic incest’ available at both schools. By far the most represented undergraduate program within Harvard grad programs is…Harvard College. It’s become a well-worn trope that the easiest way to get into a Harvard PhD program is to simply be a Harvard undergrad who serves as an RA for an existing research project with a faculty member, for if the project is going well, the faculty member will want to retain you, and the admissions committee is loath to deny admission to a candidate that a faculty member, especially a politically powerful one, wants. </p>
<p>But none of that has to do with advising per se, nor does it have to do with the focus on undergraduate teaching. Harvard and Stanford are premier schools for undergrads to attend…but not for the advising or the teaching.</p>
<p>^ But since those undergrads won’t end up working in their major fields anyway, getting the prestigious ticket to a finance job is all they really need, right sakky? ;)</p>
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<p>Well, I’m not even particularly sure about that. I would argue that every university has some great/good teachers, but the majority are simply mediocre, if not worse. </p>
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<p>Fair enough, but then that means that students should not choose certain ‘high-ranked’ schools/programs because they believe they will be provided top classroom teaching, because the truth is, they probably won’t. Rankings have to do with research, which is simply not relevant to the vast majority of undergrads. </p>
<p>That then also spurs a rethink of what exactly is the true main purpose of the top-ranked universities in terms of undergraduate education and the sweep of society writ large. If the main purpose is not to actually provide strong teaching, then what is it? Is it mainly a credentialing/branding process intertwined with an outsourced signal to the market that the student was strong enough to be admitted? Is it mainly a 4-year networking, extracurricular, and recruiting opportunity? Is there more?</p>
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<p>I (sadly) agree, but that begs the question of why that needs to be. Why can’t strong teaching be accorded greater value? Why is research considered to be so much more important than teaching? Let’s be perfectly honest: the vast majority of research articles, monographs, and academic books are read by almost nobody, not even most academics, and hence the vast majority of research output has no impact. Even the top journals have plenty of articles that are not cited even once even years after publication, indicating that those papers have no influence even within academia, and that’s to say nothing about the vast majority of articles that appear in lesser journals. Nobody really cares about most of the research. </p>
<p>It is through teaching that you can impact a lot of people quickly. So why can’t that be accorded greater weight?</p>