<p>So a friend of mine is down to going to either Harvard, MIT, or Princeton. She plans to majoring in Biology and go on to get her PhD to do research. Please help her out by giving the pros and cons to going to each school plus your own opinion on where you would personally go.</p>
<p>Thank you</p>
<p>I would go to MIT.</p>
<p>Because MIT is awesome.</p>
<p>But actually, she should probably visit each school and find out for herself. :p</p>
<p>I can’t speak to Princeton, as I’ve only experienced the atmospheres in the biology communities at MIT (undergrad) and Harvard (grad). Princeton’s department is somewhat weaker than either MIT’s or Harvard’s departments, and Princeton is less well-represented in my PhD program, probably as a result.</p>
<p>In terms of opportunities in biology graduate school following either MIT or Harvard, either school would provide a springboard to any top PhD program, given adequate grades (a B average or above), strong letters of recommendation, and research experience. Both MIT and Harvard have ample opportunities for undergraduates to contribute in a significant way to meaningful, cutting-edge research.</p>
<p>The major question is which atmosphere your friend would prefer to spend four years in. I hope she will have a chance to visit both Harvard and MIT, because the feeling of each school is quite distinct, and people often feel they fit better in one environment or the other. </p>
<p>Personally, I am glad I attended MIT as an undergraduate. The atmosphere at Harvard feels to me quite a bit more “every man for himself” than the collaborative community at MIT, and I loved the way undergraduates are intellectually valued at MIT and expected to contribute to the research process in a significant way. In a practical sense, MIT undergrads are paid significantly more on average than Harvard undergrads for biology lab work. ;)</p>
<p>I can expound further on the differences I see between the MIT and Harvard biology communities, if that’s useful.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Could you please…? Thanks molliebatmit! :)</p>
<p>I mean tomorrow, sorry. This MIT alum/Harvard grad student spent 13 hours in her Harvard lab and 2 hours at her MIT cheerleading practice today, and is not feeling confident in her ability to produce coherent sentences. :)</p>
<p>Sure, no problem:) Haha, it’s somewhat hard for me to imagine any adult working in those research labs as me going to cheerleading practices after work.</p>
<p>@ mollie you still do cheerleading?</p>
<p>i thought you already graduated from MIT.</p>
<p>^I’ve been coaching the MIT cheerleading squad for the past two years. I graduated from MIT in 2006 and am a fourth-year PhD student at Harvard.</p>
<p>So here’s my take on MIT and Harvard. Your mileage may vary – I’ve already said that I’m the MIT type, and I think there are people who are definitely more the Harvard type.</p>
<p>MIT’s biology department is contained in a handful of buildings on MIT’s campus, all within a few-minute walk of each other. This fosters a certain MIT spirit among the faculty, and there are lots of collaborations between faculty members. All of the biology faculty teach classes every year, so it’s fairly easy to meet professors in class and ask to work in their labs. It’s also easy to get to know professors in class and ask them to write you letters of recommendation for graduate school. </p>
<p>Harvard’s biology community is much bigger, because it includes Harvard Medical School. This means that labs are spread out across Boston and Cambridge, and that there’s much less of a community spirit among researchers whose labs are at different hospitals or different campuses. Most/virtually all of the medical school professors don’t teach classes on the Cambridge campus, so if you want to do research in a med school lab, you have to find out about it yourself. More logistically troubling, you have to get there every day to go to work – you can take the T to Mass General, or a Harvard bus across town to the medical school campus, but it takes time. This cuts into the time you have available to do research.</p>
<p>The end result of this is that MIT undergrads seem to me to be better-integrated into their labs, because they can spend more time there, and be more flexible about their schedules. Therefore, it is easier for MIT undergrads to contribute significantly to the work of the lab, to get their own interesting projects, and to be recognized with authorship on scientific papers. (I also think that MIT undergrads prioritize research more in their lives than Harvard undergrads do, but I don’t know if I’m just projecting my own preferences onto the MIT undergrad population.)</p>
<p>Overall, the longer I am at Harvard, the more I miss MIT. They’re very different places. Personally, I felt, and continue to feel, much more at home at MIT.</p>
<p>Since you spoke a lot about research, what kind of work do undergraduate students, especially freshmen, get to do at the MIT labs? Are they mostly performing basic lab procedures as directed by the professor or their superviser, considered as a part of a research team so collaborating with technicians and grad students on one huge project, designing and carrying out their own individual projects, or somewhat of a combination of all of these? How easy is it to get funding from MIT to carry out one’s own research, and how easy is it to find a professor who is willing to allow an undergraduate to work in his or her lab? How many hours is one expected to work?</p>
<p>Since I’m contemplating pre-med as a future option (still undecided though), I’m also wondering - how beneficial do you think undergraduate research is to pre-med students? I’ve also heard that pre-med is really hard at MIT, so… does one even have the time to carry out research and everything?</p>
<p>Also, I’m leaving home tomorrow for CPW. Is there something that you think I should check out while there? :)</p>
<p>(Sorry for the deluge of questions.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Aww :)</p>
<p>^ Since I knew nothing about labwork, I started in a bio lab doing a cool project that my PI came up with. Over time, as I grew familiar with how labs worked in general, I devised my own projects in parallel ^.^ If you have a great idea and propose it to a prof, the prof can let you do your own idea (though you’ll want to find a lab doing related work).</p>
<p>When I started in my lab as a sophomore, I spent the first few weeks learning how to do things and getting up to speed (interspersed with more learning over the next few years – you never stop learning different methods!), then started working independently on a piece of a project being run by a postdoc in the lab and worked on by that postdoc, me, a grad student, and another postdoc. </p>
<p>When that project was finished, I did a screen of my own and picked candidate genes to characterize, still working closely with the same postdoc. I continued characterizing my candidates until I graduated. So for me, there was a mix of working on a project that was primarily someone else’s and working on my own project. I like that structure, and that’s actually how I work as a grad student – I have another grad student who’s my partner, and we work on a mix of projects that are “owned” by one or the other of us.</p>
<p>
There’s funding available from the UROP office, at the institute minimum wage of $9.something. Many professors will pay UROPs out of their lab funds. I don’t actually know of a lab at MIT that doesn’t take undergrads, although, of course, sometimes a lab may feel they have enough undergraduates and can’t take new ones.</p>
<p>
Oh, of course there’s time. I can’t really speak to how important research is as an application component, but I think doing research helps you become a better scientist, and I would prefer, were I running the world, to have more MDs who are good scientists.</p>
<p>As far as results are concerned, there’s not much difference:</p>
<p>Percent of PhDs per grad
Academic field: Bio and Health Sciences</p>
<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees:
ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database</p>
<p>Number of Undergraduates:
ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database</p>
<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period </p>
<p>1 California Institute of Technology 5.4%
2 Reed College 4.8%
3 Swarthmore College 4.4%
4 University of Chicago 3.3%
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3.1%
6 University of California-San Francisco 3.1%
7 Harvard University 3.0%
8 Kalamazoo College 3.0%
9 Harvey Mudd College 2.9%
10 Earlham College 2.8%
11 Johns Hopkins University 2.7%
12 Princeton University 2.6%</p>
<p>if biology is a key interest, then MIT is probably a better choice, but overall, Princeton provides the best undergraduate education</p>
<p>Thanks again Mollie!! I just came back from CPW a few hours ago. There was a biology student UROP panel where a few undergraduate biology students talked about their research experience, being a biology major and so on, which, in addition to what you said, basically answered all of my questions.</p>
<p>IMO from CPW panels and reading CC and blogs, MIT is the place to be if you want research as part of your undergraduate experience</p>
<p>I recommend Harvard. :)</p>