<p>Everyone knows what an institution Notre Dame is. At the risk of seeming uninformed, I was curious what it was (besides the intangibles) that make Notre Dame a top-15 university. I asked a current freshman: "What's ND's best program?" He told me that there was no "one major" that ND is known for - rather, it's a community of extremely smart individuals with solid programs in every field.</p>
<p>Is this true, or am I (and my friend) misguided?</p>
<p>College lists come at a dime-a-dozen, as you all know.</p>
<p>a quick answer to you would be that ND's undergraduate accounting program and it's MS in Accountancy are both well ranked last I checked (top 10 I thought)...like you said lists are a dime a dozen. Personally I'm not a fan of business school, but that is not because of the academic programs there or the quality of the education, but personal reasons relating to my time at ND.</p>
<p>I would say your friend was pretty accurate about a solid undergraduate program in most fields. This doesn't mean that the program is necessarily ranked, but ND does garner some impressive name recognition. The school actively tries to recruit top quality faculty to their school. ND is committed to being a research institution, to that end there are a lot of very smart faculty there, doesn't mean they make good teachers, but most seem to succeed.</p>
<p>The accounting program just got ranked #3 in the nation BTW (though I do make fun of all business majors due to my A&L status). </p>
<p>I started out at Creighton University and what I found there (and a lot of universities are like this) is a school where there were a few very strong majors but everything else was basically ignored. I was a psychology major there and it was obvious that everything was slanted towards pre-med, even my psych department! Because of that and the fact that I wanted to be at ND I decided to jump ship after freshman year and transfer to ND. At ND it isn't that you don't have some dominant departments, we do have some very strong ones (especially Theology and Philosophy), but everything truly is strong. It is amazing being able to take an elective in philosophy with one of the best philosophers in the world and then being able to take a Econ class with a great economist and so on. It isn't that anything really dominates like at other schools but everything is just very strong.</p>
<p>This is a very good thing because you may go to a school for their strength and then find that your true calling is their weakness. I went to Creighton as a pre-med, and it was great for that, but when I moved over to Psychology I realized just how much pre-med dominated that school. Also, I was dissapointed in the quality of my non-major classes. I have never had that problem at Notre Dame.</p>
<p>At Notre Dame it isn't that we have all that many truly dominant programs (though we do have a few) but just everything is very strong and I think that is the best way to be! It is a truly well-rounded school.</p>