MIT vs. Carleton vs. Swarthmore

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>^^^ I’m pretty sure CalAlum meant ‘not gaining admission’ as in ‘not being accepted’, not that you were rejected. UChicago definitely has a lot in common with MIT, but I didn’t end up applying there because it didn’t have an engineering school (well, that and growing up in Chicago meant I was eager for a change of scenery).</p>

<p>I think that you will find that most students think that the classes within their majors are the ‘serious business’ and everything outside that is either a fun elective or something that you just kind of have to do. I have several friends who are either humanities majors or humanities double majors, and I have never heard from any of them that the quality of teaching in their humanities classes is inferior to the teaching in their science / engineering classes. There is additionally something to be said for taking science classes in billion-dollar state-of-the-art labs, which is an experience that you just aren’t going to get at the majority of smaller liberal-arts schools.</p>

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<p>k4 has a good point about the labs. I definitely factored that into my decision. I really want to go to MIT (or Stanford) for grad school when I’ll really get to use the facilities to my fullest advantage. Yes, you can use them as an undergrad. But, I’d like to have the advantages of being a grad student in designing a project (better funding, a tad more respect). I don’t think the basic science classes are all that different (just look at the OCW offerings as compared to the classes I’ve taken at state U). it’s really more of a question of how involved in research you’d like to be, and how that fits into what you want to do in life.</p>

<p>I had the same issue with Chicago not having an engineering school (and not having the equivalent of a brass rat-- it’s soooo cool). I wasn’t going to apply for the longest time for that reason. Then, I realized that I do not want a job right after school. I work with chemical engineering grad students and post docs daily (lab work). They admit that they aren’t using most of what they had to learn in undergrad, and that you can do engineering grad school without an engineering undergrad if you have a good background in physics/chem. </p>

<p>I have my own opinions about engineering… but that’s not the point. If you’re looking at an excellent LAC, don’t automatically say no just because it doesn’t have the pre-professional programs. You can set yourself up for an excellent grad school and go into industry after post-doc work. Many people might argue this is a better way in terms of salary and overall job availability. Don’t knock LAC too quickly. Swarthmore is actually pretty great for engineering, and the name is respected. Yes, the engineering isn’t as good as MIT, but the humanities are certainly looked upon more favorably (renaissance man, anyone?). Carleton is excellent as far as LACs go. I was speaking with one of the grad student recruiters for chem/biochem, and he said the dept (ranked really highly and well respected) has had the most success with people from smaller LAC than anywhere else. Same goes with the chair of the music dept. You’ll be in a good place for grad school coming from a LAC. idk as much about getting a job right after school. That might be a bit harder. At least Swarthmore has more pre professional programs.</p>

<p>Picking a more LAC oriented school doesn’t close you off from great research or engineering, you’ll just have to accept that you’re going to grad school for it. Personally, I’ve always wanted to go to grad school, so it wasn’t a hard choice for me.</p>

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<p>You seem to be missing something very big about MIT.</p>

<p>One, the UROP program. I’ve never seen anyone have issues getting funding because it does not depend on the lab’s funding. Furthermore, I was always treated with respect as an undergraduate researcher. Because I knew nothing about the field, I asked for a project - but as I learned more, there was nothing stopping me from designing and carrying out my own projects (and I did!). The experience I gained isn’t going to magically disappear if I go to grad school - the experience will open me up to so much more to better take advantage of grad school if I choose.</p>

<p>Two, many people from MIT do directly go into grad school. But you’re correct - it’s not a necessity. I personally like the freedom of having that choice, as I came intending to get my PhD in biology but have since changed majors and decided that I likely won’t go to get a PhD right after graduation.</p>

<p>I’m quite happy that you have found yourself content with your decision, but let’s not spread misinformation :)</p>

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<p>^Agreed.</p>

<p>As an undergraduate at MIT, I feel I was able to take advantage of the resources of my well-funded, cutting-edge UROP lab. I learned technical things (techniques, methods, troubleshooting experiments), but I also learned how to do science in broader ways (designing and executing my own project, collaborating with others, communicating my results, giving and receiving feedback about projects within the lab). I wasn’t a second-class citizen because I was an undergrad – labs at MIT generally treat undergrads like grad students who don’t work 60 hours a week.</p>

<p>Now that I’m a graduate student myself, I don’t feel my involvement in lab work is qualitatively different from what I experienced as an undergrad. It’s quantitatively greater, obviously, and my ability to design and execute experiments has improved, reflecting a greater depth of background knowledge and a broader sense of what experiments are useful to get a given answer. But these skills would have developed similarly if I’d merely taken eight years to get an undergraduate degree – there’s nothing special about being a graduate student, other than that I’ve been in the lab longer.</p>

<p>The funding is also not significantly better for graduate students, except in total quantity. Depressingly, I make the same amount per hour as a biology graduate student as I did as a biology UROP, and biology is a well-funded discipline relative to other science and engineering fields.</p>

<p>I’m not against the idea of students going to LACs for science, but I think there are big advantages to getting into a well-funded, cutting-edge science environment as early as possible. My PhD program (the top one in my field) is disproportionately full of students who did their undergraduate work at research universities, particularly top research universities, and the top labs within the program also tend to prefer students with top-flight research backgrounds. </p>

<p>There is no reason an undergraduate can’t design and execute a graduate-quality research project, and at schools like MIT, it is believed that they can and should.</p>

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<p>I am feeling slightly against it when the work one is doing isn’t relatively pencil/paper driven. I think having the option to participate in the real stuff is important, and the real stuff is just not in class in a field like engineering, aside from a few of the project based ones where a taste is given. Unlike in my own field, learning “forever” is just not the culture in much of science and engineering, and the involvement in labs plus the student culture to go along with it is invaluable. I go to a school where a lot of people do engineering or CS as in MIT, and can safely advise in favor of MIT here. Knowing individuals who transferred from very good LACs to my own tells me that while they found the teaching incredibly better at their places of origin, even if the classes were challenging and well run, the resources were utterly nothing in comparison.</p>

<p>I understand kitkatkatie’s belief that the precise undergrad education needn’t lead neatly to graduate study, but that almost seems to support my viewpoint more, because it means the character of the undergrad education is often more important than the exact contents, though some things invariably will be and should be emphasized. This means approximating the time after undergrad by undergrad closely is a good thing. </p>

<p>I don’t know specifically about Swarthmore, but I think the burden is to explain what it does have, and how it compares, because it is very possible in my eyes for a LAC to lack much of what I consider necessary for a solid foundation.</p>

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<p>How could MIT even be compared to Carleton and Swarthmore?:O</p>

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<p>All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t base your college decision on where the best research is, because that isn’t going to be the defining characteristic of your undergrad, though it probably will be the defining characteristic of your grad. Yes, having a research experience is valuable, but one needs to look at other things past name and research impact. If it’s important to you, look at depth and breadth of education. Look at fit and the social environment. If Carleton and Swarthmore are a better fit but you’re afraid because C doesn’t have engineering or Swarthmore’s engineering doesn’t have the MIT name, then I’d reconsider how you’re looking at things. </p>

<p>I don’t think anyone can argue that research done in grad school is the exact same as that done in undergrad. If you’ve worked in a lab as an undergrad, you’ll have a mentor of sorts. You have a lot more independence in grad school as far as your project goes. </p>

<p>How important is it for you to have already started grad research before grad school? What happened to having time to figure things out? What happened to to a solid, liberal arts education with specialization in grad school? If those things are important, then please consider more of a LAC. If it’s not, then you might value the intense specialization of a tech school, which is a valuable thing.</p>

<p>As far as “misinformation” goes, I wasn’t spreading any. I am well aware of the UROP program, and that doesn’t compare to the funding and resources available through fellowships and departmental funding. How much is UROP funding? And don’t they have a similar program at most other schools? I know that state U here has a program called “UROP” that does the same thing.</p>

<p>Why not have a research experience over the summer at another college? I know people who have done that while attending a LAC, and they’ve gone on to top grad schools. </p>

<p>What I’m saying is that you don’t have to go to a tech school to have a meaningful research experience, and you don’t have to go to a tech school for great science classes. It’s all about what you take from your education, and you can always do ECs in engineering-themed clubs (there are three that I know of at Chicago… you can always start one) or summer research at another institution. You just have to be a bit more self-motivated. That self-motivation would look good an a grad school application, though. </p>

<p>So, don’t knock LACs too quickly. It’s certainly a different education from tech schools, but it’s certainly not better or worse-- just different. Just try to look at what you want from your college years, and see if that matches up with C/Sw/MIT.</p>

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<p>If you are a strong math and science person, do you want to use your undergrad to be stretched, to grow in ways other than technical expertise? Or, do you want to have an intense and meaningful tech education? Both are excellent options. Most would be lucky to have the choice. That’s the question that’s come up with three of my friends who turned down MIT for LACs (two are freshman now, and one’s a sophomore).</p>

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… did you read Mollie’s post? Like, at all? </p>

<p>Mentorship occurs both as an undergrad student and as a grad student. The PI is still in charge, keeping up with your projects and giving you suggestions. Nothing magically happens when you’re a grad student that means you no longer need mentorship - though if you have undergrad experience, you’ll need less hand-holding than coming in with no experience.</p>

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<p>Yeah, you really don’t understand how the program works at MIT. To answer your last question, you apply for whatever amount of UROP funding you need.</p>

<p>Again, I’m not saying that going to an LAC is bad - we all have different fits to schools, as well as different priorities and choices and goals. But being misinformed is bad.</p>

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<p>Kiktkatkatie, you bring a good thing to attention. If self-motivated and filling in all the gaps, then it’s very good. Personally, though, I feel in today’s day and age, having a medium between liberal arts education and the grad specialization and research is important. I think this is probably why people at a place like MIT experience a culture that promotes their doing much research early. While a strong liberal arts education is certainly a great thing, for the explicit goal of grad school prep, I find really the best way is to begin to experience what you’re going to do in grad school. Granted you can do some of this at many places, but if one is heading on directly to a PhD, I have to say I can’t see much around there being an advantage at MIT. </p>

<p>Now what someone I know did is interesting – went to a nice LAC for 2 years and transferred to a big name university with “more stuff.” The result was probably getting the best of both worlds, because the step in between the strong liberal arts education and grad school was realized.</p>

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This is, actually, the argument I am making. And I have the distinct rhetorical advantage of actually being a graduate student.</p>

<p>I worked on a totally independent project as an undergraduate, as do the (Harvard) undergraduates in my graduate thesis lab. I worked closely with other lab members as an undergrad, as I do with a graduate student. I think my graduate work is much better than my undergraduate work, but that is because I spend more time in the lab and have more confidence in my ability to answer the right questions, not because I am a graduate student per se. In both cases, I met/meet regularly with my PI to discuss my results and future experiments. </p>

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In pure salary terms, per hour, UROP funding is equal to (and in some departments, greater than) a graduate fellowship. I made $10 an hour as a UROP, and I make $10 an hour as a graduate student. In terms of money available for reagents, neither UROP nor departmental fellowships cover that – each individual lab has grant funding to cover its experimental expenses. Lab resources are available to all lab members, whether they are undergrads, grad students, or postdocs.</p>

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I don’t disagree, but that self-motivation is difficult to come by, particularly when you’re fighting an uphill battle for resources. I have likened it in the past to losing weight by oneself and to losing weight while having access to a trainer and a personal chef – sure, you can lose weight by yourself, but having extra resources will almost inevitably facilitate success. Individuals without access to high-quality resources may succeed, but on average, individuals with access to those resources will succeed more often.</p>

<p>I don’t think anybody is saying it’s necessary to go to a tech school, or to an elite research institution, to be successful in science or engineering. But it’s disingenuous to pretend there aren’t real advantages to doing so. However, it takes a lot of different kinds of people to make a world, and hooray for people who want different things out of their college educations than I myself did.</p>

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<p>As she points out, Mollie has the “distinct rhetorical advantage of being a graduate student” at Harvard, after having been an MIT undergrad. </p>

<p>I have the distinct rhetorical advantage of being a full professor at a liberal arts college, and based on my experience, there is just no way that a student in the hard sciences could possibly have the advantages in a LAC that he or she could have at MIT. </p>

<p>Mollie’s right about the nature of undergraduate research at MIT. My daughter has participated in a physics UROP for about a year, earning a bit more than Mollie (sorry 'bout that, biologists). This summer, a team of MIT scientists and grad students will travel with full finding to Germany to install and conduct experiments on a new particle detector, and my daughter has been invited to go with them. At the end of this semester (junior year), she will have finished all the requirements for the focused physics major, and there is nothing to stop her from taking graduate courses going forward. The fact is, students coming for graduate study from schools like Stanford and Yale haven’t necessarily taken some of the courses MIT undergrads take in the physics major, so there is often little difference in the capability of a first or second-year graduate student from another institution, and an upper-division MIT student.</p>

<p>But as people on this thread have been saying, students admitted to MIT should come and check it out for themselves. My son is applying only to liberal arts colleges, so I understand both worlds. They are not at all the same, regardless of the overlap.</p>

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<p>I defer to your wisdom in the physics department, since I know very little, but will have to say this is probably not true in other ones, if you count the tier 1 schools in the picture. Perhaps if you’re solely contrasting with LACs, this is true, but I’d not include somewhere like Chicago or Stanford in the picture here. This is my experience from knowing individuals who came from MIT to grad school at my own school. The offerings at MIT make many others pale, but not all others by any means. </p>

<p>I realize you used the term “often” certainly though.</p>

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<p>^ What CalAlum said about many undergrads taking graduate classes in the physics department is true of many, many departments at MIT.</p>

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<p>^^ I never would have doubted it, and had this entirely in mind when I posted…after all, I am speaking from knowing some very strong former MIT undergrads. I understand the spirit of CalAlum’s point, but wanted to throw in a sanity check.</p>

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<p>^^^ I figured, but thought it was worth clarifying anyway :D</p>

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<p>^^^^ Question to you Piper, is it true that if a post has k “^” symbols in response to the previous, the next one should have k+1 precisely if it’s also responding to the same chain?</p>

<p>I wasn’t aware of this, I might just have learned something new…:)</p>

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<p>^^^^^ Dunno if that’s normal CC style, but it amuses me to do it :D</p>

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<p>I was a very balanced science / humanities student back in high school, and when I was looking for colleges, I was aiming for a balance between a good education in science while allowing me freedom to pursue the liberal arts as well. I applied very broadly, and although LACs never appealed to me (I came from a very small high school of barely 200 and I was wanting a bigger ‘university atmosphere’ for college), the final decision involved deciding between schools like Stanford, Columbia, and Brown, which offered an arguably better liberal arts program than MIT. I also was admitted into Caltech, but I knew it was out automatically because (no offense to Caltech students), but the students I met on a campus tour there really did resemble math and science robots due to their extremely narrow focus on the sciences.</p>

<p>I ultimately decided to come to MIT, and although sometimes I think about my decision (I never really weighed my decision as extensively as you often see here on CC - to me, MIT just felt right, so I decided to enroll), I think it had not been bad at all in retrospect.</p>

<p>MIT taught me how to really think about science. In high school, I thought I was good in the mathematics, having done AMC and AIME multiple years, going to SSP, going to Mathcamp, being in Siemens and Intel, but I realized that my perceived “self-brilliance” in the sciences was just about to be put to the test after getting into MIT. </p>

<p>There’s something about the science education at MIT that I find truly unique - perhaps it’s that Swarthmore/Caltech mindset that was mentioned earlier, but when you are in lecture here, you truly feel that you are learning from the best, and perhaps that’s the reason why we don’t compete against each other here. It’s really about how much you personally take away from the classes, and the difficulty of classes here strangely unites the students in a class, rather than competing against each other for the As. The sense of accomplishment and the number of distinguished scientists that one passes in the hallways of MIT everyday (and their accessibility to undergrad questions!) is the reason why science at MIT is unique to me than any other college in the country.</p>

<p>Over the six semesters here, I’ve worked on two biology UROPs (both in C. elegans), with exceptionally distinguished faculty. During my first UROP, I made $2000+ in the course of one month during the summer, had lab meetings with Prof. Bob Horvitz (Nobel Prize of Medicine, 2002), and learned an amazing amount of experimental science - never having stepped into a biology laboratory before. In my second (and current) UROP, we’re working on the Sir2 gene in C. elegans, which is currently a big topic in the medicine of aging and Alzheimers/Parkinsons research (you can pubmed it). If I stay for the UROP this summer, there’s a chance that we’ll be publishing as early as this winter, and this had been immensely rewarding, especially considering that my friends at other Ivies are fighting tooth and nail just to get into a regular biology lab to do research. There’s a reason why few undergrads at MIT apply to the NIH research institutes during the summer (that students from other colleges generally apply to as a summer internship) - why would one need to, when the labs at MIT are already so outstanding and one can pretty much find cutting-edge research in all of the current topics in biology?</p>

<p>After this semester, I will be three classes away from graduating with a biology BS from MIT. Although MIT had definitely taught me well in the sciences (I don’t know how many ‘please design an experiment’ questions that I’ve answered on the exams here X___X), I decided last semester that it was time for me to continue to pursue my love of the humanities (especially history) that I had in high school.</p>

<p>Prior to this, I’ve taken eight humanities classes at MIT outside the realm of history, from economics to rhetoric to art history to Japanese and Spanish. Humanities at MIT had provided me with a great counterbalance to my science classes (and has successfully stopped me from going crazy with my biology problem sets or staying in lab till 2 AM!). I absolutely do not agree with the statement that humanities at MIT “cannot be taken seriously.” We have outstanding professors here in every humanities field, and certain departments also have pretty famous professors (especially Music and Literature). With my history degree, I will be taking 10 more history classes (I will have finished seven of them after this semester and the last), and I had been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the history department here. There are 15 full-time history faculty, with just 3 history majors in the entire undergrad population - do you need any more personal attention? (note: we do have a lot of minors and concentrators though, which will bring the number way up if you include them) </p>

<p>I’m currently taking three history classes this term that have less than 5 students each, which honestly feels like you’re really having a chat with the professor rather than “going to class” every day. The close level of interaction between the faculty and the department provides a very rewarding experience for me, and definitely helped to allay one of the few frustrations I had with MIT previously - the large class sizes in the freshman intro classes and required bio classes. All of my professors had been pretty amazing, and it’s actually pretty interesting to Wikipedia my current professors, who had taught previously at Harvard, Yale, Dartsmouth, Columbia, Williams, Amherst for example and did graduate work at the most outstanding history PhD programs in the nation. The strong focus of most MIT students on science and engineering just means that if you’re a humanities students here, you get pretty awesome one-on-one time with the humanities professors during their office hours, and although I may not be speaking with THE MOST brilliant history professor in the United States, the quality of the faculty and the instruction here in history had already left me really surprised. The Humanities department in recent years has also provided really cool fellowships and programs for students, such as the Burchard Scholars program that offer intimate lecture dinner series in various fields of the humanities that are meant to “celebrate an intellectual exchange of ideas,” study abroad programs in Spain, Germany, and France during our IAP period, trips to Italy to study ancient Roman history, and scholarships for excellence in the humanities - just to give a few examples.</p>

<p>I guess all I really want to say (even though I had written way more than I intended) is that coming to MIT NEVER means that you’re sacrificing humanities at the expense of the sciences. To me, it truly had been the best of two worlds - I got the world-class science education that I’m looking for, and I was fortunate enough to be part of a small community of dedicated humanities scholars at this technological institute.</p>

<p>The only thing that I want to change at this point is to make the winters in Cambridge a little bit shorter. ; )</p>

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<p>I wanted so badly to go ^^^^^^ </p>

<p>… all ruined now, because someone posted first. At least it was an awesome post :)</p>