<p>Someone I know attends Harvard and says that she doesn't really get to know her professors well, which she regrets.</p>
<p>I'm used to smaller class sizes, so I was just wondering about this.</p>
<p>I don't want to base my decision to apply off one ancedote, so does anyone else have any input about this?</p>
<p>Totally depends upon which classes you take.</p>
<p>… and dependent upon the individual student. If you are the type to make the effort to see a professor during office hours- you will get to know your professor. The professor will not, however, go out of his or her way to get to know you as a person unless you take the initiative. I think you’ll find this is true in nearly all university settings.</p>
<p>Though it is true that at most large universities, close student-professor contact will be more a product of luck or effort on the part of the student, Harvard has been particularly notorious for this issue for decades among top schools. I have been a college guidance counselor at private schools and well-regarded suburban Boston high schools for a good number of years, and many of my Harvard matriculants have lamented about this. This summer, one of my former students who is going to be a senior at Harvard this year, said that he actually never had a real conversation with a professor until his junior year in a seminar (though he majors in Economics, which is a very big major.)Though I don’t think it’s better at Columbia, Penn or Cornell, I do get the sense that academic cultures at Princeton, certainly, and probably Yale, too, encourage the development of closer student/faculty interaction. Just my sense based on lots of conversations with dozens of matriculants at these schools over the years.</p>
<p>It completely depends on the student and his or her concentration. It’s easier in a small concentration than in a large concentration (economics is especially large), but in any case the student needs to take the initiative. Most students don’t bother going to office hours, but on the bright side this makes it easier for those who DO to get to know professors.</p>
<p>It depends, of course, on the professor and the student. My Columbia son struck an extremely meaningful relationship with one of his Core professors (the small Core class size limit probably helps). My son gets reading lists from the professor, and they meet to discuss the readings on a regular basis. All of this long after the Core course ended, without any course credit or other “obvious” gain for either party. This relationship has been my son’s “most meaningful relationship with a non-family adult” (his words) in his (short) life. These relationships are out there.</p>
<p>My son is an economics major, and the professor teaches classics.</p>
<p>Ok-thanks for the replies! I suppose it’s all pretty situational…I don’t know what that girl’s majoring in so it’s possible she’s doing something with more people like Econ.</p>
<p>I have two Ds who have gone there - the first one was in one of the largest concentrations, the second one in one of the smallest. Both had great relationships with multiple faculty members, and both found their instructors to generally be very accessible to them.</p>