<p>As odd as it may sound, the schools I'm looking at include small, elite liberal arts colleges in the northeast and MIT. Basically, I'm set on majoring in Economics and probably doubling in Math so these other schools make sense to me as competition to MIT as winning the top spot in my heart. At these small schools, I'm finding that the classes are all extremely engaging and that besides a couple of slightly larger intro courses, the classes are under 30. There's also a sole emphasis on undergraduate teaching as opposed to research and graduates like MIT. My question is what happens at MIT? I know that senior faculty do teach freshmen, but do they care to do more than stand lecture well and walk out and leave everything else up to the TA's? Is building relationships with professors at MIT part of the academic experience or not? How much do they really care about undergrad teaching? Does the high quality education offered at MIT go beyond having insanely smart professors and tons of work? How interested are professors in having undergrads come during office hours just to chat about academics and other things?</p>
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As an MIT alum, and now as a Harvard graduate student, I think the idea that universities like MIT neglect their undergraduates in favor of their graduate students is basically junk. MIT is a place where undergraduates aren’t treated much differently from graduate students, and where everybody believes undergraduates can make substantive contributions to scholarly pursuits. </p>
<p>There definitely is an emphasis on research at MIT, but there’s also a strong emphasis on getting undergraduates involved in that research. So MIT’s excellence in research means a richer academic experience for undergraduates, not an impoverished one. As an undergraduate at MIT, you can take advantage of MIT’s resources immediately by taking graduate-level courses and becoming involved in cutting-edge research. </p>
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In most courses, TAs lead recitation sections, where students can discuss problems and review material from class. TAs also often grade problem sets and exams, though the exams and psets themselves are written by professors. TAs exist to assist professors, not to supplant them.</p>
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At least in my experience, it’s easy to build relationships with professors at MIT if you’re willing to make the effort. I was very close with my research supervisor (who was also my academic advisor), and I had several professors whose offices I could go to without an appointment to discuss classes, my future, and everything else. </p>
<p>I don’t know that most professors consider themselves specifically devoted to undergraduate teaching, because many (or most) upper-level classes at MIT are joint grad-undergrad classes. So they would consider themselves dedicated to teaching, but they don’t really see the need to differentiate undergraduates from graduate students.</p>
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Very interested.</p>
<p>Also, don’t give MIT graduate students short shrift. They are also insanely smart, often extremely articulate, and very friendly. They are usually doing interesting research and are eager to tell undergrads about it. And by the time YOU are a graduate student, they will be professors at some of the top institutions in the country are therefore be Good People To Know.</p>
<p>My perspective is that of a parent of a MIT junior and a high-school senior who is applying to top LACs. I do think I understand both worlds, because I’m also a full professor at a small LAC.</p>
<p>On the one hand, MIT’s required general-education courses are huge, but on the other hand – and here’s where it get really interesting, in my opinion – MIT offers freshmen the opportunity to engage in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), where they can join a really small research group and work on cutting-edge problems. And I’d like to reinforce the earlier comment, that MIT faculty expect that MIT undergraduates are capable of contributing in substantial ways to research. For instance, the summer after my daughter’s freshman year, she worked in the Plasma Physics Laboratory, and her primary task was to install an $80,000 camera into the plasma physics apparatus. She was told, “Well, figure out how to install it, and also figure out how to program the camera, because we need it up and working in order to capture data within a couple of weeks.” That was it; no further instructions. She had it up and running within one week. Did she know how to do this? No. Did she believe she could figure it out? Yes. The professor and the graduate students assumed it would not be a problem, and I would say this empowered her to believe she could do it. Her subsequent career at MIT has included more of these sorts of challenges, and she has enjoyed meeting them. </p>
<p>My son is applying ED to a wonderful liberal arts college, but here’s what I know: He will never have the kinds of experiences my daughter has had at MIT. I’m writing the truth as I know it: the opportunities at MIT are really boundless, and they exceed anything available at a small liberal arts college or anything available at most other top universities.</p>
<p>CalAlum - Thanks for the helpful input. Acceptance is a longshot for all, but you remind parents why that long app was worthwhile. My son just submitted his… hooray ;)</p>
<p>@CalAlum: That challenge sounds amazing! I hope that, wherever I end up, I have those sorts of hands-on challenges to face as part of my education.</p>
<p>I agree with CalAlum that the"extracurricular" opportunities at MIT are one-of-a-kind. My son, a sophomore, worked last summer (after his freshman year) studying black holes at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory; he was asked to write up his research and was appointed the lead author (19 years old). He got paid for this. He met the inventor of a new cellular tower technology being rolled out internationally (and has coffee with him every few months). He had two Nobel Prize winners as professors his first year, and met with them periodically as well. He knows others that have been offered opportunities with Google, Microsoft, the CIA, congressmen and Senators; the examples go on and on. All the while, he’s learning in a unique way, in that MIT teaches students how to think and solve problems, not just how to regurgitate facts. My only regret in his being at MIT is that I couldn’t attend as well!</p>
<p>You didn’t ask about advising, but I will note that my freshman advisor was a Nobel laureate. Even with the guy’s prestige and schedule, he was taking the time to help 18 year-olds navigate their first year of MIT academics. He was a really good advisor, too, and very sweet.</p>
<p>I agree with Mollie; I’ve never bought into the idea that having grad students and a major research enterprise means that the undergrads are neglected. Also, the TAs (who, again, are there to assist the profs, not replace them) are sometimes phenomenal teachers. The presence of both a prof and TAs in a class means that you have more than one resource to go to.</p>
<p>It is true that, while undergrads are treated very well and have incredible opportunities, they are not the center of the universe to the degree that they might be at an LAC. Honestly, I saw that one as a plus. I wanted to be a part of something greater, with the respect and opportunities that come with being a sort of very junior colleague, not have my time as an undergrad be an extension of high school. </p>
<p>It was powerful to be able to walk through the halls at night listening to the machinery running in the labs, thinking about the work going on in there, and thinking “I am part of this; this world is <em>mine</em>.”</p>
<p>How are the english skills of the TAs? </p>
<p>The TAs for my engineering recitations (review sessions) were mostly good, and sometimes even the foreign ones with accents were fine teachers (it was mostly math/science stuff, with problems on the board). But I had a few I could hardly understand and heard the same complaint from students at other engineering schools.</p>
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<p>Obviously an alum like Mollie knows exactly what she’s talking about, but I thought I’d put in a word – the one major difference between graduate students and undergraduates is that graduate students are there specifically to work on something or the other with the given professor. I can only imagine the professor being a little more interested in a student that is explicitly interested in him/her in a more specific way, and is committing to several years of work together. So realistically, if you want exactly the same level of attention, you can just go to graduate school early and commit to working with that advisor. But sure, unlike many other schools with vastly stronger graduate students than undergraduates, I imagine the professors would be optimistic about undergraduates being able to do good work. </p>
<p>And I’m going to second the point on TAs. I know what it can take for someone to be an MIT graduate student in my field of interest, and the students are very qualified to teach things.</p>
<p>The TA’s are undoubtedly very intelligent - they don’t make the best of teachers at all times, however. I’ve gotten quite lucky with my TA’s. Overall, people shop around for TA’s - attend several sections, pick one with someone awesome. I recommend this :)</p>
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At least in my field (biology), top programs like MIT’s contain much higher proportions of domestic graduate students than lower-ranked programs.</p>
<p>Thinking back, I can’t think of a TA whose English skills impeded my understanding of the subject matter. But as Piper mentions, if I’d had a TA whose English I couldn’t understand, I would have attended another recitation section.</p>
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I agree, but I think the “attention” that undergraduates and graduate students receive is different enough that I just flatly don’t understand the “grad students draw attention away from undergrads” trope.</p>
<p>So I’m done with classes (in my program we take classes during first and second year), and I work full-time in the lab of my faculty advisor. He and I have scheduled ~weekly meetings to discuss my research, I present at lab meeting, and sometimes we chat in the hallways. This is about the same for the undergrads in my lab, although they meet with him less frequently because they’re in lab less frequently.</p>
<p>The undergraduates in his classes, however, see him twice a week during class, can attend his office hours, can set up an appointment to come talk with him, and can email him randomly on any topic that crosses their fluffy little Harvard brains. They definitely get more of his attention than I do on a weekly basis, particularly when one considers the per-unit-of-useful-work rate of attention.</p>
<p>To be honest, from the point of view of the lab (including the undergraduates in the lab), him teaching undergraduates takes away quite a bit of time from us. I accept that this is an important part of his job. But knowing how this dynamic actually works makes me kind of aggravated when people talk about graduate students getting some sort of disproportionate share of faculty attention.</p>
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<p>I can (from 18.06 - Linear Algebra). But he was one TA, out of some three dozen classes that I took, most of which were sci/eng. In retrospect, I should have attended a different section - I can’t remember why I didn’t.</p>
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<p>I do share your confusion to a large bit, and I’ve found the way to resolve it is to note how many different kinds of professors there tend to be. Some are supremely uninterested in teaching anything but very specialized topics of interest to them, and will spew volumes if one questions them about these, but possibly be very unhelpful upon visits to their office otherwise. Now while I don’t approve of this behavior, I do think it’s rightfully the graduate students’ right to be able to chat with professors about research topics before an undergraduate talks to them about “fluffy matters” simply because that’s presumably all the graduate students are there for. </p>
<p>A little example from personal experience too: a professor I particularly like has had heavy teaching duties this term, and while I know him very well, it’s hard for him to find time for me this particular term, as easy as it was the previous term, because he has graduate students to attend to on top of his teaching duties. And it so happens other professors are much less likely to have the answers to my questions, so I’d even be asking him about things he particularly enjoys thinking about, but he simply has other obligations (which of course is fair, but I wish it weren’t the case).</p>
<p>A point that’s a little strange to me is why Harvard undergraduates’ fluffy thoughts would take precedence over any of your own thoughts you had and emailed a professor about.</p>
<p>Certainly though, the many professors with any conscience at all seem to take care of their undergraduates’ questions about a course they’re teaching swiftly and well. There are also a good number (though I’d not go as far as to say an abundance) who seem to be able to inspire students with the love they had for the same subjects when they took courses on them long ago. While some of these matters are specific to my experience, I imagine I can criminally generalize a little bit of it to MIT!</p>
<p>EDIT: One other limiting factor is that sometimes one only learns enough to be conversant with the professors once relatively older. An MIT grad student I know mentioned how in a course he took, they had to give presentations, and it was easy to tell the undergraduates were severely limited in what they could do, and ended up presenting things he said he’d known several years ago, and weren’t realistically of much interest. He said he sympathized, but it goes to say if this was what a graduate student felt, one can only imagine what professors, whose knowledge can be ridiculously encyclopedic, may feel.</p>
<p>I’d like to point out to those new to the board that mathboy98 is not a student at MIT. He’s at Berkeley, which is my alma mater. I think his perspective, that one “only learns enough to be conversant with the professors once relatively older,” and that professors “whose knowledge can be ridiculously encyclopedic” may feel rather impatient with undergraduates, fits Berkeley like a glove. But I’m not sure it fits MIT. Certainly it does not match with my daughter’s UROP experiences at MIT, which have included research in Thomas Serre’s machine vision group, the Plasma Physics Lab, and now the Nuclear Research Lab.</p>
<p>In my opinion, if an institution has ample research resources and ample tasks/assignments associated with research, it’s not hard to give undergraduates tasks that actually contribute in meaningful ways to the overall project. In her most recent project, her supervising professor asked my daughter to write a chapter of her results for a report the group had to submit to the Department of Energy. He also asked her to present her results as part of a presentation to a group of visiting scientists from Germany. These were tasks that someone in the research group had to undertake; the fact that she did it freed up others to turn their attention elsewhere. She always characterizes her relationships with professors and graduate students and friendly and collaborative.</p>
<p>But I can well understand how it could be very, very different at Berkeley. Especially in this economic environment.</p>
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Because they’re allowed to email him and we’re not. :)</p>
<p>I’ll give you that much, CalAlum, my experiences are colored a little by my home school, but probably only hazily so, given I’ve never taken a course with > 15 students for my major, nor had trouble getting into a class. I actually think several of my experiences might actually be legitimately reflective of the balancing act a professor with dual responsibilities has to pull in many universities. Perhaps if there’s more money going around, people are in a little better mood, but I think the experience I have had with the finite-ness of a professor’s time to spare is just a function of his responsibilities!</p>
<p>Also, a graduate student not being allowed to email a professor, but undergraduates are?? Wow.</p>
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<p>You might just as well ask about the English skills of the faculty. I attempted one term to take a class taught by a visiting professor from the University of Beijing. He was totally incomprehensible, although brilliant, and I decided to the class the following term with a different Professor. </p>
<p>Any time you have a population the size of MIT’s you will have an assortment of saints and sinners, of professors who care deeply about their undergraduates and those who do not. I was very friendly with several of the faculty. One in particular invited me to his house for Thanksgiving dinner one year when I could not return home. He was a very good if not exceptional teacher, but he was a wonderful human being. One of the finest teachers I had at MIT did not care much about undergraduate teaching. He had to do it, so he did it, and coincidentally he was totally brilliant at it, but clearly it was something that did not enthuse him. It takes all types.</p>
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His lab is not allowed to email him, but other people are – that’s the actual division.</p>
<p>I am a senior at Yale. Maybe MIT is different, but my friends at Harvard agree - both our schools are full of bull when they say undergrads get access to professors, and that the TA’s are of high caliber. Couldn’t be further from the truth. I’d never leave Yale, but that isn’t because we’re offered some fabulous education or faculty access. I won’t leave because of the incredible people i’ve met and two specific professors. Otherwise, undergrads agree - Harvard and Yale are set up mainly as financial institutions, spending some time on grad students, and keeping an undergrad population because they have to, and hoping enough of us will be successful that they can milk us for future donations. My little brother awaits his EA decision from MIT, as we convinced him to avoid HYS and others for this very reason. If it doesn’t work for him at MIT, he’s off to Williams, Pomona or Cambridge, hopefully. Good luck to you all…</p>