<p>“Seriously, you don’t think there are more (relevant) undergrad research opportunities at a LAC than e.g. at MIT or Caltech, do you ?”</p>
<p>I don’t know about the others, but every Reed senior is required write a year-long masters-level research thesis. Are these opportunities?</p>
<p>MIT and CalTech are poor counter-examples; they are two of the big schools also high on the future-PhD lists.</p>
<p>I agree with bruno123 that the Reed statistics are not dispositive. Here is one basic issue: Propensities to attend graduate school differ among arts and sciences, business, nursing, ag. schools, etc. Thus, there is a confounding of effects if you compare a college with only arts and sciences programs to a university with business, nursing, and ag. schools. </p>
<p>Another point to remember is that graduate admissions decisions are made by the individual departments. Letters of recommendation are more important at this level, and it can matter whether members of the admissions committee are familiar with your recommenders. If you have letters from faculty members who are not active researchers, those letters may not be taken seriously. After all, someone whose research is out-of-date is a less reliable judge of who will flourish in graduate school today. So, it may make a big difference where you attend college.</p>
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<p>Seriously, you don’t think there are more (relevant) undergrad research opportunities at a mid-size university than e.g. at MIT or Caltech, do you?</p>
<p>You can always find atypical examples, which tech/engineering schools certainly may be. For example, why not throw Harvey Mudd in there?</p>
<p>Be that as it may, yes, some of the top LACs offer tremendous undergrad research opportunies.</p>
<p>You want to go somewhere that is going to combine great research opportunities with personal attention so that you can demonstrate a body of lab work and have people write letters of recommendations who know you well and work with you closely.</p>
<p>There are quite a few schools that are great and this combination of personal attention and access to lab work, and those are the places I would be looking at.</p>
<p>If you have letters from faculty members who are not active researchers, those letters may not be taken seriously.</p>
<p>If and may are good caveats, but with somewhere between a quarter and a third of all Reed grads later earning PhDs, and a higher percentage of Swarthmore grads doing so, it would seem that those letters are taken seriously.</p>
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<p>It’s 30% of their graduates, so the Honors program not only directly impacts a lot of students, but drives the whole style of education a the College. It’s a big reason that Swarthmore send so many graduates to top PhD programs. One of the advantages that LACs have is that there is often a very close mentoring relationship between a student and one or more professors.</p>
<p>@vossron: There is no question that many students from Reed and Swarthmore complete graduate degrees. Ph.D. programs are not all created equal, however, and one question is whether the students would have gotten into better Ph.D. programs had they matriculated elsewhere. Whenever someone reads a letter of recommendation, he or she must assess whether the writer is in a position to judge the candidate’s potential for success. If the writer is not active in research, the reader will be skeptical, at least in technical fields. Of course, an LAC may have developed a pipeline to a certain grad school, in which case the writer is able to make comparisons to previous candiates. (In fact, I had a couple of Swarthmore grads as classmates when I got my Ph.D., and more came later.) But if an LAC does not have a pipeline to a particular grad school, that student will be at a disadvantage relative to the student from the research university whose recommenders are well-known. </p>
<p>The statistics on Ph.D. completion do not tell the whole story. In my field, Swarthmore would be a very good choice for a student hoping to do grad work at a top program, but it is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Thus, I would hope that students do not take these numbers too seriously.</p>
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I agree with the first part but not the second. At universities of similar calibur to Swarthmore I’d assert that you have the same opportunities for all of that, except the intellectual atmosphere. 30% graduating honors and a large number of students pursuing a PhD would be a very different atmosphere from my college where the three paths seem to be med school, law school, and wall street. However, even at arguably the most preprofessional school in the Ivy League I’ve found two research opportunities (one sophomore year one junior year), multiple professors (not assigned advisors) who have mentored me and given me advice to help me figure out my academic and career goals, done presentations in some classes (other classes are a lot more presentation heavy), and I will complete an honors thesis my senior year. If I was on the same track as many of my peers these things wouldn’t appeal to me very much. However, they were very easy to find at my very preprofessional school. Maybe I would have been better off with the honors program at Swat, but in every other facet of my education I can’t see how Swat would have prepared me better.</p>
<p>Patinthehat, I suggest you peruse the grad school forum on this site and see what kind of topics are of interest to people who have or are in the middle of securing a spot in grad school. Overwhelmingly, the kinds of issues that arise are related to research experience eg. How much would a publication offset a poor GPA, or Should I work as a lab tech before applying to grad school. You would soon see that the most important thing you can gain from your undergrad career as it pertains to grad school in the biomedical sciences, is a strong foundation in science and substantial research experience. That being said, you will want to look for a school that offers a lot of quality research opportunities to undergrads. This information should be easy enough to find, just check out departments websites to see what kind of projects and awards undergrads are getting. </p>
<p>By the way, in the biomedical sciences, University of Pittsburgh is a powerhouse and you should definitely think strongly about going there.</p>
<p>Venkat89: You can definitely find research opportunities, small class sizes, and professors who will be close mentors and who can write great recommendation letters at large universities of similar caliber to Swarthmore. I don’t want to generalize too much, but I think that it’s inherently easier to find these things at a smaller school like Swarthmore, where the emphasis is on teaching undergraduates. </p>
<p>Then again, if you want to do something specific, more pre-professional, like chemical bioengineering as an undergrad, you might not want to go to Swarthmore, because we just have general engineering. If you want to become an engineer and you go to Swarthmore, graduate school is virtually a prerequisite.</p>
<p>When I applied to Ph.D. programs in the biosciences, and later when having the chance to serve on their admissions committee as a grad student, overwhelmingly the most scrutinized item was research experience. We really wanted to know if the student has knowledge of what the next 4-7 year commitment will entail, and if there was any inkling that they were going to grad school just by default in lieu of having gained any other direction about their career they were quickly dinged.</p>
<p>I’ll repeat: research experience.</p>
<p>And on that point I think there are arguments that can be made for either the smaller college or larger powerhouse research university for gaining research experience. Presumably, you have more opportunities and more labs in the research university but also more competition for those opportunities as PI’s (Principle Investigators) and the labs culture will be busy with and structured towards postdocs and grad students. In the smaller college there will be less labs and less choice as to research topics being conducted but the PI’s there may be more accustomed to having undergrads being more participatory. It’s something that you will need to check out for yourself particularly in the field you’re most interested in if you know in advance.</p>
<p>As for going to an honors state program or high caliber ranked school, again, there is the case for both depending on how you wish to craft your experience. Using myself as an example (and meaning no pretension, just giving the facts as to be most helpful), in my Ivy grad school program we had a mix of folks from state schools (~1/3), liberal arts colleges (~1/3), and Ivy-type universities (~1/3). I see this ratio mostly still holding true now at my postdoc institution (West Coast Ivy-caliber) for the grad student classes. I myself went to an Ivy for undergrad and I think it did help in giving my application a better look. But again, that can’t be entirely attributed to just the name value as it was confounded by the extensive research experience I was exposed to starting in my sophomore year and culminating in a senior honors thesis. You are right to say that a state honors program will certainly help you financially as the life of a grad student, while receiving a stipend, is still one of penury! There is loan payback deferment but going the Ph.D. route is not the road to riches but a choice towards scientific inquiry and addressing pressing issues for public good. So, I think you should take a hard look at the honors program to see how their track record is for grad school acceptance, and also if that program allows you extra access to research opportunities and enrichment above and beyond “normal” undergrads at the school. I should say however that my undergrad was not just a stepping stone towards grad school and that I felt what I learned there was unique and in and of itself worth my attendance (it helped shape my decision to go the grad school, for one). It should be noted that the current economic climate is effecting grad school admissions with reduced funding for the non-professional grad school programs (i.e. Ph.D. programs, since one pays for Masters programs). The trend I’m seeing appears to be a decrease in spots for Ph.D. programs as departments and interdisciplinary programs make cuts due to decreased funding and fewer institutional fellowships awarded for allotment.</p>
<p>Now if we are to discuss whether it really is worth it to get a Ph.D. nowadays, well, that’s a long thread in and of itself. We already had a glut when times were good, and now it’s even worse. You really, really, really, need to love science and be willing to sacrifice quite a bit for that ideal. You have a while yet to decide so take your time and good luck! :)</p>
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<p>Do you know the figures for Ph.D programs in engineering ? I would assume the LAC ratio is lower than 1/3. </p>
<p>BTW, what do you mean by “Ivy type” ? Should I understand that is your terminology for USN&WR top 10 (20 ?), but excluding public universities from the list ?</p>
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<p>My general impression from hanging out with some of the engineering grads and their program agrees with you that the LAC component in that field would account for quite a bit less than 1/3 of the grad class. The types of schools that would make up that difference would be science and tech orientated ones (besides MIT and CalTech) such as Harvey Mudd, Carnegie Mellon, UIUC, Purdue, GIT, RPI, WPI, etc. However, I want to caution that the lack of LAC representation in such a field like engineering may very well be attributed to a strong selection bias where most students choosing undergrad and who are focused on engineering steer away (rightfully or wrongfully) from LACs and towards the aforementioned tech specialty schools. That is to say, fewer engineers in LACs, rather than a lack of preparation or research opportunities in engineering, may account for their lower representation in grad school.</p>
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<p>Yes, sorry for the confusion, by “Ivy type” I mean any non-public Top 25 USN&WR college. Implicit in my categorization is the belief that #1 and #25 isn’t that great of a factor in the eyes of the grad admissions committee as research experience and LORs (after achieving a threshold level GPA and GRE) weigh so much more and are evaluated on the individual level.</p>
<p>@dkj: Two of your points really rang true. The first is that schools will endeavor to discern whether the applicant knows what grad school entails. In the social sciences, for example, most top grad programs are much more quantitative than the typical undergrad program. (In fact, many economics grad programs admit math majors with little previous exposure to economics.) There ends up being a lot of attrition in the first two years because students cannot handle the math. The second is that the best path to take (e.g., LAC vs. research university) may differ by field. College applicants should ask the college which grad schools their sudents attend and what jobs they get subsequently. </p>
<p>Your post reminded me of another difference among fields. I recently had a discussion with two faculty members from a medical school. I indicated that good ideas were in short supply in my field, but there was no shortage of people who could take the ideas, do the research, and get the results published. They claimed that it was different in their fields. That is, good research ideas were plentiful, but there was a premium on lab skills.</p>
<p>On the issue of engineering PhDs, obviously those ranks will be dominated by undergrad schools with engineering programs and specifically tech/engineering specialty schools.</p>
<p>Here is the list of all US colleges and universities that sent at least 1% of their total graduates to a PhD Engineering degree over a recent 10 year period. It’s dominated by engineering schools, but the top liberal arts schools with engineering programs (both universities and LACs) are represented nicely considering that they have much smaller percentages of engineering undergrads to start with:</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>Formula: Total Engineering PhDs divided by Total Grads** </p>
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1 California Institute of Technology 10.9%
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 6.5%
3 Harvey Mudd College 5.2%
4 Cooper Union 3.9%
5 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 3.7%
6 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology 2.8%
7 Carnegie Mellon University 2.8%
8 University of Missouri, Rolla 2.6%
9 Case Western Reserve University 2.6%
10 Colorado School of Mines 2.6%
11 Rice University 2.4%
12 Alfred University, Main Campus 2.2%
13 Georgia Institute of Technology, Main Campus 2.2%
14 Polytechnic University 2.1%
15 Worcester Polytechnic Institute 2.1%
16 Johns Hopkins University 1.9%
17 Stevens Institute of Technology 1.9%
18 Princeton University 1.8%
19 Michigan Technological University 1.8%
20 Clarkson University 1.6%
21 Lehigh University 1.5%
22 Illinois Institute of Technology 1.5%
23 Cornell University, All Campuses 1.5%
24 Swarthmore College 1.3%
25 Stanford University 1.3%
26 Duke University 1.2%
27 South Dakota School of Mines & Technology 1.2%
28 Florida Institute of Technology 1.2%
29 University of California-Berkeley 1.1%
30 New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology 1.1%
31 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1.1%
32 United States Military Academy 1.0%
33 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ 1.0%
34 Milwaukee School of Engineering 1.0%
35 GMI Engineering and Management Institute 1.0%
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<p>@coase, that is exactly the case. Only about a third of grant proposals to the NIH get funded (even fewer on the first try). There are tons of research plans that never get done due to lack of resources. In fact, in many grad schools, there is a requirement for “an off topic” comp. That is a research proposal that will never be followed up on.</p>