<p>My daughters at Harvard have had far more personal relationships with their faculty - several of them superstars - than I had with my instructors at Wake Forest. The faculty teach intro courses and freshman seminars (limited to a class size of 12), and are generally very accessible for office hours. My older D’s live-in House Master has a Nobel Prize. He and his wife have lived in her hall and eaten meals with the students for 13 years. They’re leaving that role this summer, and the new incoming House Master is a current member of the “Time 100” (100 most influential people in the world). Both my Ds have perceived the notions that Harvard faculty are disinterested in undergrads and that the university somehow focuses its attention on grad students to be total myth.</p>
<p>I think it is worth a mention that University/College teaching jobs can be in short supply and many wonderful professors go where the job is…</p>
<p>My sister was arguably the top graduate in her area of expertise when she got her doctorate. She went to the best Masters and PhD programs in her field and regularly presents papers, edits journals and books, etc. with the best of the best.</p>
<p>In her TOP tier graduate program she and ONE OTHER person got teaching jobs the year they left. EVERYONE else went on to something else or got post-docs because there were simply no positions open.</p>
<p>She has chosen NOT to leave and “move up” because she has a family and is in a wonderful community. She regualarly wins student elected teaching awards and sends her students to top tier grad schools. </p>
<p>Don’t assume the best TEACHERS (or even the best qualified) are at the top tier schools. They can be anywhere.</p>
<p>I can only say one of them was a bad teacher. Even then, it’s more of a learning style difference. A number of the folks above are pretty well known in their fields.</p>
<p>Phil Jackson was an avg player and poss the best coach ever. Michael Jordan has been a terrible executive. Doing and teaching are two entirely different skill sets. I think schools like Rice, Tufts, W&M, Georgetown offer a great education but in a larger setting than most LACs, but not too big to lose their focus on the undergrad. This is a great thread to highlight a most overlooked niche.</p>
<p>So many overly broad generalizations being made here. This is going to vary tremendously by field. In the humanities and in pure intellectual disciplines like math, research and academic superstardom are not driven by big externally generated research grants or work done in labs that take time away from teaching. The research is done in the professor’s own office and/or study. When I was an undergrad in philosophy at Michigan some years ago, virtually everyone on the philosophy faculty was a “star” in the field, many of them at the “superstar” level in a department that was ranked in the top 4 or 5 in the country. Every one of them, superstars included, taught both graduate and undergraduate courses, as as another poster from another school mentioned, the boundary between the two was very fuzzy as most of the courses I took in my major as a junior and senior were graduate-level courses and seminars that were also open to qualified undergrads. Did I benefit from studying with the top people in the field? You bet I did. I got an education in philosophy that could not be replicated at any LAC at the time, nor at any second-tier quasi-research university that didn’t have the same kind of depth, breadth, and cutting-edge, pushing-the-boundaries research going on in its philosophy faculty. I had opportunities to develop close relationships with, and to study under (in intimate, small-class settings), some of the very best in the field. As best I can tell, Michigan’s philosophy department is similarly structured, and similarly excellent, today.</p>
<p>On the other hand, many of my fellow students in certain sciences and the most popular social sciences had a very different experience. Political science and psych, for example, tended to be taught in large, anonymous lecture classes, even at the advanced undergrad level. Most of the big-name professors were good teachers, but those departments didn’t have the same kind of classroom intimacy and opportunities for undergrads to develop close mentoring relationships with their professors. So I honestly think it’s a mixed bag, and most of the broad generalizations being bandied about here on both sides are just wrong, or substantially wrong.</p>
<p>I think some people are missing the point here. It’s not a question of whether or not superstars teach undergrads, or whether or not the superstars sometimes change the lives of the undergrads they teach. It’s a question of whether or not someone who isn’t even close to being a superstar could do as well teaching the (relatively elementary) undergrad-level courses.</p>
<p>Probably the best and most life-changing instructor I ever had was a grad student who taught a 2-semester intro philosophy course. No doubt, all of the tenured philosophy professors knew the subject better than he did, but since I had almost no idea what philosophy was at the time, this grad student was more than smart enough for me. I’ll never know, but I doubt if a superstar could have taught the course any better than this guy did.</p>
<p>I went through all of Kb’s engineering profs’ web sites. Wow, lots of impressive degrees among them! And one gives Phead’s superstar prof a run for her money on the hot-o-meter. Another has that classic librarian look, but if you take off the glasses and let down the hair–like in the movies–a different story. MollieB, that’s a look you might want to cultivate so you can have it both ways (smart yet…). See the movie “Varsity Blues” if you need a primer on how to get this look.</p>
<p>Ditto mollieb’s description of MIT regarding the lack of a distinction between undergrad and grad courses at Harvard. The only liberal arts courses that are defined as one or the other are tutorials and freshman seminars. Everything else is open to anyone who is ready for the material.</p>
<p>Mollie, I’m guessing “MIT Barbies” are a fairly small % of the female student population at MIT. Is that right? Maybe they should make an “MIT Barbie” doll for overachieving young girls to play with: hair pulled back and tied in a bun, thick horn-rimmed glasses…you unfurl the bun and take off the glasses, and …hubba hubba.</p>
<p>Well, there are certainly people who aren’t interested in being girly or fashionable, which isn’t to say that they couldn’t be – they just aren’t interested. But there are also a number of smart fashionistas.</p>