<p>My daughter is having an amazing time at pre-frosh weekend so far. She loves the events and the kids she has met. She won't be able to sit in on any classes until Monday and although we have heard that only professors teach the actual lectures it seems that TF's lead discussion sections, labs (?), and grade papers, problem sets, etc. We have heard TF's range from great to terrible. She is comparing this with Williams where profs (although not as big name as H) do have really personal contact with the students and do not use TF's. Thank you so much - this is going to be a really hard decision for her.</p>
<p>The truth is TAs really do teach a lot of the courses at the introductory level (usually as supplements to the professors who lecture). However, what we have to remember about them is that they’re not only graduate students, but they’re graduate students at Harvard. That means they know their stuff… seriously. Most of them go on to become professors themselves within a year of you having them in class. </p>
<p>Long story short - TFs teaching classes is not as big a deal as you think it is. In fact, it’s better in a way because they’re younger and definitely more approachable (and well versed in email… which is something not all professors are.).</p>
<p>I have a daughter at H and a son at a top notch LAC. You are absolutely right; it is night and day. At the LAC, he has formulated incredible relationships with professors. When it came time to apply to grad school, they couldn’t have been any more helpful and available because they really know him. </p>
<p>Though many will say that one can formulate the same relationships with professors at H, the relationships are not even close to the same level - qualifier: in my kids’ experiences. And yes, there are many great TFs at H and some lousy ones.</p>
<p>That being said, there are many other experiences that my daughter had at H which are not available at my son’s LAC. The wide diversity of students at H contributed largely to this, IMO. There is a much greater variety of courses at H as well. </p>
<p>Your daughter really has to sort out what is most important to her. She has two great but very different choices. Best of luck to her!</p>
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<p>Twinmom, thank you for the qualifier. This was not my son’s experience (he graduated from Harvard last year), nor mine at Harvard many years earlier. Literally half of my son’s courses at Harvard had enrollment under 20 students, and probably half of that half had enrollment under 10. He formed very close relationships with several professors, who got to know him well and helped him with recommendations etc. Even in larger classes, he often took advantage of office hours to talk directly with the professor in the class. And he also developed some good relationships with TF’s, some of whom were stellar teachers as well - though admittedly a couple were duds. I agree that this is not universal - it is certainly possible to go through Harvard taking primarily big classes and not getting to know your professors. But if it’s a priority for you to take smaller classes and develop relationships with professors at Harvard, it’s really not that hard.</p>
<p>Cosar: I think that a lot depends on the student’s major and his/her personality. And I do agree, some of the TFs are stellar teachers.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>If you like the idea of a university as a center for education, then you see TFs and grad students in general as a plus, not a minus. For any given field, the community at Harvard will be 6-10 times larger than that at Williams, and far more knowledgeable, since undergraduates will maybe constitute 20-25% rather than 90%. Grad students, who are close to undergraduates in age and only a few years beyond them in training, provide important mediation between undergraduates and truly leading scholars, as well as modeling for undergraduates what a career path looks like. And if you are talking about a place like Harvard, the graduate students are really top-notch, and the TFs are not first-year grad students but ones that have been though additional training and socialization.</p></li>
<li><p>And any real (research) university you go to is going to have graduate students performing those functions. </p></li>
<li><p>Like Cosar’s son, I was aggressive in college and formed close relationships with senior faculty (as well as some graduate students). It was great. Those relationships, however, were nowhere near as close as the ones I have seen between LAC professors and their top students. It really is a different model. I would choose the university model again every time, but not if having close relationships with faculty were the thing I valued most.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Unfortunately, there are TA’s and TF’s who are not graduate but undergraduate students. My d is a senior and is a TA for “organic chem”. She teaches the section, submits test questions and grades tests.</p>
<p>I have heard of this happening in extreme situations, but never experienced it firsthand. Clearly it’s the exception, so your daughter must be exceptional. Congratulations to her - it must be a great experience.</p>
<p>^
Depends on the class</p>
<p>[This</a> is CS50 / Staff](<a href=“http://www.cs50.net/staff/]This”>Staff - CS50)</p>
<p>Never heard anyone complain about the TF’s in this course, and they are almost all undergrads.</p>
<p>Thanks for the link. It looks like a great course - I particularly like the slideshow from the CS50 fair. Did you take this course? Computer science seems like an obvious candidate to recruit undergrads to help with the intro course - would be interested to hear how successful it is. (CS was more in its infancy when I was at Harvard. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were undergrads then - probably wouldn’t have been too bad to have them as TFs.)</p>
<p>Twinmom - what did you mean by it depends on your major? My D is considering physics at the moment (but I know things can change.)</p>
<p>@cosar - CS50 is an incredible course. I took it my junior year, TF’d my senior year. Malan is very dynamic, and incredibly creative in terms of how to teach/assess/etc.</p>
<p>I think undergrad TFs are a great fit - most of the CS grad students I know are too brilliant to be able to explain something like pointers or malloc() (if that makes sense).</p>
<p>JMMom32 - My D’s freshman physics (16 and 15B) TFs all were/are grad students.</p>
<p>My 2 Ds at Harvard are a Government concentrator and a Gender Studies concentrator. Government is a huge major, GS is very small.</p>
<p>My Government concentrator has had a few very large classes which break out into sessions with TFs. But most of her classes have been quite small. She’s has had an opportunity to build relationships with several of her professors and has found that they are very generous with their office time for one-on-one visits…</p>
<p>The GS major routinely has class sizes such as 15, 10, 4! Her professors occasionally come over to her residential college to eat with her. When she declared her major, one of the faculty in the department told her how happy she was that she’d chosen that department, and when my D asked how she knew, the professor said that once the paperwork came through, another colleague had run down the hall yelling “We got Laura, we got Laura!” My D liked that a lot.</p>
<p>You’ll find a big variation in class sizes by major, but even within the larger majors, there are numerous quality, small-group interaction opportunities.</p>
<p>“undergraduates will maybe constitute 20-25% rather than 90%”</p>
<p>Are you including faculty members as part of the community? GSAS only has around 3000 students, so undergrads constitute about 2/3 of the students in liberal arts.</p>
<p>Hanna:</p>
<p>Of course I’m counting faculty members as part of the community. And lecturers, and post-docs, and institute researchers, etc. </p>
<p>You are right (and I was a little surprised that you are right) that there are only 3,700 grad students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. (You were wrong that it was only 3,000, but you were much closer to being right than I was, because I thought the number was over 6,000.) If you count the grad students in Engineering and Applied Sciences (which includes computer science, applied math, and environmental science), it’s more like 4,100. </p>
<p>I had looked up the ratio of grad students to undergraduates at Harvard (and elsewhere) a few years ago, and had it in my mind that the ratio was a lot closer to 1:1 (excluding the professional schools, etc., of course).</p>
<p>In any event, 20-25% was a little hyperbolic. Say 30-40%. My basic point stands: At a research university, you are part of a larger community where most of the people know a lot more than you do. At a LAC you are part of an often much more intimate community where only a few people know a lot more than you do. Two different ways of learning. I always vote for the first, but that doesn’t make it right for everyone.</p>
<p>JJMom:</p>
<p>Let me frame it this way: your daughter has to decide which college is best for her interests, needs, and temperament in less that a weeks time. I do not believe the professor versus TF debate (at least in the case of Harvard) is the right issue to focus on.</p>
<p>Rather, your daughter needs to think about what Harvard offers its undergraduate students year after year: 1) peopleextraordinary fellow students, world class faulty, TFs, and staff, 2) extracurricular activities that are unmatched in number, depth, and breadth, and 3) unequaled resources available during undergraduate years and beyond. </p>
<p>I do think that it is difficult for any 17-19 year old to appreciate how powerful this combination is on the Harvard undergraduate experience vis-à-vis other schools until they have been there for a while.</p>
<p>Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Williams Fitzsimmons has often been quoted as saying “there are no mistakes” among Harvard admits. In speaking to my freshman son last night after his concert, he said to his prefrosh guest for me, the mistake would have been to go any where else".</p>
<p>My daughter is not a physics major but has taken physics courses. They do break out to be largely taught by TFs. </p>
<p>It really depends on what your daughter wants. There are pros and cons to everything in life as we all know. My son got a phenomenal education at his LAC. My daughter has had incredible experiences at Harvard. Your daughter should look at the whole package and pick what feels right to her.</p>
<p>“My daughter is not a physics major but has taken physics courses. They do break out to be largely taught by TFs”. </p>
<p>I am not sure what you are saying.</p>
<p>Of the 30 or so undergraduate Physics courses, only 2 (introductory type survey courses primarily for non-concentrators) have TFs that are involved as lecturers, and that is in conjunction with a Professor who teaches the course. </p>
<p>TFs do typically run the break out recitation sections.</p>
<p>ws59</p>
<p>Was your son in the Bach Society orchestra concert last night by any chance? (there were probably several concerts going on.) The excitement of the performers was so apparent. My D LOVED the whole pre-frosh weekend! So many people on CC have raved about H’s amazing EC’s and before we visited we weren’t sure how they could be that amazing but they truly are. The H students were also wonderful all weekend - so friendly and helpful and excited to have pre-frosh there. My D felt so at home. You are also right about an 18 year old not understanding how far-reaching H’s influence in her life may be. The reason I posted about the TF issue is that I wish H had offered the chance to see something besides an array of large lecture classes. Maybe the logistics just wouldn’t work with so many pre-frosh. H did welcome people popping in and out and between the two of us, we saw 20-30 minute sections of maybe 7 or 8 classes. Some other schools we visited required you to stay for the whole class, which was not necessary to get a good feel for it. But we saw a wider range in size of classes elsewhere also. Some of the H lectures were great but others didn’t seem to engage the students as much as they might have. Maybe that occurs more in the discussion sections with TFs? Do you think that H students can successfully use available info (Q guide, peer recommendations, etc.) to get into the classes that will most interest them?</p>