UCLA v Middlebury

College Search & Selection
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With respect to your pros of UCLA, there is incredible depth of majors at the university. In the life sciences, there are Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics, abbreviated as MIMG, and there’s Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology, abbreviated as MCDB. There’s a Computational and Systems Biology (“CaSB”) major in which students can go for a five-year program ending with an MS with concentrations in Biostats, Bioinformatics, and others – here’s a link, and there’s a story of a grad of the program who’s now in the PhD program in Computer Science at the university after she found out about the program belatedly. There are numerous other life-science majors at the university: Psychobiology, Biochemistry, Biophysics. . . let me cut this short and just post a link with majors and minors in the department.

And if you’re looking for something computationally based, in addition to or instead of the life sciences, UCLA has various minors; here’s a link to the all the minors at the university, with two new majors in Social Data Science and Data Science Engineering, as well as there being a Specialization in Computing that anyone can take. The pivot from life sciences at UCLA to Stats, Data Theory, and the nine or ten math/computational majors at UCLA is apparently pretty smooth, as long as you take the math classes for math students instead of for those specifically for life-science majors. And of course, you’d have to take the full set of calculus courses (or come in with AB or BC Calculus college credit), with would be five or six courses.

Sorry for the verbosity…all the best.

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This was extremely helpful. Thanks!

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I can say that it’s very unlikely that you’ll walk on to the Middlebury women’s lax team, so don’t factor that into the equation. Middlebury is the top-ranked Division III team in the country right now, having won 40 games in a row.

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You’re welcome.

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Any decisions? :slight_smile:

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You mentioned that there are more people to meet at UCLA. That’s true, but you’re not going to meet them. There’s just not enough time. Research suggests that students have the same number of friends in college regardless of whether they go to a big university or a small college. There are only so many hours in a day. I wouldn’t make a decision based on that factor.

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My daughter is a Neuroscience major at Midd, and my nephew is a bio major at UCLA. We are from Chicagoland, and they are from the LA area.

Both colleges have research opportunities, however they are different. For lab experience at UCLA, one must be more proactive, since you will be one student out of dozens or hundreds who are taking that course from that professor. So it is unlikely that the professor/PI will notice any one student from the class itself, so you would need to go to a few office hours, ask to speak with the professor, etc. In short, you would have to do your schmoozing mostly outside of class and the lab.

On the plus side, there will be more choice in labs.

On the other hand, at Midd, you will be in a small class, and the professor will know your name in a couple of weeks. Asking about research opportunities will take very little effort (but standing out may take more - se my remarks below)

As others have written, the nature of your work will differ. The work that you are more likely to do at UCLA will be in the more technical aspects, while at Midd, you are more likely to be engaged in your own research. On the other hand, the lab facilities at UCLA will be more extensive, so your technical work will involve the use of more advanced equipment.

However, it is not absolute. Some PIs at large universities are really good at encouraging the undergrad research, and you can join these labs as a lab member. On the other hand, internships are readily available for Midd students who want to work at a lab in a research university. My daughter will be having her second internship at U Chicago this summer. She is working at one of the top labs in the field.

Regarding the Cons for Midd:

There is, in fact, sometimes too much partying, as is true for all rural LACs. The lack of a Greek life does not hinder that in the least.

There is no social gap between athletes and non-athletes, but mingling is limited by the fact that athletes have to build their social life around their training and game schedule. The mingling between athletes is also limited because different sports have different training and competition schedules. Volleyball and Skiing will have very different schedules.

There are 787 varsity athletes of around 2,500 students. So a bit fewer than every third person is a varsity athlete. There are also club sports, as well as many outdoor activities. It is an outdoorsy campus, and sports are part of it. Some of those sports are, however, very geeky, like ultimate Frisbee or Quidditch.

Regarding the cons for UCLA:

Quarter system can be a good thing

You will be as big a fish at UCLA as you would be at Middlebury. Academically, they are equivalent.

In some ways, at UCLA it will be easier to stand out, if you make the effort, since most students in large classes will not try to connect with the faculty teaching the class. At a small school, the professor know everybody, and everybody meets with the professor during office hours. So you have to do more than that to stand out. At a very large school, not being intimidated, and not being uncomfortable with standing out, will make an impression, so simply going to office hours and having an interesting discussion with your professor will make you stand out in a positive way.

Course registration is difficult everywhere in some majors. This is true for any college which is not suffering from a drop in enrollment, which is not the case for either UCLA or Middlebury.

I will disagree with some others on the thread. While there is access to good hiking trails in UCLA, the campus itself is urban, and access to outdoors will be restricted to free time. At Middlebury the colleges itself has outdoors. Being able to walk to the Knoll at night and see a sky full of stars is not an experience that one can really have at UCLA. The air is also cleaner at Midd…

Of course, UCLA has the amenities of a major metropolis.

For you specifically, I would actually recommend Middlebury. Not because it is objectively better, nor do I think that either is better for you academically. It is that you have grown up in a major urban area, and I think that you would really enjoy being in a more rural location for a few years, especially one as beautiful as Middlebury.

Whatever you choose, I am sure that you will do very well, and have a great time.

Congratulations, and good luck!

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Not yet! Still doing some thinking but this thread has definitely helped me put my thoughts in order.

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When I visited Middlebury with my kid, I thought it was the most beautiful campus I’ve ever seen and one of the prettiest places I have ever been. But it is quiet- I think it is just so physically big for the number of students there. For my kid it was too quiet and she did not apply, but she felt that way about all the LAC’s in general. I would have enrolled in a heartbeat, and I am not a skiier. I also am a believer that there is no way a big public uni can offer the same education as a top LAC if one is inclined to take advantage of it (although one can argue that the things one learns out of class from having to navigate a large impersonal environment are equally important).
As far as outdoors opportunities- UCLA offers warm weather so you can be outside all the time. But it’s not like true outdoor activities are easily accessible on a daily basis, no more than a college in NYC. Middlebury wins in that sense, as long as you don’t mind the cold.

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This was a very kind and thoughtful response and you bring up some great points. I actually live in a suburb north of Chicago so I wouldn’t consider myself living in an “urban” area but the points you bring up are very valid. How does your daughter enjoy Midd as a whole? How has the neuroscience been for her?

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For quarters…my kids fall quarter ended before the Christmas break. Winter ended before the spring break, and spring ended second week of June. Quarter kids usually don’t start until mid September.

My semester kid…finals ended before the winter break in December and second semester ended first week of May or so.

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Desire to live in an urban vs rural area is very dependent on personality. I have twins, who grew up in suburban NorCal, one chose a location with endless outdoor activities (skiing, climbing, hiking, rafting etc) and the other chose UCLA for the city lifestyle. I think others have described LA fairly well: the weather is great for spending time outdoors, you can go and laze on the grass and read for all but a handful of days during the year. S has done some hiking and skiing (though access to a car is helpful for some hiking and necessary for skiing) but he’d say the easy access to the beach is the best “outdoor” feature of UCLA because Santa Monica is very accessible by bus and driving out to Malibu and beyond gets you even better beaches. He’s used Zipcar for day trips although once people move out to apartments it is somewhat more common to have a car. He does enjoy running up and around Bel Air though, there’s a loop from campus that goes past many of the most spectacular mansions.

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Have you researched whether UCLA is still making the largest classes online? That might be a thing for lectures. I think you can look on their class finder or, even easier, call admissions. I tried to look on their class finder website but it’s a little clunky. Maybe you can look through it a bit. Looks like fall 2022 isn’t there yet but you can look at current classes.

Not sure if this matters to you but you should go in eyes wide open.

https://sa.ucla.edu/ro/public/soc/

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There’s a full set of traditional and other greek orgs at UCLA.

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UCLA Reagan Medical Center and its associated labs is on campus just a Justin Fields’ heave from the life-science classes to them. And there are many complexes to the point that many people believe that North Campus is too overbuilt. But they’ve kept the places where students mostly attend class pretty wide open, and there’s a nice hilly feel to the campus, even if it’s more like the highland versus the lowland – that’s what I call it, and not all that much elevated. Hope you visited both campuses.

Let me add too that apparently a lot of the upper-div neuro classes are taught in modules, with two or three professors teaching their particular specialty.

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I think that we are making @Buffy091’s choice more difficult than it already is… :laughing:

She loves it, she really enjoys neuroscience, and she is well set up now to go on to grad school. She does not find the weather to be too cold, and the North side is colder than our area of Chicagoland (we have friends up in Highland Park, and know that the Northern suburbs can be more than 5 degrees cooler because of Lake Effect).

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You make the point that UCLA is much larger so there are ‘more people to meet’. While that is true, because of the residential college experience and close knit community at Midd, you will likely ‘meet more people’ at Midd. There are thousands more students at big universities than LACs, but you may end up really getting to know a very small subset. That’s usually not the case at a LAC.

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I attended a large flagship. This is plainly true in my experience. You’re not going to have 10,000 friends. Or even 100.

It’s one of the things that comes up in these discussions that I discount pretty heavily.

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Classes are pretty much all back in person now (as of spring quarter).

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Even for the largest? We know a freshman who had two online classes and I also found some remote options on the spring class finder.