<p>I got accepted to both and received the financial aid pkgs. The net price are both the same. However, for pittsburgh..it included work study and a Perkins loan while Penn state offered me a really good provost award. I have been told that Pittsburgh sends out its awards and scholarships after financial aid? The big difference is that I have to take out more loans for pittsburgh and work study is not always guaranteed. Both are exceptional schools and I love both of them. I like pitt due its area but penn b/c of the college experience. I prefer urban over experience. My goal is to go in the health field and pitt is good for it. However, I'm not a 100% sure and I'm afraid i might switch majors if i cant handle it. My entire family and coworkes think its a mistake to pass up psu. what should i do?</p>
<p>depends on what you mean by going into a health field. Life science departments at PSU are much better and larger than U. Pitt. Pitt has a great medical school, but the research opportunities for undergrads are not as extensive because of the medical school environment/model- teaching undergraduates in the lab is not a mission of a medical school, although some undergraduates do research. I’m assuming you’d want to do research. If not its a coin flip, if you’d like to do research to prepare yourself for a career, PSU is better.</p>
<p>Pitt is ranked #6 nationally in research funding by NIH. Not sure what you mean by “medical school environment” making it not likely that undergrads would have research opportunities, but research at Pitt is quite easy to obtain both inside and outside the medical school - for example, my dd is a frosh at Pitt, has wanted to be involved in stem cell research. In Dec, she sent out 10 emails to profs/researchers that are doing work in stem cell - she had 4 responses overnight, currently she is working at one and has been asked to extend that work over summer. Technically, the lab is part of the medical school. My ds is a jr. and has been involved in materials research for 2 yrs now, some paid, some for credit. </p>
<p>Work study is shenanigans. I did one first semester, it just means you’re first priority to hire to do on campus jobs no one wants to do. Theres plenty of employment opportunities that may or may not pay more than the work study around PSU. Dont hinge your decision on that. I’d choose whichever requires the least loans.</p>
<p>I’m glad your children have done well. To answer your question thoroughly would take more time than I can give to the explanation. It’s long, complicated and unless you’ve been in the environments it is difficult to wrap your head around.
The major points to two issues you raised.<br>
NIH funding rankings: It is true Pitt medical school routinely can be found in the #5-10 slot every year. It’s a great medical school made up of multiple hospitals. The funding, based on total costs is high at medical schools due to factors that do not translate into opportunities for UGs. The sizes of the grants funding clinical studies are huge compared to basic science grants. This is due to the high costs of patient research and very large salaries of the MDs supported by the grants. This type of research is difficult for students to get involved due to regulations (HIPA and IRB controls). So large dollars usually do not translate into the type of work that is easy for UGs to be involved.
Medical school environment/model. Medical schools are very concerned about square foot per dollar. A sq ft of clinical space will always bring in more money than a sq ft of research space. Research space, especially basic science research, is kept to a minimum. Thus, each lab run by a professor is comparatively small compared to that in a University setting and space is at a premium. To accommodate UGs is difficult for most investigators. In addition, there is no UG teaching mission associated with medical schools. This type of activity is not valued. Some basic researchers do this nonetheless. </p>
<p>I recommend looking into the numbers of students doing research at each university. </p>
<p>While it is true undergrads won’t typically be involved in clinical research involving humans, the assertion that NIH funding involves research that undergrads can’t get involved in is absolutely false. While medical research involving humans are expensive (and rare because so few get to trial), by far, most by actual dollar amount and especially by the number of discretely funded projects, are the type of bench/wet lab laboratory research that undergrads could be involved with, and this is certainly the case at Pitt. In fact, NIH clinical trial categories account for only about $3.3 billion out of the NIH’s $30.6 billion annual budget, so that is only about 10%. Add to that fact that about 70% of clinical trail funding in the US is privately funded so most clinical trial research isn’t reflected in NIH money at all. </p>
<p>The reality is that research involving humans is a smaller component because of its extreme complications in regulations involved in conducting it, except perhaps in psychiatry departments. Major research medical schools like Pitt and the University of Pennsylvania, both of which I’ve done HIV-related neuroscience research in, are filled with departments and divisions housing dozens of labs each conducting bench research even classified as “clinical” (and most of these at places like Pitt and Penn are absolutely accessible to undergrads). Undergrads can be trained in most safety and animal procedures that are necessary to conduct this research. For instance, as an undergrad at Pitt many years ago, I was injecting live HIV virus, human culture cells, and doing surgery on mice in the medical center laboratory in the Division of Neuropathology. Further, the assertions about MDs large salaries gobbling up research funds are also not true as allowances for salaries (as a % time that a principal investigator on a project dedicates to it) are capped by NIH and their salaries are supplemented by clinical duties; nor is the point about square footage for indirects vs clinical space relevant, and actually, is pretty much flat out not true, as again, most med school departments’ research is actually wet lab research in animal models or culture, not human. I have to be blunt, but luvthej doesn’t appear to be someone that has any accurate knowledge of research environments at major medical schools and therefore I wouldn’t put any weight on his or her statements.</p>
<p>The reality is, NIH funding, by in large, can be thought of as a direct reflection on the research opportunities that are available, including to undergrads if the labs are located near them, and there are certainly more of those at Pitt and a place like Penn than at PSU where its med school is located 100 miles away. And by far, life sciences are better at Pitt than anywhere else in the state except maybe the University of Pennsylvania in Philly, and that is directly reflected in the prestige of all the health sciences and health and biomedical research funding at the university. I stake my 15 plus years in academic biosciences on that statement.</p>
<p>I have daughters at both Pitt and Penn State. They are both very good schools - neither one is a bad choice. My take on this is that if you are at all interested in any medical or health field, Pitt is, by far, the better choice. I’ve been amazed at the opportunities that are present, ON CAMPUS, for Pitt students to participate in research opportunities. Not to say that research opportunities don’t exist at PSU, but at Pitt, it literally means walking about 400 feet (okay, it’s uphill) to work in a top 10 medical center. PSU cannot provide that.</p>
<p>I’m aware that anecdotal evidence is certainly not statistically significant, but D1 and all three of her undergrad roommates, who were in health science fields had both research and summer internships all four years of undergrad at Pitt. Well, except for the one roommate who’s now in the Pitt MD/PhD program - she had a summer internship at Stanford for one summer.</p>
<p>Pardon me for hijacking this but I feel something needs to be cleared up for the general public regarding the post from wgmcp101. The statistics of the percent of the budget for clinical TRIALS sounds right from what I recall reading. It’s small and a lot of it is funded by private sources (big Pharma). However, it is very important for the public to know the category of clinical trials is a very precisely defined area of clinical research. This is only a portion of the money spent on clinical (research conducted on patients or patient samples) studies. It may seem like I’m motivated by one-upsmanship, I’m not. Considering that a common argument against increasing NIH funding by some politicians is that money is wasted on research unrelated to human health, it is important to know the amount spent on clinical/human is higher than what you could conclude by the figures presented above. </p>
<p>Now for the response that’s useless to the rest of you, sorry just ignore
My point is using NIH dollars is not an indication of the amount or quality of UG research. I’ve been in both environments thank you and have been independent for more than 15 years. My opinions are primarily formed by reviewing NIH grants over the last 7-8 years, including many non-modular grants from universities and medical schools, and reinforced by the knowledge relayed to me by many colleagues still in a medical school environment. I’m sure you know what insights reviewing budgets within the grants would provide me. I see you know about percent effort. Think carefully if the expected salary contributions (effort) at medical schools versus universities supports or weakens your argument that medical school grants are larger due to the PI’s salary line. I’m where I am now because I prefer to use 25% of my grant money for my salary support versus 50-90% at a medical school. I’m well aware of the salary cap. My experience is that is rare for a professor at a University to approach the cap, while is commonplace for MDs to be at the cap. </p>
<p>Peace, I’m out. </p>
<p>The “clinical research” category defined by NIH represents $10.7 billion total of NIH’s budget in FY2013, or about 1/3 of its overall budget, still the minority of its funding, a truth regardless of any politician’s ignorance of the importance of basic/non-clinical funding. The “clinical research” categorization is defined by NIH very broadly and includes not only the $3.3 billion in clinical trial funding mentioned above, but also includes funding for projects that would be considered by most to be more basic biological research (using human samples in some portion of proposed aims) as well as grants that might be psych/learning oriented, or things like sleep studies, EEG/MRI, and social science-leaning studies, etc. But an R01 is an R01 and there isn’t substantial variation in the size of award for a particular mechanism across the landscape whether falling into the clinical category or not. The suggestion that most NIH funding is “clinical” was incorrect, and more importantly, the assertion that labs supported by clinical grants wouldn’t be able to include undergrads is flat out untrue. I’ve personally worked in labs and am colleagues with many others’ labs funded by grants that are currently listed in NIH’s “clinical research” category and all of these have had many undergrads working in them, and thus those undergrads’ work was in part supported by this “clinical” funding whether or not it was specifically budgeted. It was misleading to suggest that research involving human samples (that typically arrive at labs from banks or other sources already anonymized) would preclude, due to HIPPA or IRB restrictions, undergrads (albeit experienced ones) from ultimately working with them, or at least for students to work on other projects in the same lab not directly utilizing them. Heck, I know undergrads that been able to work in P3 facilities, and those experiences are not typically found at places without substantial funding coming in from NIH. Anyone that’s done research in a major med school setting knows that most of the labs such an environment aren’t of such a clinical variety that would prevent students from engaging in research opportunities within them for reasons other than the specific PI of the lab doesn’t want to take them on. And to the undergrad student at a school where research facilities are adjacent to and interspersed among the undergrad campus, the distinction between a university department lab and a lab is a professional health school is largely irrelevant.</p>
<p>And I will state this fact again, the overall money total and the total number of individual awards is absolutely a direct reflection on the quantity, quality, and the variety of work being done at a typical institution (unless something is really out of the norm). Thus, with the obvious caveat the institution has its undergrad and research/graduate components largely in the same physical location, the opportunities for undergrads are also generally reflected in those NIH numbers, which is the case for the point being discussed. It boils down to money and number of labs which aren’t mutually exclusive. The ability to have people work in your lab is all about money, whether derived from your own funding or training grants, because you have to support those individuals’ salaries, stipends, physical space, and obviously the supplies which allows them to do the work. NIH money is the biggest source of this funding, by far. Therefore, NIH totals are a very good reflection on the opportunities for undergrads at universities that have these facilities. It’s also not just the number of faculty, but also the number post-docs and grad students on the undergrad campuses that can take students under their wing. I don’t care how good of a school places like Miami or Georgetown are, the lab experiences there are nearly as voluminous or robust as a place like Pitt or Penn, and that is very much a reflection of the extramural funding they have coming in and I say that from personal experiences at all of them. To suggest otherwise is wrong.</p>
<p>With that said, other considerations regarding the number of labs is also important not just for available space for students, but for the variety of research projects. If a student truly wants to get a jump on exploring the type of research that he or she might enjoy, because 75+% of research involves failure and (when the novelty wears off) repetitive drudgery, they are better off being able to seek out experiences different in lab environments to find ones that match their interests and/or personalities in order to figure out whether or not they want to put 5-7 years into grad school. Nothing is worse than the frustration of failing experiments combined with a poor lab environment, so learning the qualities one needs to look for in a lab is important. Sure, they can wait until grad school to do rotations through labs… but this is about getting a jump on one’s personal direction and having superior opportunities. I’ve seen too many PhDs end up wasting 6 years of their life for something they really didn’t want in the end because they didn’t know what they were getting into. Most of those tend not to have as robust undergrad lab experiences.</p>
<p>Regardless of location, an undergrad student that is interested in a scientific career in a field like biology or neuroscience absolutely needs to obtain solid research experience because these are ultimately research fields and you need such experience to take the next step into graduate training, or to know if you want to take that step. And ideally if one has the opportunity to do undergrad research, one should aim for some sort of authorship; if not in published paper, at least as part of a poster presentation at a national meeting in order to demonstrate to a graduate admissions committee and understanding of what academic research is about and a demonstrated desire to pursue it. Such experiences also develop the beginnings of the ability think critically in a scientific fashion, to practically apply and thus reinforce the background knowledge learned in the classroom; and reach an understanding about why things were done and independently trouble shoot in experimentation, not just follow the instructions of a supervisor in performing assigned tasks. But in order to obtain something like a publication authorship at the undergrad level in a field like biology, a student typically needs to be able to commit to working a lab setting over multiple consecutive semesters to really delve into the project and lab environment, and when looking for a home lab, it is best to seek a lab is adequately funded and has a track record of publishing regularly (preferably with prior evidence of undergrad authorship of some sort) and ideally one that has people that you enjoy being around. </p>
<p>Thank you for all your input guys. Since the beginning, I have always leaned towards Pitt. After reviewing your comments, it has made me fall more in love with Pitt. However, as much as I am interested in research and believe it will benefit me in the future, Penn State has recently responded with an offer that I cannot refuse. I just hope I don’t regret this decision. Thanks.</p>
<p>Did you get into Shreyer? Or Pitt-Honors? If you got into Honors at one, choose Honors if costs are similar.
However, all things being equal, choose whichever will leave you with the least debt.</p>