Hi guys, this is my first post ever.
What are the best subjects to major in undergraduate at Vanderbilt in terms of rating?
Thanks in advance for the responses.
Well it’s ranked 34th in the nation for undergrad engineering by US News & World Report, so there’s that.
Its medical center is also ranked one of the best in the nation.
According to US News & World Report, the most popular majors at Vanderbilt University include: Economics, Social Sciences; Mathematics, and Political Science and Government.
Besides the popularity, what majors are really strong at Vanderbilt? Do they have a really good Chemistry program or a really good Engineering program?
Vanderbilt is known as one of the best colleges for education, and also top ranked for Psychology, Biology, and pretty high for engineering as well to name a few.
@BallerG and @edc123: Be careful with “ratings” at the departmental level because they usually have nothing to do with undergraduate education (you have to snoop around for course materials and ask around to figure that out. When on campus tours, if you are seriously concerned about academic quality and not just ratings in a certain department, go to that department and visit the class of what many consider an average instructor and then try what is considered a top instructor. See if you see differences between what a student body at one school qualifies as “top” versus “alright” or normal at one school versus another, and then choose the school that seems to have more of what you like. Learning is very personal. One STEM student may just love tradition of a nicely organized spoonfed lecture style course with emphasis on powerpoints and another may appreciate a more personal environment with an emphasis on more active learning techniques and activities during class sessions). They usually reflect graduate program and research strength (thus publication record and other forms of "productivity). The exception is engineering where plenty of undergrad. programs are ranked. I would argue that 34 is super strong.
I would argue that you could do better for chemistry in terms of quality undergrad. education, but the research opportunities at VU look really good (there is a Beckman Center and an associated undergraduate Scholars Program) and they have a very solid core for chemical biology and structural biology if you are interested in those areas. In terms of teaching, seems VU excels in a few of the intermediate courses (like inorganic and analytical) and some of the upper division special topics. i would say be careful what instructors you take. Engineering ask someone else, as there are many people on here who are engineering majors. However, from what I hear, seems that courses that heavily serve engineering (like physics and math courses) or belong to engineering are run well and stress a good level of problem solving. And again, the research infrastructure at VU looks awesome in so many areas. What seems fortunate about engineering courses (I looked at some of the course materials, and they basically look as good as many of the more revered programs) is that it appears that the courses will prep you well for research or industry. Chemistry and biology, again cherry-pick. Seems to be a lot of that old school memorization/algorithmic level problem solving stuff going on in a lot of courses which will not translate well to a thinking style that translates at all to a research environment. You would want to find teachers who try to buck that trend if you are serious about learning the subjects (if just pre-health and in need of strong grades, this may matter much less) in a way that could potentially help in research (a “fact in a vacuum” foundation can help identify interests, but going into a lab knowing what those “facts” look like in an experimental context is more useful as google and textbooks are always there if you need to relearn details). RMP and hearsay (hint: Often instructors that stress higher level problem solving are not revered, but if they are said to emphasize that AND are well-like, target them).
*Note that at the end of the day, you should major in what you like and not what a school “does the best”. Almost any major could be manipulated and cherrypicked to make it a solid experience if not an amazing one at any half-way decent school, and especially at an awesome school. You have a lot of freedom over your experience in college.
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Thanks for the information @bernie12. Do you currently attend Vanderbilt?
@BallerG: No, I kind of just was interested in comparing the STEM curricula across some of these schools in STEM a while ago (I am very interested in STEM education as I may want to become a college professor, but I want to actually do it right) and there seems to be some patterns. One way I got access to VU’s stuff is through its own course websites and another is through a couple of friends who went. I went to Emory, so we would compare our materials. Pretty uniformly, the two were about even in math, VU killed in physics and many things remotely related to engineering, Emory killed in chemistry, biology, and neuroscience. This is the case for many school’s whose life sciences curricula and courses I have seen (so on average, compared to peers, VU appears to be better than some near peers in math, physics/engineering, on par with some technically higher tiered places in it, but then seems a bit different in terms of how most biology, chemistry, and neuro courses are run, especially at the intermediate and introductory level. I am sure many students may like the focus on details in tons of classes because it makes getting a grade more predictable, but much of the literature suggests that life sciences curricula should begin to sort of de-emphasize heavy rote memorization and maybe just have some of it while integrating much more data analysis, experimental design, and higher level problem solving. Not everything that students “enjoy” or “can handle” is best for learning outcomes it seems). More of the selective publics and privates have invested money (via grants from HHMI or other sources) to reform life sciences education (this is something you can look up to. Like you can go onto the HHMI Science education grant website and see who is listed as winning grants each cycle) over the past decade. And when you look at the course materials, you could sort of tell which schools have been putting in significant effort for a while. Places where things like chemistry, biology, and neuroscience have been heavily invested in tend to have a much stronger research and problem solving focus even from the lower division courses, which isn’t common at all schools (believe it or not, some schools, even some good ones, still keep those classes rather plain and focus on details and algorithms rather than requiring much process oriented thinking).
@BallerG Here are some examples of things in STEM that VU has/had worked on though:
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/bold/docs/project-gallery/
It just seems most things are smaller scale than other schools, many who have completely overhauled certain courses/sequences permanently by now, if not having made significant modifications in the whole curriculum (again, especially in life sciences).
*I also want to point out that I like their idea in the biochemistry course (https://vanderbilt.edu/bold/docs/biochemistry-bsci2520/), but my understanding is that the exams (based upon what I have actually seen) are typically misaligned with those homework problems (especially the case based ones, but even the regular ones). It, to me, never makes sense to give students complex homework problems that make them think about processes only to give them exams where they must regurgitate for example…the structures of metabolic pathways and label co-factors for most of the exam. They need to change the assessment strategy as well. What is the point of celebrating how new problems increased scores on exams that mostly assess surface level knowledge anyway? I think the correct way to measure this would be to actually put a serious case style question on the exam that is far different from the one tested via HW, yet maybe had the same topic, and then measure performance on that. Using the same assessment type as before can mask any real gains students got from the method (and scores of 40something out of 50 implies that mostly memorization is required to succeed. We all know most high achieving students who go to these schools are excellent and remain excellent at memorization in life sciences and will almost celebrate multiple choice and most closed ended questions because “either you know it or not”. There is really no: “Gee I have to think about how to approach this one” in between).
There are ways of indirectly finding out about how a school treats STEM education indirectly in the case you don’t know people there. But I say for most top schools, just trust the physics and engineering courses, but maybe try to investigate everything else, because life sciences and chemistry has been so resistant to change over time anyway (which explained the initial bio 2010 movement which then had to be extended and turned into something else).