<p>How does Amherst compare to top universities?</p>
<p>Well, off the top of my head, universities are more focused on grad students. LACs like Amherst are undergrad only, so undergrads get the attention of real professors and not TAs or RAs or grad student-teachers.</p>
<p>Amherst in particular is good for kids who want an open curriculum. It’s also beautiful there. There is a five-college consortium (or something) which means that kids can take advantage of classes from neighboring schools.</p>
<p>Recently, a college counselor friend of mine (a Harvard grad) told me that her professors wold have “stepped over my dead body on the street”…they had no idea who she was. She had just visited Amherst and said that she wished she had gone there.</p>
<p>That said, Harvard is right for a certain type of kid, and Amherst is right for another. They are both fantastic but very different schools.</p>
<p>It depends on what you want.</p>
<p>If you want a professor to call you when you don’t show up for a class because they’re worried you might need chicken soup for your cold, Amherst might be more of a fit for you.</p>
<p>At least, that’s what I’ve been told. :)</p>
<p>Amherst is better, duh. :)</p>
<p>EDIT : Oh, you asked why. Cause it just is. Its awesome. Oh, and what she ^ said. </p>
<p>Although I have to disagree, not * all * universities are more focused on grad students. Off the top of my head, Brown, Dartmouth, U Richmond, etc. etc.</p>
<p>^You are correct. Princeton too. I was generalizing.</p>
<p>Although Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth have more of an undergraduate focus than most research universities, the level of interaction that a student at Amherst can have with faculty is considerably different than Princeton (from my experience) or Harvard (also from my experience) and probably from Dartmouth or Brown (my inference based upon size).</p>
<p>My son is a freshman at Amherst – not working on a thesis or anything. He took a fabulous freshman seminar but had an activity during the professor’s announced office hours. So, my son arranged to meet weekly with the professor at another time – and they met for about an hour every week last semester. I mentioned this to a friend who teaches at another undergraduate-focused research university who said that would never happen at her school. </p>
<p>This semester, my son signed up for an advanced class. The professor (who had given him an A+ in the first semester) told the class that he taught this course in the spring so that he didn’t get freshman in it (not clear that makes sense, but OK) and that it was too hard a class for freshman. My son decided to take the course in a subsequent year as he is not terrible at taking subtle hints and discovered that there weren’t too many courses he wanted to take that fit in a time slot that worked. He created a special topics course at the suggestion of his advisor. The advisor and a dean (whose interests are in a related field) will meet with him once a week. That level of attention would not happen for a freshman at any Ivy, I wouldn’t think, and certainly not at the Ivies I know. [He’s a particularly smart, hard-working kid, who never shows up at a meeting like that without a bunch of stuff to talk about, and professors notice that, but the level of attention he’s getting is extraordinary. A senior advanced in the field working on a topic of research interest to the professor might get that kind of attention at an Ivy].</p>
<p>Classes at Amherst are smaller. He had one class of 15 and three of about 25 last term. This term, he has one class of under 20. His special projects class is one student and two professors. He’s taking two extremely popular courses that are really large (about 45 and 60 respectively). At Harvard, really large classes can have 500 kids or more in them.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are few professors at Amherst of doing research at the level of those at Princeton or Harvard. You can easily get involved with professors research projects at Amherst, but if you want to get involved in really cutting edge research with a world class researcher, HYP and Columbia, Penn and Cornell are superior. I’d guess Dartmouth and Brown are hit-or-miss; faculty in some areas are world class while others are not.</p>
<p>Another difference is the percentage of recruited athletes. Amherst fields almost as many teams as an Ivy school. But Amherst’s freshman class is 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Harvard or Princeton’s freshman classes. Penn, Columbia, Cornell would be even bigger, I’d guess. So, recruited athletes make up a much bigger proportion of the school at Amherst than at an Ivy. My son has not observed a noticeable difference between the athletes and non-athletes from an academic perspective, but that could make a difference socially or academically.</p>
<p>From afar, Amherst seems to have a warmer, more supportive feeling than the Ivies I know. Both professors and administration. But, that’s based on very little data.</p>
<p>Finally, there are going to be disproportionately fewer of the math/physics/computer science genius types at Amherst (and perhaps other pure genius types if these are readily identifiable). Those types will probably find themselves at Havard, Princeton, MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon for CS and maybe a few other places. They’d run out of stuff to study at Amherst pretty quickly.</p>
<p>agree with ^strawbridge.</p>
<p>Don’t put too much weight on the 5-college bit. UMass is a mile or so up the road on the town bus, but the other three colleges are a fairly long schlep. A course at Smith, say, would block out about 3 hours. I took one graduate level class at UMass while at AC, but otherwise all courses were at the college. Not atypical. The 5-college consortium works best for extracurricular activities, rather than extending the course catalog.</p>
<p>Oh wow, now I really want to go to Amherst… It’s too bad I didn’t know anything about it when I was actually applying to colleges…</p>