<p>^It may be true at Stanford but I have not found it to be true at Harvard where many of the departments are graduate only and it is very difficult for undergrads to get their foot in the door. Mollie may chime in about how many undergrads do research in her department at Harvard for instance. </p>
<p>While it is true that other schools have introduced UROP like opportunities, none come even close to the scope and range offered at MIT where pretty much every student gets involved.</p>
<p>Graduate and Ph.D. students need their advisors to be in their corner in order to complete the research for graduation. For undergrads it is not a requirement of their graduation and so they are more free to say what is on their mind.</p>
<p>Sorry not to have chimed in earlier – I’m at a conference in Crete, and I’ve only had spotty internet access. </p>
<p>I agree with many of the points being made here: MIT undergrads are treated like graduate students in that they are given quite a bit of academic freedom in most departments, are encouraged to participate deeply in research projects, and (in the most obvious sense) are usually taking upper-level courses with graduate students, as the upper-level undergrad and grad courses are often the same.</p>
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<p>Although to be fair, you were probably a frosh, looking at people who were at least 5 years older, if not 6 or 7 - I still look at my professors in awe, and that probably won’t change ;)</p>
<p>I will note, however, that it mustn’t be underestimated how much the game changes once you actually choose what you want to do and start specializing. That tends to (by compulsion, really) happen quite rapidly in grad school, and tends not to happen so much in undergrad. Why? Because to get your foot in the door, you need to know a lot of things fundamentally well.</p>
<p>But just as steeply as your education accelerated in regards to the learning of these fundamentals, so steeply may it accelerate when you spend hours every day thinking about certain particular kinds of things. In other words, actually endeavoring to become an expert at something.</p>
<p>I think the point I’m making here is that I don’t buy, beyond a fairly limited extent, that grad and undergrad actually blur (except maybe in the part of grad school before passing prelims, which is really more like a master’s program than the actual PhD program - in foreign schools, the PhD program is often entirely separate). Which means that I still think a professor will in most cases treat you pretty differently. </p>
<p>However, as phantasmagoric says, you do tend to get a strong whiff of grad-level work if you go to an elite school. And it is true that in some schools, you cannot EVEN get that.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about that–I think that may seem to be the case, but only because MIT’s offerings concentrate in STEM fields, which are easier to set up UROP-like opportunities in. You’d have to compare those STEM research ops to MIT’s to get a better picture of their relative strengths. (And yes, I know MIT is also good in some social sciences, etc.)</p>
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<p>Actually, it was only a few months ago that I still felt “awe” over grad students. :p</p>
<p>I can see how specializing will necessarily up the ante, but I think that most students already get that specializing when they start focusing on their major. After all, grad schools and fellowships require you to have some kind of project proposal, so even if you don’t stick to what you propose, you need to have a good idea of your specialization. So that acceleration definitely happens when you really focus on your major, which means taking more advanced classes (which means lots of advanced projects and writing, often involving some form of research; and at Stanford, that means taking lots of grad-level courses), getting involved in research, doing internships, etc. I think that’s why I don’t perceive a noticeable jump in acceleration (as others have told me as well), because the largest increase in intensity is over by the time grad school starts.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s probably a different story once you’ve finished quals and started to work toward proposing a thesis.</p>
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<p>You’re ruining it for me! I’m going to try to defend why there is still some awe to it. </p>
<p>So…of course you specialize in undergrad - namely in the sense that you probably want to develop some direction as to the kinds of things you want to study in graduate school, and even try your hand at research, as many as several times. But is it not the entire point of grad school to become an expert at something, so that you have deep prospective projects to work on even after you finish the PhD?</p>
<p>I feel like the development post-prelim exams (i.e. 3-4 years of specifically going down some path or the other) should be quite different. </p>
<p>The taking advanced classes stuff coincides with the prelim/qual-passing phase of grad school, but my impression is that just gets you to the point where you may have an idea of what sorts of things you want to study, so you can write something intelligent on your applications. The experience at different grad schools also varies - some schools have nothing but ‘go do your research’ to tell you. </p>
<p>I feel like the act of picking an advisor and committing to them * for several years* is an irreplaceable, unique part of specializing, not just in the sense of going from ‘I want to study CS –> I want to study AI –> I want to study so and so kinds of aspects of AI’ to ‘I am actually committed to becoming an EXPERT in so and so aspects, and am spending 4 years on them to prove it’. </p>
<p>I think an undergrad student at a non-elite school (measuring eliteness strictly by resources available in the field) might never get past the ‘I want to study AI’ phase before grad school, or at least in any particularly meaningful way. At an elite school, there are more classes, presumably more research resources, and you can probably say more.</p>
<p>Beyond that though, I find it somewhat unlikely that someone who hasn’t really made a commitment to sticking to becoming an expert at something is going to be (or even should be) treated the same as someone who has.</p>
<p>What I am in a way saying is analogous to noting that while many people take AP classes in high school, and in college at the beginning, people may take somewhat introductory classes, for the most part what you’re committed to doing in college is pretty distinct, and with the resources at your disposal, the opportunity is quite unique, where you are told to figure out what you want to do for a career, or try to get closer to answering that, and that’s it! That’s your major task.</p>
<p>Yes, I can see what you mean about becoming an expert-in-obscure-corner-of-the-field, so in that sense, grad students are still distinct (to clarify: while I think the lines between grad and undergrad are blurred at elite schools, I still think they’re distinct on the whole, but their differences are harder to see between upperclass undergrads and 1st/2nd year grads). Since that doesn’t really start to happen until at least a year or two into the PhD, and since these beginning grad students are welcomed into research labs, I can see how professors see little qualitative difference between beginning (or sometimes advanced) grad students and undergrads, if just because the university attracts extremely intelligent/ambitious undergrads. I haven’t experienced MIT very much, but I’d bet that the line between grad/undergrad is even more blurred (but still there will be some clear differences).</p>
<p>And it’s true - I’m definitely in awe over the more advanced grads, and perhaps my awe over even the beginning grads is more “you got into the PhD program here, you must be amazing” (and they invariably are). Of course, once I got past admissions, I realized they’re just flawed, bumbling humans like me. :p</p>
<p>For sure. I think a beginning grad in the U.S. is often basically a master’s student. Exceptions exist, for instance at Princeton’s math program, where a beginning grad quite often knows exactly what he/she is going to work on. This is probably further the trend in some foreign programs (I bet people in England specialize quite early, given their style is to do 3 years of undergrad, and then potentially 1 year of master’s at Cambridge, going to a PhD program that is almost all pure research). I imagine the difference between a Princeton undergraduate and a Princeton PhD student in math is fairly steep in almost all cases. Always, exceptions exist, but this seems the trend.</p>
<p>The people graduating with their PhDs and working on things fascinating to me, definitely make me say ‘Wow!’ inside. Because while I can of course imagine to an extent what it would be like to succeed in that way, there’s a huge unknown before it actually happens.</p>
<p>If they bumble, it somehow only adds to the wow factor, as it’s miraculous how such bumbling people tend to consistently churn out perfectly amazing work :)</p>
<p>I turned down Stanford, CalTech and Princeton in order to attend MIT.</p>
<p>I don’t get why this is weird at all… At least in most of Europe, MIT is the ****…</p>
<p>It seems like turning down one of HYP would be a big deal, but surely not for MIT. In Europe I would say only Harvard is comparable as far as prestige is concerned.</p>
<p>Math and physics PhD’s are very different from chem and bio. People spend a significant amount of time in classes for math and physics PhD’s and classroom performance is taken seriously, whereas in chem and bio no one really cares about classes. In chem, you typically spend a year in classes, but the second half of the year you are supposed to be spending a huge chunk of your time in lab.</p>
<p>So it’s quite different. I imagine there is more to get through in theoretical fields before you can meaningfully commit to an area of research.</p>
<p>Also, what the last poster said is true. In other parts of the world, Harvard and MIT are far and away more prestigious to the general public than other schools.</p>
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<p>I have heard this time and again - which simply makes me wonder, if there’s something fundamentally irrelevant about them, why not change how they’re structured in the first place? One spends a lot of time taking classes when in school, and I don’t see why they should be structured such that it is not very relevant. I’m of course talking about admission.</p>
<p>When it comes to the actual PhD programs, I think it’s less that the students are assessed based on classroom performance, and more that the classes relevant to one’s discipline are absolutely crucial to master anyway, before really getting any farther.</p>
<p>^Well, I was talking about grad chem classes. Typically, a year is spent on them, but in the second semester you are expected to spend most of your time in lab. My friend in a top bio program took a semester of grad classes and two out of the three were like readings-type classes.</p>
<p>In general, it’s pretty much assumed you have the sufficient background to do research in chem and bio by the time you reach grad school. As for why they even have classes, well, there are a lot of useless things in grad school, hoops to jump through, that are passed down over time. Frankly, I think it would be a better use of time for new grad students in chem and bio to be full-time for the first couple of years and then take a class here or there. There are a lot of people who leave grad school because they never got a foothold in lab.</p>
<p>Ugh, my program requires eight classes. Most stupid, pointless waste of my time ever, especially considering that several of the courses were carbon copies of the grad-level courses I took as an undergrad.</p>
<p>Although it is now 30 years ago, I turned down Harvard Business School for a graduate program in engineering at MIT. I was never really interested in a corporate career anyway, I just wanted to start my own business, so my decision was a no-brainer. At MIT, they let me pretty much create my own program, with half my classes at Sloan and the other half in CS and AI.</p>
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<p>I guess the obvious solution would be to structure them as more seminar-style or research-focused, so that students working on certain areas may benefit from learning a relevant skill-set.</p>
<p>But of course, I’m well aware that there are hoops one may have to jump through that aren’t strictly crucial for pursuing a career in research.</p>
<p>Declined Harvard, much to my parent’s dismay (Harvard has gorgeous FinAid).
I never really wanted to go to Harvard all that much. I probably shouldn’t have applied. That’s pretty much the whole reason.
If I had gotten into Yale rather than being waitlisted, I would have been way more likely to go there. </p>
<p>As for HYP-level schools elsewhere in the world. I turned down Cambridge. I got pooled, and fished out my a college I liked much less. Sometimes I regret it.</p>
<p>your choice of M over H is understandable, but not Y over M.</p>
<p>I turned down all 3 to go to MIT. My main reason was that MIT > HYP at engineering fields, and I would say MIT’s equivalent (or slightly better or slightly worse, depending on the specific field) in the sciences. MIT’s humanities aren’t as good HYP in most though, although MIT’s econ, linguistics, philosophy are also top of the line. Other humanities I didn’t really care about anyways. MIT’s business school is one of the best also. So it just seemed like MIT was tops in everything I could possibly care about. Ended up choosing comp sci, which MIT is tops in also :D</p>
<p>Also, I really like the environment. It’s not as intense and as competitive as you would think, and it’s a very academically stimulating place. I have a friend at Harvard who once said he has days where he doesn’t feel like he used his brain at all… Also, MIT’s a fun place to be, with great people, in a great city, with great things to do :)</p>
<p>Well, I’m still a sophomore in hs, but if I had the choice, I would pick MIT any day. Physics really is best at MIT, along with engineering, biology… MIT has better resources in my opinion as well. Harvard, Yale, Princeton… amazing schools, but other than cosmology, MIT mostly has more of an edge when it comes to hard science. Plus, personally, I love the give MIT has. I’ve found that the people there really aren’t snooty or completely unsocial. The people I met there were relatively…cool. and genii, of course.</p>
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<p>Oh come on, you know your friend was being silly … there are so many people to talk to at Harvard who could blow your mind. I think the people attracted to each place are probably different.</p>
<p>I sometimes worry people actually will read this sort of thing and believe it!</p>