<p>I agree that visiting campuses helps a lot. It helped me pick MIT. I visited Yale, Princeton, and MIT… and found myself instantly loving Boston’s “big city living”. Don’t get me wrong, Princeton was a beautiful campus… it felt like a country club to me. And Yale felt very colonially to me. But, for someone like me who grew up in a small rural town, the urban-ness of MIT and Boston was just so new and wonderful. </p>
<p>YAY for going up to the roof of the Green Building for an astronomy class. YAY for visiting the nuclear reactor on campus and having your radiation detector give a wacky reading afterwards (that was an interesting experience I will never forget). I got the chance to try crew, rowing in the Charles River, which I loved… though I hated the runs up and down the stairs of the Green Building. YAY for winters when MIT turns the Johnson Atheletic Center into an ice skating rink. BOO for when they got rid of the video game arcade from the Student Center (you will be missed).</p>
Tough to say what leads to a tenure denial in any specific case – the bottom line is that it’s incredibly difficult to get tenure at MIT, and no junior professor at MIT is ignorant as to what he has to do to line up a competitive tenure package.</p>
<p>I’m on the record believing that undergraduates benefit from and deserve to have faculty mentors who are both brilliant researchers and outstanding teachers. I don’t think professors have to be one or the other – some of the most brilliant professors I know are outstanding lecturers, because that’s how they deliver their work to the field.</p>
<p>Classes gave me a lot of preparation for the real world and additional personal fulfillment, but UROPing helped me figure out where I wanted to go. I had an awesome summer researching regeneration genetics for planaria, and realize that I probably didn’t want to be in a biology lab full-time. The next summer I sent code up to the International Space Station, and suddenly the coding skills I was learning in class felt magical.</p>
<p>So I want to re-emphasize a point: grad students and undergrads are not at odds. I’m not sure where this mentality comes from a lot of the time – and I hear about it way more on the internet than from my fellow MIT students. (Frankly, MIT undergrads are usually complaining about the “administration” suppressing on our culture(s), and it generally doesn’t involve grad students :P.) But being at a research university offered me opportunities working with world-class professors and grad students to really dive deep, learn a lot, and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And it didn’t come at the cost of losing out on undergrad dorm culture, or having good classes, or participating in awesome club activities, etc. </p>
<p>^Totally agreed, both on the amazingness of research and on grad students and undergrads not being at odds.</p>
<p>It’s a comment often made around here that professors at MIT/research universities in general ignore undergrads to pay attention to their grad students, which is so adorably naive it makes me dizzy. My children, I solemnly swear to you that a) nobody gives a single rat’s hindquarter about graduate students, and b) as an undergrad, you have a lot more social leeway to command professorial time than you do as a grad student. When I was an undergrad, I would just pop into my UROP advisor’s office with no appointment to chat about life and career plans and lab. As a grad student, and now as a postdoc, that is no longer a thing that I have the roly-poly undergrad adorableness to pull off. </p>
<p>After you graduate, nobody will care that you got an A in x.yyz or that you had that one semester where you took 75 units and totally pulled it off. They will care what you know, and what work you’ve done, and much of that work, practically speaking, is stuff you will have done as a UROP. My UROP experience was still discussed (and useful) when I applied for postdoc jobs. And my husband, who’s been a working engineer for seven years, just got offered a great job because his new boss used to be MIT faculty and remembers him from his UROP work in the department.</p>