Tim_ND08

The Campus.

That was my main problem when I visited. It seemed as it was just squandered around the entire downtown are of Ann Arbor. There was no definite campus, it just felt like it was too urban for me.

GoBlue81

I presume that's your personal experience? Care to expound it further?

inertia

how good is Michigan in Sciences?

Alexandre

Michigan's weakest Science department is Chemistry, which is tied with Princeton at #16 in the nation. Engineering, Geology, Mathematics and Medicine are all ranked among the top 10 nationally. Biology, Computer Science and Physics are all ranked among the top 15 nationally.

inertia

#16 is really good

but it's just weakest at U-M right?

Alexandre

#16 is very good indeed. Any top 25 department in a major field such as Biology, Chemistry, Economics, English, History, Mathematics, Physics, Political Science, Psychology etc... is going to be amazing. The fact that Michigan is ranked among the top 15 in all of those fields (top 10 in most fields and top 5 in several) is very impressive. Only a handful of universities are ranked in the top in every field.

dilksy

Yeah, weakest in the sense of "not rated the highest by US News". You'd probably want to look at other statistics that are more geared towards what you're interested in. If you're pre-med, you'd want to look at med school placement rates and stuff like that. If you want to work in industry, you'd probably want to look into chemical engineering. USNEWS ranking can be used to kind of gauge the prestige of a department, but there's a lot of other more important factors you'd also want to consider.

hoedown

The comment about the campus surprised me. Squandered around downtown Ann Arbor? In fact, Central campus us pretty much a contiguous area. It may be a bit odd-shaped at the edges, but it's a cohesive unit. I happen to be in rental space a few blocks off campus, as are a few other offices, but barring renovation projects most central campus units are right there on...wait for it... central campus. North campus is its own area, as is the athletic campus, but neither of them have much to do with "downtown." True downtown is Main Street, which is about 6 blocks west of campus, although it's well connected with the State Street area, particularly because of the businesses & public buildings on and near Liberty.

I guess I find myself wondering what the poster Tim_ND08 saw, and what he/she thought he was seeing.

Weasel8488

The USNews rankings of Arts and Sciences graduate programs are based entirely on the peer assessment score. Basically, it is a prestige ranking. This is not to say that Michigan's programs are not top notch; there are simply better metrics than the USNews ranking to assess them.

Alexandre

Weasel, Peer assessment scores are accurate, especially when it comes to specific departments.

Weasel8488

Could you provide data or reasoning to justify your assertion? I don't know how accurate or inaccurate they are, but I would think there is a better way to rank departments.

Alexandre

Care to share how there is a better way to determine the quality of a department or university? I should think that averaging the overall rating of a department by surveying hundreds of leading experts in their respetive fields and filtering out the outliers, would paint a pretty accurate picture. Maybe you have a better way.

forgiven

i agree with tim_nd08. it's just the urban feel of campus and how everything is just spread out and all over the place.

he'd probably prefer a smaller and more intimate campus that is separate from like neighborhoods and busy streets. i feel the same.

Alexandre

Forgiven, as Hoedown pointed out, Michigan's campus is, for the most part, self-contained. You have to cross a couple of streets on occasion, but they are hardly "busy". Ann Arbor just doesn't have an "urban" feel. However, I definitely agree that Michigan's campus, although impressive in some parts, is not as pretty as other campuses I have seen.

Weasel8488

Maybe use peer assessments in conjunction with other information such as selectivity of the program as measured by GRE scores and acceptance rates, publication volume of faculty, and research grant money per faculty member (for sciences). My main issue with peer assessments is that their accuracy is distorted by the time lag between perception and reality.