Advice for future scholars

Hucmenzu
Thu, 05 Apr 2012 01:39:44 +0000

I appreciate your input, but I’d like to make certain things clear.

First of all, you seem to have missed my main points in the post above. I did NOT say that it is better to attend “research” universities for an academic career. I said “academically oriented” schools. I understand where your confusion is coming from. The reason I included Wesleyan is because Wesleyan is an academically oriented school. Despite being a small liberal arts college, it has decently ranked graduate programs in science and math. In my opinion, Wesleyan is one of few schools that truly combine the benefits of being a liberal arts college and being a research university. I have not heard of the academic atmosphere in Oberlin, but from the statistics I can imagine that the school itself and many of its students are academically oriented, meaning emphasizing research both for the undergrads and for its faculty members. And that is indeed what an academically oriented schools are like. Wake Forest, on the other hand, is where entrepreneurship and business, and careers in professional schools are emphasized, both by its students and its administrators. That is what is Wake Forest is “good” at.

Secondly, this is not about bashing liberal arts schools. This is not even about bashing “life” oriented schools either. As I said in my post, there are good things and bad things about both types of schools. However, if you are serious about getting an advanced degree and remaining in academia, it makes sense to go to programs that are geared towards careers in academics rather than careers in industry. You cannot deny that, when it comes to graduate school admissions, there are advantages in taking graduate level courses, doing undergraduate research, and getting recommendation letters from Nobel Prize winning scholars. And I wanted to let people know that Wake Forest is not an ideal place where you can do these things as an undergrad, coming from my experience as a student.

I am not disagreeing with you, wilmingtonwave, but I am simply stating that we are talking about two different things here. You are talking about the advantages of attending liberal arts colleges as opposed to research universities, where as I am talking about the advantages of attending schools that are academically oriented as opposed to career (or life) oriented. I especially agree with you on that the small college environment will lead to better relationships with the professors and ultimately better recommendation letters. It is shown that the admission rate for top grad programs is higher for the students coming from small private schools than for the students from public research universities. However, Wake is not the only place where you can get this experience. There are many academically oriented schools where professors care as much about their undergraduate students as Wake’s professors do. In addition, Wake Forest is not that small. Some universities that have active researchers such as Duke, Rice (this is even smaller), and CMU have the similar size of student body as Wake Forest does. Even if this is not true, the current plan laid out for Wake Forest is to increase the student body (that’s why they are building more dorms every year and let students take over faculty apartments) which will ultimately cancel out the advantages of being a small school.

Lastly, I am not simply saying these things based on nothing like you have rudely implied above. This is coming from my own experience at this school, talking to my peers, looking up admission statistics and talking to a professor in economics who specializes in econometrics and education.