<p>The “undergraduate focus” thing does cut both ways. I really like Harvard; there are other places I could have done very well, although Dartmouth is maybe not one of them. One of the reasons I’ve liked Harvard is the graduate student population, and the benefits I get from the attention paid to them. My real professors are attentive. I’d much rather have only professors than only graduate students, of course, but the graduate students are nice because they are a qualitatively different resource than the professors and it’s nice to have both.</p>
<p>Things I have liked about being at university, not college:
-Breadth of courses. My interests are not so much bread-and-butter staples of every college. I’ve loved the depth and randomness of the course catalogue, both for my concentration and electives. As a fundamentally impractical person, I think it’s great that I can open up the course catalog for next year and decide to take “Japanese Folk Religion” or an art history seminar entirely on St. Peter’s and the Vatican. Every college worth its salt will have some random and specific courses like that, but Harvard has so many more courses (which it is able to offer because it is a large university) that I am happy.
One thing I found helpful in choosing colleges was comparing courses both in my major and in English, which I used as a metric for electives in general. (I love but would never major in English.) Swarthmore, e.g., got crossed right the heck off my college list after that. Harvard had like two dozen English courses I would have loved to take in the catalogue for 2009-2010; Swarthmore had, I think, one. This is probably less true Dartmouth v Harvard than Swarthmore v Harvard, but if you haven’t checked out the course catalogues comparatively, you should.
-Opportunity to take graduate courses. Possibly I am a super nerd, but I’ve found some of them relevant.
-Getting two types of teaching in many courses. This is my main one. I like courses where I am graded by two people with two quite different perspectives on my work because of their different points in their careers, as often happens at Harvard. I feel like it’s easier to improve, then, than with only one kind of comments. (In writing, not, like, problem sets.)
-I like graduate students. One of my good friends is one, and (as the eldest sibling/cousin in my family and someone without a ton of older friends from before college) I feel like I’ve been learning both about graduate school as an option (not so appealing) and just general things from seeing how one might have to deal with life at 25. As the eldest eldest, that was just not something I saw much of in high schol or would have seen much of at a more undergrad-centric college.</p>
<p>One thing: if you come in expecting to do Social Studies, you really do need to be OK with lots of graduate students running around. Coming in to Women’s and Gender Studies, say, you will have a lot of attention from full professors. Social Studies is one of the largest concentrations, but it is not a department, so it runs perhaps oddly. You have, I think, 4 mandatory semesters of Social Studies tutorials, which cover a syllabus of great social thought and then move to your more specific interests. Those are taught exclusively by graduate students, and would be the core of your concentration. Social Studies students do have to work a little harder to find faculty advisers etc. because they do not have a dedicated department. Are you OK with all that? Could you switch to government? There is a strong undergrad focus within the Social Studies department, but it is largely from grad students and not from professors.</p>