<p>@Maudline -
I really enjoyed the sciences classes while at Amherst. The lecture courses early on may deter some students from wanting to major in science but once you get to a smaller class, it becomes a great experience. </p>
<p>Intro classes get up to ~100-120 people for biology and chemistry. During lecture, which is typically 3 days a week (MWF for 50 minutes each) everyone is attending or supposed to be attending lol. It is certainly large compared to any other course you’ll take at Amherst and honestly, it’s not super enjoyable just because it is a professor dumping information on you. Sometimes they try to make it a little more interactive by having questions that students have to answer using a remote clicker and then discussing why students picked each answer but for the most part, lecture is a lecture. There are discussion groups that you are broken up into for chemistry that meet once a week. Typically that involved taking a quiz of some sort and also asking questions about the problem set that we were assigned. I don’t believe biology had this discussion group, only chem. </p>
<p>Labs are typically for 3 hours and are every week. You typically skim/read the lab experiment ahead of time and submit a “pre-lab” which demonstrates that you have in fact read the experimental procedure. I think it really depended on the student whether or not he/she enjoyed lab. I personally liked it but some students hated doing it. Regardless, its a required component of many intro courses.</p>
<p>We usually have 3 midterms throughout the semester and then a final exam at the end. Some courses are cumulative in their final exam, like organic chemistry, while others are not, like intro biology courses. They are graded on a curve for the most part. Exams are certainly challenging. Based on what my friends at other schools have told me/what I’ve seen from their exams, Amherst really pushes you to apply the basic principles of what you learned to a brand new idea and see how are able to work through that. I realize that many schools say the same thing, but I truly believe that Amherst provides very challenging questions and are not just asking you to replicate what you did on an old problem set. One good thing about that was it made the MCAT questions seem very simple and easy, especially the organic chemistry component.</p>
<p>Upper level courses are where this school really shines and the largest class for bio after the intro courses was ~30 students but most of mine were ~15-20. Seminars were ~10. For the most part, these professors aren’t the best a lecturing to a large audience but really excel in a small class setting where they can really probe your mind. In fact, that’s why most of the professors chose to teach at Amherst, because they didn’t want to just lecture. They truly want to get to know YOU. In one class, we did not have any “exams” but instead had to provide a 25 minute presentation on a paper that we were assigned, present to the professor 1-on-1 and then get grilled with questions from him for the next 30 minutes. But I enjoyed that style so much because the professor got to know me very well through that personal assessment. And it really taught me how to read scientific papers well.</p>
<p>If there’s anything else specific you’d like to know, send me a pm and i’ll do the best I can to explain based on my experiences</p>
<p>@ Oceanaid -
I would say as a whole, people at Amherst are pretty politically aware. There’s always discussions going on among students about politics in general and I think many students here pride themselves in keeping current with what is going on and being able to provide their own analysis. When you walk into the dining hall for breakfast, vast majority of students are either reading the NYTimes or Wall Street Journal and some others even reading the economist. Obviously some choose to not partake in this but if that is something you are interested in, you will have no problem finding many others with whom to have these discussions.</p>
<p>Intellectual curiosity is a little tougher to generalize. I would say that certain majors attract students that have a greater amount of curiosity than others, at least in the academic sense of the phrase. The sciences typically have a decent amount of students who are curious and are attending guest lectures/seminars and even discussing interesting papers they read in class with others who are not in that class. Many science students also end up writing a senior thesis which is a sign of intellectual curiosity, though some are also doing this to have a stronger “research background” for their future career paths (cough cough medical school cough). Also many political science and LJST majors also choose to write a thesis, if the department approves them. </p>
<p>Still, I should say that even if students arent trying to learn in the academic sense, they are still researching and learning about other things that they find interesting. Very few econ majors write a thesis despite it being one of the largest majors but many of them are still actively seeking knowledge about the economy and business/finance on their own because that is where their interests lie. </p>
<p>There are certainly students here who choose solely to just go to class for the sake of getting good grades and are uninterested in the material, but they are certainly in the minority and like I stated earlier, you should have no problem findings other who share you intellectual curiosity.</p>