<p>I won’t let a Space Pope insult the faculty at my mighty school. Just joking… I love the Space Pope.</p>
<p>But a lot of those large state schools have extremeley competitive graduate students and that was why I chose WPI over UMass and other large state schools, for example. Because UMass has 300 grad students who are all pursuing Ph.D vs 17 at WPI. And WPI has 2/3 as many tenure-track faculty, so the ratio to students is quite decent and professors probably by necessity assign more of thier research to undergrads, since they are researchers even though they might not recieve quite as many NSF grants or corporate donations as an MIT professor, for example.</p>
<p>I don’t think that WPI recommendations are valued less than most schools (except MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard). They are probably valued equally since at a large state school, a lot of the “top professors” you mention almost exclusively teach grad courses and work almost with grad students and your interactions with them will be more limited. To them, you will likely be a random number and they would likely write a fairly generic recommendation unless you do something exceptional. I also liked the career center since they help place many students into good internships where I can build my professional/academic resume. The limited availability of interdisciplinary work seems to be an issue but I think that there are probably a lot of projects people do at WPI applying combinatorics and game theory to biology/etc. </p>
<p>The research opportunities are also augmented by the nearby UMass Medical Center and the numerous corporate and academic project centers.</p>