Open for Discussion: Does attending a liberal arts college really help a student get a PhD

[boneh3ad]

@jack63

For those of you attending major large research universities, you really see a significant number of undergrads doing meaningful research with profs their at the university?..by the way this is not rhetorical. For example, they do research over the summer. There always are a handful of happy stories where a students starts working for a prof their senior year and becomes a PhD student with that same prof…sure, but I’m talking about widespread programs (i.e. more than 10-15 students in a larger dept over the summer).

I suppose it depends on what you mean by significant. I attended a large research university for both undergrad and grad school, and I’d have to say in my experience, it was not the majority of undergraduates who had that experience, but it wasn’t uncommon either. Some of it has to do with the personality of the professor, but even more of it has to do with the particular undergraduate student and how motivated and intelligent they are. I would also say it is relatively uncommon for the undergraduates who work only over the summers and much more common for those that work during the semesters for a given professor as well.

@jack63

I went to a LAC and a major research university for a PhD. I’m proud of both, but I question the opportunities that undergrads at a large research university have to get to know their profs. This is the basic thing that is needed for a student to get a letter of recommendation.

LACs have a certain advantage built in when it comes to getting to know the professors teaching your classes, that much is certainly true. It has always been my opinion based on observation that something similar can be achieved at a large research institution, but the onus is much more on the student to make the effort to get to know a given subset of the professors. I am sure this is less true in the extremely large undergraduate courses like economics 101, but it’s the later courses whose professors can write the most effective letters anyway.

Further, you only need 3 letters anyway, so it isn’t necessarily a disadvantage to miss out on getting to know every professor (I suspect this is highly student-dependent). Also, I would argue that it is at least as useful to have one very good letter of reference based on your research experience with two medium-quality references based on classes as opposed to three good ones from professors who you knew fairly well from courses. In that regard, I think going to a major research institution is at least as good at grooming graduate students as a LAC provided that a student actually takes advantage of the opportunities available at said research school. Most do not.

@jack63

At umich many of the summer opportunities for undergrads actually went to students from other universities…I thought it was bizarre. There was little push to recruit undergrads at have meaningful research opportunities at the university they were attending, but lots of push to recruit from other colleges.

I think the expectation at most of these programs is that the summer students will come from other students as a sort of recruiting tool for getting graduate students that otherwise would have no direct exposure to the program. It is more expected that undergraduates that currently attend a given institution already have the opportunity to get involved in that research during the semester. In fact, of all the professors I have known, most who hire undergraduate workers are more than happy to keep them on over the summer without having to go through a formal REU program of any sort. It just seems like few of them actually do this, as many of them chase the money inherent in internships.

I will also point out that everything I have expressed here is based on my experiences in STEM fields. I am sure there is considerable variability across fields.

@juillet

I think that a good LAC or good research university could be, in theory, equally good at preparing students for a PhD program. The key is the individual student, and how they think and what environment is good for them. Some people would flounder at a large research university and need (or want) the nurturing environment of the LAC; others would feel stifled or smothered at an LAC and need (or want) the relative freedom of a larger research university.

Also, I’ve seen undergraduate students at larger research universities get close to professors in research labs - both at a large-ish private university and at a very large public university. It certainly can be done; the students in question just need to be a little more proactive about it.

I couldn’t possibly agree with this more. Hopefully that came across in my early-morning ramble above.

@juillet

I’d disagree with that argument. A lot of medical schools are explicitly recruiting humanities majors because they want majors who have engaged with the big questions of our humanity and who often think about medicine more broadly than the science majors they get. One example of that is Mount Sinai’s Humanities and Medicine Early Assurance program.

While I am not all that familiar with medical schools, I’ve always heard that they also like the STEM fields on account of the particular brand of problem solving those students practice.

All I really know is that I would be awful at medicine.