princeton graduate school sucks?

molliebatmit
Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:00:45 +0000

sakky:

momof3sons:

However, when it comes to graduate school admissions of any kind, undergraduate reputations have NO BEARING.

Well, I don’t know that it has NO bearing. I have to believe that some undergraduate schools can help you to get into some grad schools, particularly when we’re talking about going back to same school you were at as an undergrad. Many grad programs provide strong ‘homefield advantage’ to their own undergrads, and certain ones are exclusive to their own undergrads.

I think that momof3sons was saying that undergraduate reputation and graduate program quality are not the same thing, and that great graduate programs in a given field may be at schools with relatively unprestigious undergraduate programs, as I’m sure you’d agree.

And hey, in a sense, Harvard Med is MIT’s medical school. So I think MIT’s medical school might be quite a bit better than Princeton’s!

jhl, MIT tends to favor its own undergraduates in engineering master’s and PhD programs, but not in science PhD programs. There are exceptions – MIT undergraduates are not allowed into the chemical engineering program, while they are allowed into the biology PhD program – but generally the school of engineering likes inbreeding more than the school of science does.