Professor Accessibility, TA's, and Relationships

bigjay71
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:54:55 +0000

As odd as it may sound, the schools I’m looking at include small, elite liberal arts colleges in the northeast and MIT. Basically, I’m set on majoring in Economics and probably doubling in Math so these other schools make sense to me as competition to MIT as winning the top spot in my heart. At these small schools, I’m finding that the classes are all extremely engaging and that besides a couple of slightly larger intro courses, the classes are under 30. There’s also a sole emphasis on undergraduate teaching as opposed to research and graduates like MIT. My question is what happens at MIT? I know that senior faculty do teach freshmen, but do they care to do more than stand lecture well and walk out and leave everything else up to the TA’s? Is building relationships with professors at MIT part of the academic experience or not? How much do they really care about undergrad teaching? Does the high quality education offered at MIT go beyond having insanely smart professors and tons of work? How interested are professors in having undergrads come during office hours just to chat about academics and other things?