Professor Accessibility, TA's, and Relationships

CalAlum
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:08:51 +0000

I’d like to point out to those new to the board that mathboy98 is not a student at MIT. He’s at Berkeley, which is my alma mater. I think his perspective, that one “only learns enough to be conversant with the professors once relatively older,” and that professors “whose knowledge can be ridiculously encyclopedic” may feel rather impatient with undergraduates, fits Berkeley like a glove. But I’m not sure it fits MIT. Certainly it does not match with my daughter’s UROP experiences at MIT, which have included research in Thomas Serre’s machine vision group, the Plasma Physics Lab, and now the Nuclear Research Lab.

In my opinion, if an institution has ample research resources and ample tasks/assignments associated with research, it’s not hard to give undergraduates tasks that actually contribute in meaningful ways to the overall project. In her most recent project, her supervising professor asked my daughter to write a chapter of her results for a report the group had to submit to the Department of Energy. He also asked her to present her results as part of a presentation to a group of visiting scientists from Germany. These were tasks that someone in the research group had to undertake; the fact that she did it freed up others to turn their attention elsewhere. She always characterizes her relationships with professors and graduate students and friendly and collaborative.

But I can well understand how it could be very, very different at Berkeley. Especially in this economic environment.