<p>Are professors willing to help students, or are you on your own when you have trouble?</p>
<p>All the professors I have had are extremely willing to help students. They all welcome you at office hours, will set up times outside of office hours if you can’t go during the scheduled time, will email you back if you email a question, will chat at the beginning or end of class about a paper topic, etc. There are also TAs for some classes with their own office hours, free tutors in the libraries, and lots of helpful friends in the class or who have taken the class.</p>
<p>sounds very conducive to the “life of the mind”</p>
<p>Does it get competitive?</p>
<p>I haven’t seen any real competition, which I was happy about. My high school was somewhat competitive, but here people are generally all willing to help each other out. People talk about paper ideas together, work on problem sets together, study together, exchange papers to proofread, and all the rest. At my high school, sharing grades was a big deal: people who did the best wanted to let everyone know, and people who didn’t do well didn’t want anyone to know and look down on them. People don’t talk about grades all that much, but I haven’t seen people trying to show off with their grades or seen people ashamed to let others know if they did poorly. People here work together a lot. I guess people see that we’re all in this together, going through the same types of stuff, so people get along. There probably are classes that are competitive, but I’ve never been in one.</p>
<p>sounds wonderful!</p>
<p>I have had the exact same experience</p>