<p>Thesis requirements now vary from department to department. Some require every student to write one, some require it only for departmental honors, and others don’t even require it for that I believe. Lots of students write them. Interestingly, my daughter had very little engagement with her thesis advisor, but there were some specific reasons for that. </p>
<p>There IS most certainly an institutional ethos that promotes good relationships between undergraduates and the faculty. It’s the fact that both groups strongly buy in to the Chicago educational philosophy of intellectual rigor, critical thinking, and respectful debate. At least from what I have seen, the faculty respects the students, and sees them as for the most part engaged in the same intellectual enterprise that the faculty is. And vice versa. That’s a hell of a lot more important than a take-your-professor-to-lunch program.</p>
<p>One additional note: Any sense that the Chicago faculty is distant or unapproachable ought to be dispelled by the substantial involvement – most of it involuntary – they seem to have in Scav Hunt every year. Dancing in short-shorts, being serenaded in class, donning silly t-shirts, allowing their labs to be pillaged, and lending out their Nobel Prizes . . . all of it seems to happen with a fair amount of enthusiasm, or at least grumpy tolerance.</p>