<p>Now I’m going to object mildly, because I think the last two posts maybe overstate things a little on the “cold” side. My kids’ experience: </p>
<p>Kid #1 is not someone who sits in faculty offices much. But during her time at Chicago she developed a meaningful relationship with at least one professor in her department. This professor definitely fit into the “scary” mode I described above, but it so happened that she is also the best high-school buddy of a family friend (neither the professor nor the student knew they had a friend in common until after they had met several times, though), and so we got feedback on the relationship from both parties. I don’t think my kid ever got over being a little intimidated, but we know that the professor felt quite warmly toward her, and was happy to help her out / advise her, etc. She also had a very close professional-and-social relationship with a grad student who was a TA in a class she took first year, and then served as the preceptor (or some such term) for her BA thesis. And she got a lot of help outside class time from her first-year math teacher (a grad student), who took personal responsibility for getting her over a rough patch that was mostly her fault. I know that she felt she had very satisfactory in-class relationships with almost all of the professors she took classes from in her department.</p>
<p>Kid #2 IS the kind of person who will go to office hours. He got invited to the year-end barbecue for his department last spring, shortly after he declared his major, and realized that he already knew about half of the faculty and grad students there. He has regular e-mail correspondence with three or four faculty in his department, and with a senior professor in another department, whom he met on Parents Weekend his first year when he and I attended a model seminar the professor gave. My kid was totally turned on by the seminar, spent about 45 minutes after it talking to the professor, and then another hour in his office later that week. Those conversations (which have continued via e-mail) began the process by which my kid changed his idea of what he wanted to study. He also stayed in touch with his writing TA from first year, a Divinity School student, and with the TA from a language course. Through his job, he has a day-to-day relationship with a professor in a department he has never (and probably will never) take a course in. He has something approaching a fuzzy-wuzzy feeling about several of these teachers. (To be fair, there are some others whom he would be perfectly happy to see drop off the face of the Earth.)</p>
<p>In some departments, there can be lots and lots of faculty-student interaction. Other regular posters have first-hand experience here, but my sense is that math majors wind up knowing many of the math faculty pretty well, at least if they get involved in research. And in small departments like Art or TAPP, the students and faculty get very tight.</p>
<p>The point is not that Chicago is anything like Sesame Street, or even Haverford. But it’s not someplace with a wall between undergraduates and faculty. With a little bit of effort, you can have the relationship you want with most faculty members – really about the same as at any comparable university.</p>