Questions re Honors Weekend, Public Transportation, Safety

fallenchemist
Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:24:44 +0000

Candles - glad that solved your issue. I still miss the paper versions though.



How did your daughter find the English department? Lit and reading were my first true loves - kinda like oxygen to the rest of the world - so I’ll definitely be exploring lots of those courses.

She has generally been quite pleased. Interesting areas of study she has enjoyed (a Hemingway/Fitzgerald course, Southern Lit, Creative writing seminars, etc.) and she has found most of the profs to be very accessible and interesting. I think there was one she really loved that unfortunately left Tulane, and one she was less thrilled with. But of course it would be really unusual to go through 50 or so courses at a school and think every prof was excellent. Her expectations are pretty demanding, and she has been happy with the level of the instruction and interaction.



Do you have a sense of the general level of course rigor at Tulane?

Interesting you should ask this now, because I just had a discussion with a parent whose first went to Vandy and second is at Tulane. I hope I am paraphrasing what they said correctly, but it was essentially that the Vandy students were somewhat more intense while the Tulane experience is more balanced, and that the level of instruction and rigor is similar. I have found that for most undergrad courses you won’t find a great deal of difference at most schools in the material being taught. You will find the same textbooks being used at Harvard as at Tulane as well as at Big State U. The biggest differences are in the atmosphere of the classroom (smaller vs. huge, that kind of thing) and the level of your peer group. The smarter they are and more prepared they are before coming to college to handle college level work, the faster the instructor can go, the deeper they can go, and the sharper the discussions will be. I think Tulane stacks up very well in this regard. As many students have come on here to say, they feel they have to work pretty hard to do well at Tulane, but that it isn’t crazy hard. Obviously some majors are considered harder than others, but aptitude for a certain area has a lot to do with that.



In the catalog, I noticed some programming/computing courses offered through the continuing studies program. Do you know whether these classes are open to students enrolled full-time?

Yes, if there are courses that are not available during the regular class times, you can take these other courses. You may have to get permission first, but that usually isn’t a problem. Same with taking courses next door at Loyola.

Also, CS is an area where I have had several e-mail exchanges with Dean Altiero of the School of Science and Engineering. Tulane is definitely investing in this area, and the plan is to have it be a coordinate major for now, and eventually it could come back as a full major, but highly unlikely in your time there. But the course offerings should increase, and there might already be more than you think. A lot of CS is how it applies to various focused areas like business, biomechanics, linguistics, etc. So there used to be, and I would think still are, courses that are in these areas but cover a lot of intro CS and more advanced CS areas. But I haven’t gone back to look at this in depth for a while, so I might be talking nonsense, although I don’t think so. The best thing for you to do is try to schedule a time to talk to Dean Altiero while you are there, or someone else he might suggest. Write him and see what he can tell you. He is extremely nice and loves hearing from prospective students, so don’t be shy at all. This is what it is all about and this is where Tulane really shines, being both a top level research university and being extremely accessible to undergraduate students.