Research university

boneh3ad
Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:25:28 +0000

Making your posts more verbose does not make you look more intelligent. In fact, it detracts from the overall content of your posts, which, for the most part, have included at least some very valuable insight.

However, you completely failed to address the whole point of this debate, which is whether or not the “RU fancy of fancies” require teaching experience and excellence from their professors. You quite bluntly claimed that those very top ranked institutions had no such requirements, a claim about which I subsequently offered several counterexamples.

It is certainly true that you can sometimes run into a seeming conflict of interest with the faculty at large research institutions, I will not argue with you there. However, your claim that this is always the case and that these universities don’t even expect their faculty to teach well or care at all about undergrads is absolutely baseless and can potentially misinform people coming to these boards for objective information.

I will not discourage prospective engineers from considering smaller, teaching universities. I may be young, but I have been around enough to know that you can certainly get a wonderful education from seemingly unknown places, and I know that at small schools such as those in question, a student can get personal attention at a level that, in many cases, simply isn’t logistically possible at a large university. I have several friends and colleagues who graduated from places such as Rose-Hulman and they are just as capable as anyone who came from Purdue or other big names. However, it is absolutely untrue that those big schools don’t care about you and absolutely untrue that they are full of universally terrible teachers. You can get a fair amount of personal attention at larger schools, you just have to make more of an effort to do it.