U of C/Harvard

sac
Sun, 24 Apr 2005 17:48:38 +0000

My son made this choice last year (though he didn’t end up choosing either Harvard or U of Chicago), so I’ll add some of what I think made him like Chicago better than Harvard. Like your son, he didn’t know what he wanted to study because he is interested in so many things. One drawback of Harvard for him was that you need to choose a major at the end of the first year. Of course you can change, but for him this seemed to add pressure to make up his mind and he didn’t think he’d be ready at the end of the first year. (As, in fact, he’s not.) He really liked the core curriculum at Chicago. Also, it seemed to offer much more faculty attention as well as advising. He spent time with a freshman there who was designing her own major and who had been e-mailed by a professor offering to help her come up with coursework, for example.
When he visited both places for the second time, he thought the Chicago students worked much harder (a plus in his eyes) and seemed more intellectually engaged than the Harvard students he met. Of course, this is entirely based on the students he happened to meet. But it seemed to him, and us, that it would be impossible not to get a great education at Chicago. There is clearly also a great education to be gotten at Harvard, but not every student there goes out of his or her way to find it and it doesn’t necessarily find them. Hope that makes sense.