<p>Just be aware that Chicago isn’t necessarily paradise on the “individual attention from actual professors” front, either. You have to work at it, especially if you are in a popular major. My daughter is in a large department. She has good relationships with a couple of professors, but her relationship with her B.A. thesis advisor is quite formal and distant. (By luck, her first four choices for advisor were on leave all or part of this year, and she didn’t actually get an advisor assigned until December – when it should have been August.) By far her most important relationship is with the fifth-year PhD student who is serving as her “preceptor”, and whom she has known since the woman TAed a class my daughter took as a first year – that is a very close, valuable relationship, from which she has learned a lot. And also with her classmates – she talks a lot to two or three other students who are interested in the same set of problems she is.</p>
<p>This isn’t a knock on Chicago at all, just pointing out that elite research universities are more alike than different.</p>