UChicago vs Williams Pre-med/Neuroscience

juillet
Sun, 28 Aug 2016 05:10:48 +0000

Both of those schools are elite schools with high-quality professors, research opportunities, internships, career advising and opportunities.

The obvious differences are that Williams is a small, undergraduate-only college - just over 2,000 students in a rural area, while the University of Chicago is a medium-sized university with more graduate students than undergrads (almost 10,000 grad students compared to about 5,900 undergrads) in a very large city.

Williams as an institution is going to be more focused on undergraduate education than Chicago. Chicago might have more cutting-edge research and prominent researchers, so even as an undergrad you may get the opportunity to work on some seriously cool stuff if you want. Williams - as an elite LAC - has the clout to hire professors that would’ve been competitive for an R1, and those professors are going to be focused on undergraduate teaching and research supervision. Williams also has the Oxbridge tutorial system, which means you can take some classes with a very deep amount of personal interaction with professors (you pair up with one other student and you meet with the professor once a week). The coursework may be more limited at Williams in certain areas, and there won’t be any graduate courses you could take. But at Chicago, if you get sufficiently advanced in an area you can take graduate classes.

Also, Chicago being an enormous city there are tons of hospitals and medical schools nearby that you could potentially shadow doctors at or sit in on a class or whatever. Williamstown is a small rural area, so there are fewer of those resources. The nearest hospital seems to be in a town to the south. However, the competition for spots is also likely to be smaller as Williams is the only college around for quite a bit. A lot of students from Williams go onto medical school, so I’m sure they have ways of getting you the experience you need.