<p>In my opinion, UW-Madison is the best. What do you think? </p>
<p>Undergraduate? It appears Wisconsin puts a lot of effort into UG biology education. Very innovative. Probably better than most private schools. Michigan does similar things in chemistry…USC appears most similar to regular selective private schools, many of whom are not doing anything particularly special on a large (I qualify this so as not to claim that nothing interesting is happening. Most selective privates and publics have some amazing “elements” but in general are not very innovative on the whole. You may not see the interesting stuff/pedagogy until you get to advanced courses or if you enroll in honors level freshman classes at most of these places. Exceptions are very top selective privates like Harvard, Princeton, and MIT, etc). scale in the sciences and definitely not in biology. </p>
<p>They are just usually very standard UG programs (with the giant lecture based classes-no pbl/scale-up or case based/project based learning) but with more rigorous than normal content and higher expectations. Like, for example, Emory, my alma mater, may make most of its classes/tests harder than Wisconsin, but you’ll be mainly be learning from lectures and powerpoints in a majority of the classes, especially intros, so the likelihood of retention is low. Wisconsin, on the other hand will teach at a fairly high level and do things like team based and problem based learning to increase the chances of retention and development of higher order thinking skills, whereas many schools will just try to overload students with content knowledge without depth/ability to apply. I’ve seen some videos and read some articles on what schools like Ohio State, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan are doing in there extremely large science classes, and I honestly feel like some of the smaller/medium sized private schools (which have tons of money BTW) need to get on board at a larger scale. If huge schools can do it with lower budgets, huge class sizes and more variable student bodies, smaller, extremely selective schools should be able to as well. Whether or not they want to is a different story…Extremely selective schools can easily mask the quality/lack of innovation in their science depts by pointing to the fact that most of their students get into grad. and professional school, with the latter depending highly on grades and test scores more than actual learning. The fact is, students at a selective school already test amazingly well and know how to earn top grades (even if it involves gaming the system for easier courses. And since they know how to test well, they don’t need the training from the science coursework to do well on say, the MCAT, because they can just crack open a prep book or take a class…they have an almost inherent advantage over others before these things. And the regular GRE for these students is like the SAT again).</p>
<p>This rant also serves to discourage people from saying that USC and Ann Arbor are better because they are more selective. Selectivity sometimes has little impact on quality of education provided within a department (or at All). You can give your excellent student body a very standard (nothing special/different from elsewhere). but rigorous educational experience. For example, many Liberal Arts college less selective than some top 20 privates/research U’s educate far better (or with much more innovation) in the sciences. </p>
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<p>Michigan is going to shore up its biology department. </p>
<p><a href=“New biology building construction gets regents’ approval | The University Record”>http://record.umich.edu/articles/new-biology-building-construction-gets-regents-approval</a>.</p>
<p>Thanks for your detailed comparison and the rationale. Although I expected that UMich has far better quality of education than USC, I’m relieved not to hear such conclusion from you, since I couldn’t apply for UMich but instead USC. UW-Madison was initially my safety school, but after collecting information about the strength of its biology department compared with other top 20~50 national universities, I found that UW-Madison became a strong candidate which has been a tier with other prestigious schools like USC and UMich in biology. Although some people in CC have told me that UW is the best among them due to its dedication to biology, I have never seen a person who has as much knowledge about the courses of these schools as you. In fact, the schools of my first choice are some of top LACs like Carleton. So, these large schools are just for the case in which i will change my mind or I will be rejected by LACs. Also, your recommendation of schools, including LACs, helped me a lot to be convinced that my current choice of schools is not that bad. </p>
<p>WIsconsin is an excellent school and very strong in the natural sciences. </p>
<p>For biology, a major that virtually any good college is going to have a good program, for THOSE three colleges, there probably isn’t any real noticeable difference. </p>
<p>What is your career goal? Grad school/research? Med school?</p>
<p>I want to be a stem cell researcher after getting PhD in some competitive PhD program. Although stem cell is the most popular topic in UW-Madison among the three, I think it doesn’t matter, since stem cell isn’t studied in undergraduate. </p>
<p>There is a noticeable difference in pedagogy, not necessarily outcome. However, a student is more likely to actually enjoy their experiences in science coursework when the experience is richer. As I said, many other schools are basically “good enough” to get students where they are going. However, for many of these students at other places, the UG science education/learning will mainly just be a “grind” where you just merely do the best you can because the courses are not taught in a stimulating or engaging way (and thus the student will reciprocate by not engaging the material much beyond that which is only required for exams and assignments. It becomes more of a game of “task completion” than actual learning). Madison (and many other schools) have worked really hard to turn biology education around. It has seen a lot of pressure from the science and science education community to change the way it’s taught, and places like Madison, Iowa, and I think Minnesota have done well responding to these calls. Again, Michigan has alread implemented calls to change science teaching in things like chemistry and physics more so than anything else</p>
<p>. Again, USC, behind both of these. It’s good, but not really any innovation. Even Emory has more (and up until recently, we weren’t really trying at all…I had to cherrypick my instructors very carefully after intro. biology to ensure that I got something different than the “standard protocol” that pre-healths are comfortable with. And only a few instructors do this so I was seeing these folks over and over again. I also sharpened my problem solving skills through the many chemistry courses I took). We at least have 1-2 introductory biology sections that are case-study based and a couple more that use multiple methods. There is a suite (the evolutionary suite which includes organismal form and function, ecology, and evolutionary biology) of intermediate courses that focus on problem based learning, and understanding the concepts in terms of actual scientific data sets. I have seen what USC has done, and it has none of that. It is rigorous, but only in the standard way of “we teach through lectures and powerpoints and then give difficult multiple choice exams and or multiple choice/short answer hybrids that require little high level critical thinking or analysis”. It’s very much, “use the exact scenario or approach we taught you in the lecture slides”. USC is more of the “grind” sort of school (as is Emory for the most part) based upon what I’ve seen from its course materials. It’s challenging, but not necessarily in the right way for the right reasons and certainly lags behind the other 2 in innovative teaching. This innovation is kind of crucial to actually retaining science students. “Standard” biology education often makes some of those who actually performing well even drop out because they find it boring or underwhelming. </p>
<p>USC isn’t the only one, but I have to call it out. It’s the oddball among those 3 (in science education) for sure. Like most selective privates, it’s pedagogy is far more friendly to the pre-med types who mainly need to earn a top grade and who typically enjoy a very organized lecture format as opposed to other teaching styles. You know, ones where they have to kind of figure things out on their own instead of being told exactly what to know. I know at Emory (Since I went here, I just use it as a calibration point), while students in general like the case-based teachers, most of the pre-meds dislike the case studies themselves because it puts them in a situation where they don’t know everything and can’t just use the book or lecture slides to “get the answer”. From one aspiring scientist to another, you should be the opposite and appreciate an environment that trains you in sorting through ambiguity or figuring out something you haven’t been directly exposed to. You want to be trained to know content, but then be able to use it and “think like a scientist” and be able to create your own ideas from that content knowledge (so you want courses that a) don’t stop at just requiring knowledge and ability to recall facts, but also b) take it one step beyond algorithmic problem solving if they have a problem solving component. Often algorithmic problem solving occurs in weak general chemistry courses, for example, where a good student can pretty much get an A by just memorizing all the problem types and then repeating the exact same process with different numbers on the exam. A stronger course would “trick” you or make you apply/derive a different thing from the skills you supposedly gained by learning those problem types). A department with pedagogical techniques (or tons of instructors who employ it) more conducive to the “traditional” way of teaching biology (which again, works for pre-meds who don’t really benefit from knowing stuff that deeply) are actually not conducive to developing these skills or much less, even retaining knowledge from the courses (which is needed if you have to take a GRE biology or biochemistry exam for example. These exams are both more difficult than MCAT biology and require knowledge of the content and also requires one to use it to problem solve and understand experimental contexts. Well taught courses and research experience helped me greatly!). The other two are just better for developing actual scientists and the type of teaching shows it. </p>
<p>OK. I actually has the same opinion about USC. If I will accepted to both schools, I will definitely go to UW-Madison. </p>