Well, that’s what the tour guide said, anyway. Maybe they’d just had a really bad experience, and typical results were better. And that wasn’t the only thing that gave the impression “this is a place for grad students, not for undergrads”, just the most clearly articulable one.
Of course, many schools don’t even have graduate programs in many majors. That can be a very good thing for undergrads, because it means that when the professors do need research assistants, they’ll go to the undergrads.
In my current position, I spend a lot of time dealing with university research, visiting universities, talking to professors, etc. In addition, I have a lot of academic colleagues in my professional activities organizing conferences so I think I have a fairly broad view of at least the top couple of tiers of research universities and professors in a subset of STEM (Engineering, Applied Physics, Materials Science, etc.).
First of all, the vast majority of the professors I deal with enjoy teaching both undergraduates and graduates. Teaching the freshman introductory classes can be a slog, but they get a lot out of teaching the 3rd and 4th year classes.
Every top tier STEM university has what are called “capstone” projects for most disciplines. These are industry posed (and partially funded) projects that teams of mostly juniors and seniors work on. They get to plan, keep to a budget, and perform development that doesn’t have the answer in the back of a book. Some of the projects lead to jobs and real funding to continue development.
I went to an elite STEM university with Nobelists out the wazoo in Physics and never had any problem approaching and talking to the most celebrated professors.
I got started down the road to my PhD in EE because I was looking for an advisor (and idea) for a (terminal) masters thesis and just walked down the hall of professors offices reading what was on their doors. I stopped at one that looked interesting, knocked, was invited in and that person ended up as my PhD advisor (which is a longer story).
At FSU, Paul Dirac (who had “retired” there) used to eat his lunch on the roof on the building where he worked. Anybody was welcome to join. This was back in the 70’s. Apparently, Dirac preferred to listen rather than talk, but still… Who here has had a PB&J with a Nobel Laureate?
Different time and he had nothing left to prove to anybody, but it’s always been a cool story…
Reminiscing about that miserable first year at university that I mentioned earlier, before I switched from engineering to Honours Science, I remember one course in particular. It comes to mind from the earlier comments that even the most celebrated professors can be inspired by questions from humble undergrads. This course was delivered in a large auditorium, and it was a freaking videotape of the professor delivering the lecture! I could have stayed home and watched him on TV! I wonder how “inspired” this particular prof was by questions from his undergrads? And this was a genuinely prestigious school, but, again, that reputation was mostly based on their research accomplishments and opportunities in their graduate programs.
But I must admit, when I switched to Honours Science, things were quite different, even at the same place. As part of the “well-rounded” principle, I had to take courses in both philosophy and literature, and I particularly remember the course I took in Shakespeare. It was given by a noted Shakespearean scholar, the class was small so there was lots of opportunity for interaction, and that one course instilled in me a lifelong love of Shakespeare’s works.
Another thing I remember was my first physics lab in the Honours program. Fresh out of high school, I was mystified by the lack of instructions. I asked one of the TAs what I was supposed to be doing. The reply was something like “you’re taking a physics course. There’s a whole bunch of equipment here that you can use to demonstrate some principle that you’ve learned. Your task here is to design an experiment and carry it out.” How refreshing! It turned out to be challenging and fun!
I guess the moral is that the undergraduate experience can vary enormously based on the school, the particular program, and just dumb luck with regard to what professors you end up with.
I’ve been to a party at the home of Nobel laureate. I don’t think the catering included PBJs, though.
I’m not sure that that’s quite the best approach for brand-new undergrads just out of high school. There’s a lot of equipment that you wouldn’t even know what it was without explanation, a lot more that you might know what it was but with no idea how to use it, and a lot of really cool experiments that I wouldn’t expect undergrads to think of to do. My favorite was using an ordinary machinist’s ruler marked in millimeters to measure the wavelength of a laser to within a nanometer: All you really need for that is the ruler, the laser, some paper, a pencil, and tape, but I wouldn’t expect very many people to figure that one out from scratch.
That could be a worst-case scenario, but it wasn’t in the case I’m describing. IIRC, this was basic Newtonian physics, in a lab that Newton himself would have loved to play in. There were no particle accelerators here. It was delightful because it was like kindergarten for grownups – here are a bunch of toys, play with them and show us what you’ve learned!
The only students who wouldn’t be delighted by that opportunity were those who were uninterested in the class and more interested in football and chasing girls, and those students were not in that program.
I know exactly what you mean. Nothing new about this - in the movie “Real Genius” the evil professor has a TV series called “Everything.”
It’s too bad you got misled. That was not my impression at all. I had a lot more access to faculty than the undergrads in the state school I went to for grad school did - and it was a very good school. It was pure numbers.
My senior year I took a grad level class in computer architecture, which changed my life, and led me to what I did my research on. We also got talks by Bob Noyce and Gordon Bell. To a class of about 30 tops.
A UCSB professor got a Nobel with two other guys for discovering OLEDs. He started a company which was bought by Dupont and hired me. He wasn’t around much at that point but I did very briefly meet him.
When I wanted to talk to The Professor (job titles are different here), I never got past the secretary. I think the professor would have been glad to talk to me, but his secretary was a self-important git who saw it as her job to increase his value by scarcity.
Now you know who the important person in the department was. A friend of mine at MIT was officially majoring in math, but he was awful at it, and was failing everything. He wanted to go into polsci. The secretary of the Math department did a deal where they passed him on the proviso that he never take another math class.
He became a lawyer, a high power one.
I saw MInsky right after my car got stolen, and the secretary in the AI Lab asked how she could get her car stolen too. Maybe that helped. (In Cambridge getting your car stolen was pretty easy.)