There is a dichotomy in how people see college. I talk to precisely 0 people I met in my 5 years of university matriculation, all of my close friends are from elementary school. My girlfriend’s entire circle of friends is from college. As stated though business contacts have to be made somehow… Socializing =/= Partying.
Strongly disagree. I took a number of courses that simply would not have been available at Ickydick. I also did not do much socializing in college. I was a part-time student, full time (for some value of “full time”) employee in a lab and a commuter for my first three years. Both the lab work and the truly exceptional courses were what I got out of college. I am not in contact with any fellow student from either HS or college and none of them had any influence on my subsequent life or marriage.
The college was largely residential and largely frat oriented and I would never have gotten into that scene.
There are a few benefits of socialization - and it will depend on the type of school you go to.
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You make friends. Do you need friends? If you are doing the living in a dorm away from school at 18 thing, you have no choice but to make friends (unless you are socially stilted). That going away to college and having to immerse yourself in a new social circle is a wonderful experience in reinventing yourself, in learning to meet new people. Especially if you’ve gone to school with the same kids since kindergarten and still spend Friday nights with the people you invited to your tenth birthday party. (My nephews live in a small town. They will graduate with the kids they went to kindergarten with. Few people move in, few people leave. That can mean you carry the baggage around from your juvenile mistakes your whole life - if you try and set down those bags - someone does the favor of reminding you - going away to college lets you only take the bags you want to take).
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You make networking contacts. These might be friends, but they also might be the guy in your class who manages to get into the same company you want to get into, and you are connected on linked in, and he remembers you and doesn’t think you were an idiot or an asshole, so he’s willing to talk to his boss and hand your resume over when they are hiring.
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Not socialization, but working in a small group in person is way different than doing it in an online course. I HATE it either way, but its a skill that needs to be developed - both ways - for most office jobs. And developing it in college is better than making a mess out of it in your first job or two and pissing peopleoff.
To a certain degree, **watchwolf49 **is right, in that an accredited school is going to teach much the same stuff as other accredited schools, and none of it is proprietary knowledge at the undergraduate level.
So if you’re working on an undergraduate biology degree at a reputable, accredited school, it’s likely to be more similar than different to other undergrad biology programs at other reputable, accredited schools.
It is true that funding differences may mean that your lab work will be more or less comprehensive depending on where you go to school- a flagship state university may have more resources to throw at their biology department than a smaller, liberal arts college, so there may be more or newer equipment at the state university.
It’s also debatable that the professors are better at larger, more prestigious schools as well; often in undergrad you’ll be taught by a grad student, or by a researcher who views teaching undergrads as something that takes their attention away from their research. It’s probably the exception to the rule to end up with a real, honest-to-God tenured professor who is passionate about teaching undergrad classes.
Teaching is only a part of it. First, private colleges have a lot more professors actually teaching classes. My Bio 101 class was taught by a Nobel Laureate. There is also lots of opportunities to meet and be inspired by great researchers and professors. I got to have a meeting with Marvin Minsky, and I got taught by lots of famous people in my field. My daughter got to work with a famous economist, the kind who has regular columns in the Times.
There is also the level of teaching. I’ve taught at a really good state school and at a mediocre state school, and the depth I could teach at was way different. It might be more or less the same material, but in one case the students understand it and the other the students memorize it. (Most - there are idiots at the good school and really smart people at the mediocre school.)
As for classes, a place like MIT has everyone do research, and there are tons of ways for undergrads to get involved with labs and research projects far beyond just plain classwork. And the good state school my younger daughter went to had an office supporting fellowship applications, which helped her get a Fullbright Fellowship after she graduated.
In many cases if someone wants to take the classes and graduate, it won’t matter, but anyone with more ambition can do much better in a good school.
Plus, top companies limit recruiting to top schools. I can’t even talk to someone at a lower ranked school without approval, which is often not given.
In my experience that’s totally wrong. I went to a high-pressure Ivy League school as an undergraduate. Most of the people I knew were “serious students.” We socialized a lot, especially with other people in the dorm. We had frequent parties and social events, but I and others were able to maintain high grade point averages anyway. One way we socialized too was by studying together if we had the same classes. Pulling an allnighter together before the Organic Chemistry was an excellent way of bonding.
That’s because you went to Lame Nerd U!
It was a bit of hyperbole. No, we did not have literal Eyes Wide Shut style Roman sex orgies with naked girls running around. There were just a lot of large fraternity parties where people often got really drunk, hooked up, broke stuff, etc,etc.
That’s debatable. You have different calibers of professors. Different caliber of students. Different levels of group discussions. Different quality of facilities. It’s one thing to build balsa-wood bridges in your structural engineering class. It’s a different thing to be able to take it to the industrial testing facility and crush it with the same equipment they use to test girders for skyscrapers.
True in theory. Assuming they want to socialize with you and not join some social club for rich CEO’s kids so they can do drugs and screw all day. Or even if they do want to socialize with you. Just because you do drugs and screw around with a bunch of CEO’s kids doesn’t give you a foot in the door at Goldman Sachs.
The managing partner of my firm graduated from Princeton. One of our interns got her internship by cold-calling him out of the blue and introducing herself as a fellow Princeton grad.
In contrast, one of my interns at a previous firm got his job because he was dating a managing directors daughter at Cornell. How long do you think he had to keep dating her before he could break up without risking his job?
My point is, if you achieve actual success, it’s a lot easier to sell yourself to a much larger market of total strangers than if you are a fuckup and have to connect with people who both a) enjoy your fucked upness and b) are in a position to actually benefit your career.
Yeah, I don’t want to imply that college was a non-stop party. One of the benefits of school is actually getting to collaborate with like-minded colleagues in study groups or group projects.
Really I don’t know too many students who get by on zero interaction with other students. Really, I don’t think you can.
A lot depends on what the student has been doing before they started school.
When the daughter of an Asian-American friend started college a few years ago, she had been raised in a pretty sheltered home. So I was surprised at how much quickly she gained independence. E.g., I had been updating the website and menus for the family’s restaurant for a long time. A year after she was in college, she’d quietly taken that over and improved on it. I’m sure she could’ve done so years before, but I doubt she got the message in high school that you’re supposed to look around for things to improve - it was all just feeding back what the teachers taught.
Since I’d already been on my own for a couple of years when I started college. it never occurred to me how beneficial this could be for kids.
Also, the college she attends stresses peer learning: at the orientation, they explicitly told the kids not to plan to go home and do homework, but to form groups and work on it together. That way, they learn to build teams, and teach and learn from each other. I think that’s an improvement over the way I (and most of my classmates) spent college locked away with our books.
First and foremost, college is for leaning stuff. Never, ever, let that out of your sight.
Partying, socializing, etc. are very, very secondary.
As to “making contacts” among students, alumnae, etc. For the overwhelming majority of people that makes very little to no difference at all. At some snobby schools in some fields it might. But those situations are far from the norm.
OTOH, faculty can be an immense help. They can help you over stumbling blocks, give you access to special programs and really help you a lot in getting into grad school or getting a job.
The perversity of faculty help is that the really elite top colleges have the highest percentage of faculty who can’t teach and don’t want to even see students, let alone help them. They have their research to do. The undergrads are in the way.
If you want to work with faculty and get a better than usual education, go to a midsized to large mid level school. One where most faculty in the dept. of interest aren’t doing research (but still some are).
(The smallest school I taught at had the most in demand graduates by far. But it wasn’t small-small.)
Senior professors tend to teach the classes they want to teach. So, if a famous professor is teaching a class you take, odds are he wants to. And the best kind of classes are seminar classes, which is where you can really make an impression. Those are usually taken as a junior or senior, but if you want to make connections that’s the time to do it.
But forget about socializing, if you want to make faculty connections as an undergrad you have to work at it. Don’t expect to sit in class and have some professor come swooping down on you - unless your work is exceptionally brilliant, that is.