Liberal Arts College vs. University

I am very much a proponent for a small liberal arts school science education. I have no idea how I will fare later in life, but I have no doubts that my education has been anything but excellent, and, on the whole, superior to my friends' educations that go to large institutions.

See, even here I had some large lecture-based classes that kind of sucked. Introductory chemistry was ~120 people. However, even with 120 people in the course it was a) taught by a professor b) all our exams were graded by him (even if he hired student graders for homework and lab reports) and c) he knew every one of our names. Even then he was down for p-set help and just dropping by his office to chat. And this particular professor is what drew me into the chemistry department in the first place. Later my courses got smaller and more specialized, and I suppose that is the case anywhere.

My friends at Berkeley, University of Illinois, and other large research-focused institutions describe to me gen chem and even organic chem classes as being ~500 people. My sophomore organic class was 70 people, and this was considered abnormally large (usually it's closer to 50), and definitely much larger than the average Reed class. They also describe this trend towards making it more interactive involving clickers that digitally record answers to multiple choice questions on the screen, which in reality is an easy way for the TA to take attendance (which I think is silly; we're all adults now, the only person you're hurting is yourself--unless you don't get anything from going to lecture anyway--and then what's the point?). Students get around this by getting their friends to go to class and press their respective clickers for them, and take turns who goes to class just to press the clicker enough to get participation points.

My friend Luke is in the aerospace engineering program at the University of Illinois--which is a great program, one of the best in the country--and he says the big advantage is that in a couple labs they got to go see real planes and play with the mechanics. You just don't have those sorts of facilities at a smaller institution. But he said he also did not know a professor well enough to ask for a recommendation when applying to summer programs and he has no clue what he is going to do when applying to graduate school. He said that he often feels that the access to larger facilities in the end doesn't outweigh the benefits of having mentors relationships with professors who know you personally considering how infrequent access to these facilities are.

I know I certainly complain enough about Reed not having subscriptions to Nature Chemical Biology or Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, and I would have access to that at someplace like, say, Berkeley. I also know that if you are an undergrad confident, savvy, and lucky enough to ask and land a research position then you get to do things that we can't do here. Our science is modest; sound in methodology, but far from cutting edge. Profs publish, some more than others, but not that often. I know that if you are bright and self-directed you can make use of the facilities and resources of being in a larger institution, but in all honesty, it seems like most undergrads get lost in the sea. It also seems like anyone who is extremely self-directed does a fair bit of teaching themselves things; and while I'm all for self-teaching, it makes me question what the point of having class is. If the syllabus is online, if you have libraries full of books and journals to read, and if you can check your answers against an answer key, no wonder people at larger schools skip class. I always found that self-directed learning is great, but complemented by really excellent teachers.

I am sure there are some students who are better equipped to deal with bigness than I am. But I feel like for most of us, we're still figuring our shit out and we need more interaction to keep us from just skating through. I feel like I am solidly accountable for my work, and no one is just shuffling me through the system, and like I am getting trained to think like a scientist. Yeah, Berkeley has some sweet facilities, but it's not like I would get a chance to use them as an undergrad in all likelihood anyway.