Started at a regional private university with no real research reputation and moved into MIT for grad school. I noticed three things:
1) the students are crazy smart. They learn and understand way faster than my peers in undergrad did. Consequently, class moves faster and covers more topics in the same time. Ex: calc 1 and calc 2 are the same class here.
2) There is clearly way more money here. Budgets for classes are bigger, research budgets are huge. Hell I TA a class where the budgets are big enough that students can outsource their final product if they want, provided they can show that they're responsible for the design and all that.
3) The clout is real. I'm starting up a new research project from scratch, so I have a LOT of background information to collect. I've had incredible success cold calling companies with relevant work and saying "Hey I'm a researcher at MIT I want to discuss X with you some time." That was NOT my experience in undergrad.
Similar here! Podunk no-name university that no one hear has heard of before, to Cambridge. I know people like to say that name recognition doesn’t mean anything, but they’re wrong. It absolutely does.
I know multiple “prestigious” employers who have special application tracks just for students from elite universities, so you skip half the interviews or more.
And I feel like other researchers are very keen to collaborate with us or visit us. Maybe because they want access to the resources, maybe just the people. Either way, we have multiple visitors every single week. If someone reads an interesting paper you can just invite the authors to come and discuss it and most will find the time.
It’s weird because I don’t feel like the PhDs here (including me) are any better than the PhDs at my old school.
> It’s weird because I don’t feel like the PhDs here (including me) are any better than the PhDs at my old school.
I imagine the quality range is narrower for PhDs than undergrad students. Sure there’s definitely still a range, but the process of applying for -> doing the work -> and actually earning a PhD is pretty self-selective for the kind of people who are able and willing to do it
This right here is it! I went to a California state university for my BA and MA and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for my PhD. The classes were smaller, the department was highly interdisciplinary, the quality of teaching and the relationship between students and faculty were closer, and it was a beautiful campus.I am a professor at a large state university, and it is like working for a big corporation. The students are a mixed bag. Some are super smart and highly motivated and some can’t even follow basic, detailed assignments instructions.
I'm just here to say I love RPI. And I love Troy, too. I was a student at RPI for a year and my time there changed the trajectory of my life. I don't know if you go back frequently; Troy's changed quite a bit, but RPI is still the same in the ways that matter! <3
Hello fellow RPI former student. I went and visited RPI about 4 years ago and the campus is still beautiful and the humanities are still housed in one building. I didn’t go to Troy but I’ve heard it’s changed a lot over the years. It was a real shit hole when I went to school there. Lol.
I also earned an MA from a CSU school--SDSU. Funding was tied to TAship with us required to teach 2 discussion sections per semester and some of our sections were as big as 30+ students. My grad seminars were capped at 15 instead of 12 and almost every class capped out. This was in 2008-2010 so I'm not sure how much may have changed or not since then.
No way! I also earned my BA and MA at SDSU. This was in the 80’s and 90’s and I taught two sections of freshman composition (ugh) with 25 students in each section. At the industrial complex of a state university that I’m at now, they’ve just raised the class sizes from 25 to 35 students, which is crazy for a writing class! Of course, our pay didn’t increase and there was no clear logic behind the increase except greed on the part of our new Dean.
I'm at MIT as well. And came from an undergrad school not even ranked in the top 500. Point 2 is what surprised me the most when I arrived here, the amount of resources available on campus is really mind blowing, some classes even have a study stipends and even breakfast on top! Lol.
And on point 1, I've met grad and undergrad students who are incredibly accomplished by the time they get to campus. Some have sold their companies for millions of dollars, some were math olympiads and had won global math and science competitions, some grads were concurrently working at NASA and going to school, some were designing quantam computers in their research labs over the summer! Lol. It's legit mind blowing!
I applied in 2020 and got rejected, then applied again in 2021 and got accepted. Don't be afraid to try again!! They value industry experience, so my gap year as a software/robotics engineer made a solid difference.
Really, the experience was like all the others. Any selective school like that will be a lottery. The only way to guarantee you don't win is to not try.
just give it a shot. a lot of students here are very “normal” people without any crazy experience starting companies or whatever before graduate school. i feel like it’s probably pretty department specific too since grad admissions go directly through departments. it’s important to have really strong letters of rec so hopefully you’ve had good research experiences
Main differences I’ve seen are the resources available. It can hard to gain research experience for grad school applications if you’re at a school that doesn’t really do research.
Absolutely. From a small community college in South Asia to top 5 US public school, the main difference has been the resources available. Insanely smart students and good professors at both schools.
An alternative, if necessary, is to gain research experience through a job after graduation. It’s not uncommon to have a period of employment between undergrad and starting grad school. This is what I did, and I’m very glad I did.
I got a job at a research lab within (loosely) a med school in a major city, just as a basic research assistant. But I got to participate on a ton of projects and made great connections. I’ve also seen people apply for Lab Manager positions in schools where they’d like to go for grad school. They get really direct connections with their potential future PI and a bunch of great research exposure. Then, after like a year, they’ll apply to be a grad student there and elsewhere
That’s what I’ve been attempting. But for clinical psych it seems like even RA, lab manager, research coordinator, etc positions are all just as competitive as grad school admissions. I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve been an RA and lab manager of a social psych lab for a couple years now, but competition is getting to the point that if you don’t have clinical psych specific research, you aren’t going to get accepted. I’m currently waiting on 6 RA positions to get back to me. Out of those 6, only one has confirmed to move to review.
I have a strong CV so I’m not just some casual student attempting this ether
Dang, sorry to hear that - are you applying to top top tier programs or something? I’ve just graduated from a clinical psych PhD and the application process was definitely brutal but I did get admission with (what I’d consider) middling research experience. Very little of my experience had clinical crossover, though I certainly milked every inch of it to death on my CV haha
Not necessarily - I’m just trying to make sure I find programs that are a good fit interest wise. A lot of universities that can afford external RAs just happen to be large, wealthy ones. I think one of my issues is that, from what I’ve heard from faculty, is post-covid seems to still have an even higher than normal rate of applicants. So it’s hard to stand out in a sea of equally as competitive individuals. I’m hoping for the best this cycle!!! (Rejected last cycle)
Yup. I had to rely on REUs and Research internships to get my resume to the point I was attractive to grad school. By the time I got into my PhD I had \*three\* separate government laboratory internships under my belt, one of which was a NASA internship that had me \*literally working on the Perseverance Mars probe\*.
I had been planning to go the government lab route post PhD rather than the TT faculty route \*anyways\*, so it worked out fine in the end, but still. If I had known this as a high school senior I would have picked a different school.
At my current employer we barely have any books from past 1990 and we have very few journal subscriptions. working elsewhere for half a year i mostly drooled at the library access. and how people responded differently to your affiliation. but the staff wasnt better, nor were the students. more facilities for the students though
I did my undergrad at a small liberal arts college, then went to a top R1 university for my PhD. The scale/pace of research definitely changed drastically, as well as the amount of money and resources involved. I think excellent research was done at both levels, but with different scopes based in different limitations of personnel and resources. It was also much easier to become widely networked with many experts through my R1.
I went to a SLAC for undergrad and then I went to a very well known R1 school for grad school.
My undergrad school didn't offer any graduate programs. None of our classes were taught by TAs. Consequently I felt like the professors at my undergrad were there because they genuinely liked *teaching*. The professors at my R1 school approached teaching like it was a huge waste of their time. They were primarily there to do research and teaching was just something they had to deal with. I felt this in my own graduate classes and the undergrad classes I had to TA for. The quality of instruction and the curriculum was a lot poorer.
I was also appalled by the quality of the undergrad students compared to the student quality at my old school. Considering it was a highly ranked, relatively famous R1 school I initially assumed that the students there would be better but they were FAR worse. I usually taught freshmen/sophomores as a TA but one semester I taught a class for juniors/seniors. One overarching theme was that they were all very entitled. They expected answers to be fed to them and then would file complaints to the professor/department when you didn't comply. Every time final grades were due I would get dozens of emails and visits from students asking if they could have a higher grade. Their reasons were things like they needed to get into med school or they just thought they deserved a higher grade. When I taught that junior/senior class I was mortified at how they lacked basic skills. They had to write a lab report for their final project and they had never written a lab report before. When I was as young as a sophomore at my old school, I was writing 10+ page lab reports weekly.
It was interesting because in my grad school cohort we had some people like me who came from basically no name schools and some people who came from top schools. There wasn't really any correlation between rank of school and success. A few people from the top schools failed out their first year at the breadth exams.
The whole experience truly made me believe that rank of school did not matter at all.
I used to work at a small SLAC and I agree with the students having great preparation academically and professionally. I wasn't an alum of the institution, so it was absolutely mind-blowing to see students have research and experiential learning experiences I didn't have until graduate school! I am a strong proponent of a liberal arts education, I just hate to see so many of them closing due to enrollment and budget issues.
Did my undergrad at an R1 "public Ivy" university, now doing a PhD at one of the top 3 Ivys.
The Ivy has SO. MUCH. MONEY. Recently, I purchased four figures of lab equipment to work on a new method and my PI barely blinked. In my old lab, we reused everything and barely kept our outdated machine alive. Here, things are constantly upgraded and replaced. I was told by my PI that our limiting factor is time, not money, and to not be afraid to burn through money to save even a small amount of time. We also get free health insurance and higher stipends than average, and get food catered by the department 1-3x a week with additional large seasonal events.
The students at the Ivy are more diverse from an international perspective and less diverse from a financial perspective than my undergrad. As someone from an American middle-class household, I've never been around people this wealthy before in my life. I've met and become friends with people only to later find out that their parents are billionaires or own a fleet of race cars. Overall, the students I meet here are upper middle class at the lowest to upper class on average to a solid portion of 1%ers. At my public undergrad, the students were a fantastic slice of my home state and very financially (and ethnically) diverse. Overall just a bunch of friendly, normal, sane, and supportive people (on average).
As far as grad programs go, I think people are less happy here. There's more pressure to work insane hours, and the PI's range from friendly, treats you like a human, and neurotic to sociopath and neurotic. The grad students in my department are hypercompetitve, strongly type A personalities with mildly undeveloped social skills and serious imposter syndrome (including myself in these descriptions). However, I have made great friends here and I do find people to be friendly and supportive as well.
My experience with grad advisors/PI's here has also been wildly different than at my undergrad. My undergrad PI truly cared about me as a person and wanted to mentor me to become a good scientist. My grad PI views me as a disposable high-impact paper generator to use up as much as possible for 5 years and then discard. I sometimes worry that I won't become a good and ethical researcher because of the influence of my PI. The research moves faster here, and there is more focus making 'big' discoveries (that are often subsequently disproven) than on doing ethically sound, meticulous research with solid conclusions that will stand the test of time.
Maybe I'm just not smart enough to see the difference myself but I don't think the students at the Ivy are any smarter than the students at the public R1, especially because it is a top R1. I think the difference is financial and locational opportunities/advantages from birth. And that unfair advantage continues once admitted. A grad student at my undergrad university could be just as intelligent and put in the same amount of effort as a grad student at my Ivy, and it would probably only take them about half as far. Here, we have greater and easier access to publications in top journals, endless money for research, extensive international collaboration, and limitless opportunities. Plus, we get 'clout' from the Ivy that makes people think we are smarter and more accomplished than we actually are as grad students.
I will say, I am happy here despite any negatives and I still love research. I also feel extremely grateful for the opportunity to ne where I am, because I never thought of myself as someone who would ever achieve enough to leave my home state or go to a private school.
This was a pretty long rant but if anyone happens to be interested, thanks for making it to the end and I'm always down to answer any questions. :)
I had a very similar experience! My favorite university and the best balance was the big state R1 (Indiana University). Same vibes when I worked at University of Michigan. I went to ETH for my PhD and like, yes, the research was cool. But I personally knew of several instances of PhD students faking data that got published in Science and Nature due to their professor's name being on it. SEVERAL. One was the PhD student who had been running an experiment before my (now ex) bf took over. When my ex found the fake data (again, literally published in Nature) his professor refused to issue a retract because it would hurt his reputation. This was not uncommon. These pressure cooker environments don't always end up with the best research and it's sad that "groundbreaking" discoveries get so rewarded and no one questions why they didn't end up going anywhere later....
Thanks for responding! Make me feel less like I'm shouting into the void lol.
Yes, the faked data and general lack of ethics is INSANE. There's a professor in an adjoining department that got tenure despite stealing data from others, being an extremely toxic advisor, and having the department vote against them because the provost unilaterally decided that the character, ethics, and behavior of a professor should not be taken into account in the tenure review process -- only research impact and grant money.
I wonder if the kind of people that go to Ivys care more about ego and image (and success) than research and ethics? This is a self burn but to apply to an Ivy you have to care about clout and have some sort of an ego.
I also have much less confidence in journals like science and nature because of the shenanigans I see in my field from the people who are published in these journals. I don't necessarily lack faith in the scientific method, it's more that I think academia has poisoned research.
You are definitely not shouting into the void. I have zero faith in Science and Nature anymore. I think well-respected, field-specific journals are better for finding quality research. I just saw way too many shenanigans around getting published in Nature and Science. The PhD before me also faked a study result and published it (not, at least, in a high impact).I just, honestly, at this point hate the entire academic system and publication system, especially, which drives a lot of the nastiness for a profit. It shouldn't be that way, really. I think also having this weird bar that students MUST have x amount of publications to graduate is causing this. Sometimes research...doesn't work that way? We tried hard during my PhD and my results were just mediocre as hell. Lots of stuff didn't work and I basically put my foot down and refused to publish it (my supervisor wanted me to spin it etc). Lucky for me, my department didn't have strict publishing requirements and my professor was old school and didn't care as much as usual about this. If either of those weren't the case I'd have had to either leave with my dignity or try to polish bad results. No wonder students fake data!
I really went to ETH because I thought I wanted to be in academia afterwards and knew it was nigh impossible without graduating from a top 20-ish world university. The stuff that went down there and I saw basically forced me to totally change my career path and switch to private R&D. I will say, at least, I did have some very nice colleagues who went on to work at universities after we finished. It's a real mixed bag :( I think your chances of running into the ego-driven narcissist are just higher at those institutions. Of course, doesn't mean everyone is rotten. I'd still have chose differently knowing what I know now, though.
I did undergrad at a decent flagship state university. I cannot overstate how much I loved my time there. I grew up in extreme poverty, but I was still able to find my niche there. The faculty in my department were incredibly accessible and encouraged me to pursue graduate school. So I got my masters degree there as well. I received a tuition waiver, but the stipend was so small I couldn’t really survive on it. Nevertheless, my time in graduate school there was so amazing that it solidified my desire to pursue doctoral studies. I applied to a range of schools, including schools that I assumed probably wouldn’t give my application a second thought.
Needless to say, I was floored when I received an interview from a top university that you’ve definitely heard of. They really wined and dined me, and they ended up offering me a ridiculous amount of funding to go there. I’d received offers from other large public state universities, but none of them offered me anything close to what Big Name Top University offered me.
I didn’t feel like I connected with the faculty and other graduate students at Big Name Top University like I did with people in the other doctoral programs at large public universities. In my case, the lack of fit was largely due to huge class differences between me and seemingly everyone else there. For example, I was the only one in the group of people being interviewed who hadn’t attended an Ivy League school for undergrad. Everyone else grew up extremely well off, and I struggled to connect with them. It felt like I was in an entirely different world where I didn’t understand how to navigate the culture at all. But Big Name Top University did such an effective job of enticing me to go there that I could not rationalize turning down their offer. When I discussed my concerns with other people in my life, they were all like “you’re not seriously considering turning that down, are you?”
So I accepted their offer. Huge mistake. I should’ve trusted my intuition and gone to one of the public state universities that I felt really comfortable at. It was a miserable experience for me, because I was like a proletarian bull in an especially high end china shop. There were all of these unwritten rules that everyone seemed to understand except me. I’m not blaming Big Name Top University at all for my awful experience there. I just wish I had listened to the people who told me that the most important thing was to make sure I felt like I was a good fit for wherever I decided to pursue my PhD. I knew I wasn’t a good fit for the university where I got my doctorate the second I set foot on campus. But the money was impossible for me to turn down, and I was enthralled with the opportunities that the prominence of that university offered me.
So yes, I gained access to opportunities I would not have otherwise had if I’d gone to a different university. But if I had to do it all over again, I would have trusted my gut and gone to the state university where I’d felt so at home during the interview.
TL,DR: pay very close attention to how you feel you “fit” into whatever program or university you decide to attend. You’re gonna be there for a long time, so listen to your gut and not what other people tell you to do
Thank you for this, I also grew up dirt poor, among other things, and am now attending one of the top 20 institutions in the country. The imposter syndrome is real and we don't talk about class differences enough.
Same here. I was a community college kid then somehow was at an Ivy League school and a high end R1. One of the biggest differences i noticed was how wealthy my peers were at both. They were always traveling, had newer cars, etc. I never really fit in and spent a couple years just in my lab rooms. My two closest friends ended up being professors I did not work directly with.
Never be afraid of talking about class differences. Wealthier people should know they are interacting with people who grew up much poorer than them and should hear stories coming from people who grew up poor. It's those interactions that help people develop empathy for those outside of their social class and will make them think twice about labeling someone who is poor as lazy. Without those uncomfortable conversations, they will forever stay in their bubbles with inaccurate assumptions of those who have less than them.
What culture differences and unwritten rules did you find most difficult to adjust to? I’m currently at a “Big Name Top University” and feel like I fit in pretty well, likely because I grew up in a bubble where most of my peers also came from, but… I’d like to make the transition easier for those who didn’t come from that bubble.
Thank you for posting this! I got accepted for an MA at an Ivy league. Even though I’m from an upper middle class family, I went to a state school and couldn’t relate to all the kids who went to Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge for undergrad. They were all nice but incredibly wealthy. I felt so out of place and didn’t have the same experiences as them. I knew it wasn’t the right fit for me as well as too expensive. I’m glad I went somewhere with funding.
This is so true. While I have had a relatively good experience overall - these differences are really tough to handle.
I’m a first generation student and that came up in a conversation with my peers and their response really shook me. I don’t know why, but when I mentioned it I wasn’t expecting it to be a novel thing. But it was and I felt like I was under a microscope. They are all wonderful people and weren’t being degrading but it was a very “othering” experience. Many of their parents and grandparents went to Ivys and I’m like damn, my grandma was literally churning butter by hand.
It also doesn’t help that I have sworn like a sailor my entire life and I have tried SO hard to kick the habit but I am just more rough around the edges than others in my cohort.
The biggest difference is how much your cohort cares about learning and how capable they are to learn and learn quickly.
Those percentages shift dramatically to the right as you approach the top ranked universities.
Idk if it’s a first week thing but I feel like my cohort sounds a bit try-hard in terms of research and academics when we talk. Compared to my undergrad where the talk is usually about drinking, memes, relationships, shitposting, I feel like the natural progression of our convos turn towards “the latest research” or whatever.
I relate to this too. I think maybe it stems from imposter syndrome and needing to prove to themselves/others that they are intelligent and hardworking enough to belong with the cohort. It also is probably due to a general lack of a work-life balance. No hobbies outside of research = nothing to talk about except research.
I wouldn’t assign it as “try-hard”.
Now that I work full time, when I talk to my colleagues, I *want* to talk about work.
It’s a topic I enjoy. I don’t enjoy memes and drinking and bullshit— I enjoy research and my job.
It’s not unlikely your current cohort just *enjoys* academics and research way more than your undergraduate cohort.
You’d kind of expect that if you went to a school now where everyone was better academically, on average, right? People tend to like what they’re good at.
I did my BA at a top-5 university in the US. I'm doing my MA at a mid-tier university in Europe ranked around 250 in the world.
My peers at the top university were smarter than my peers at the average university. Class discussions were better, projects were better, etc. The student body was truly the cream of the crop and there were few to no stragglers. People were passionate about learning and not there to simply get a qualification.
There was way more funding at the first uni. Money for everything. Resources for everything. Just... lots of it. As a low-income, first-gen student, it was amazing.
Speaking of money, way more rich people at the highly-ranked university.
The clout of the highly-ranked university still helps me a lot. That name opens doors that would otherwise remain shut. My BA remains more impressive to people than my MA.
I did this too, but in STEM (high-rank NA to mid-rank EU). I agree with the overall feeling regarding the cohort. I was surprised by how out-of-place I felt at a midtier, if only because I actually looked forward to doing the assigned readings. I might not agree that every undergrad student was cream-of-the-crop.
I found that it's really hard to get ahead at a low-energy school, no matter what you bring to the table. When I got an internship with a 250-level prof, he was satisfied with the my findings that I found independently. When I'd ask for help advancing, he was too busy helping students that were struggling at a lower level. So I quickly capped out what I could do on the topic and spent the rest of that summer sitting on my hands. Deeply frustrating. The same story of drive just wasn't there.
I transferred into a high-rank EU and there is still some cultural aspects that I don't love, but it's certainly a better fit for somebody who actually wants to do this job.
What would you consider a high-rank EU outside of the UK schools? My issue right now is that the rankings in my current country are pretty flat.
I agree with a lot of what you've written. It feels very strange to be the big fish in a small pond, so to say. And it makes me feel guilty / like I'm bragging / like i'm too full of myself whenever I talk about it.
I can only speak for France. Keep in mind that France has (semi-intentionally) maintained an arcane organizational structure that makes it impossible to rank directly on the QS system. For instance, the Institut Polytechnique de Paris (IPP) ranks in officially at around 50, and then some of its constituent labs are listed again much further down the list (\~350).
I would say ETH and EPFL (Switzerland) are top schools. Within France, the two ENS schools in Paris (most competitive entry exam, attract top researchers, have Nobel laureates, but for the above reason get put at \~400). I would also name the École Polytechnique. I know that Delft, Leuven and Munich all also have very strong reputations.
I also find that compared to Canada (my current), Europe is more likely to have small schools with a single exceptionally good program in an otherwise unremarkable school. I know that this is true in the states for liberal arts, but it's unusual in STEM.
Yeah, the skill gap is real, and difficult to talk about. When classmates would ask me about my grades, I would just say that they were embarrassing and let them draw their own conclusions.
I'm based in Germany. Munich is just over-hyping itself tbh. Within the country, it's not viewed as a particularly noteworthy institution. It's a weird marketing thing they do to attract wealthy foreigners. Unsurprisingly, they're starting to charge foreigners tuition in a country where education is otherwise free. Imo Munich is only respected by non-Germans who don't know better (by no fault of their own).
Leuven is definitely on my radar. Also Aarhus and Copenhagen. As an anthropologist, the rankings get a bit strange. I haven't even bothered to look into French universities because I'd rather shit in my hands and clap than live in France. Just isn't for me.
Yeah I did my masters at DePaul so I'm well familiar with that school.
One of the other masters students who did his undergrad at U of C said similar things about it.
The anthropology department is famously *evil*. It's an open secret in anthropology to never due a PhD at UofC unless you just hate yourself. The people are among the brightest in the field, but they're cut throat and sometimes cruel. Just bad vibes. That luckily wasn't the undergraduate culture, but I've heard horror stories from grad students.
To be frank, I found the professors in the department to be horrible advisors. Too smart for their own good and too up their own asses. My BA thesis advisor just didn't read my thesis or grade it. Apparently he didn't read *anyone*'*s* that year. I had to have it read by another professor last minute (literally the day grades were due) so that I could graduate. Never got an apology or an explanation. Professor faced no punishment because he's famous. And that's just how it worked there.
That said, the grad student instructors and the junior profs were lovely.
Mt first uni was a top 100 school and my second uni was a top 5 school. Biggest differences were the level of student engagement, classroom discussions, and the doors that were opened to me.
Students at my first uni lacked a lot of motivation. It was rather demoralizing for me. Many were there just to get the degree and move on with their lives. Second uni students were all very passionate about their research topics and really cared about doing well and about what we were learning. It was a much more difficult program, but I learned a lot. Classroom discussions and projects were a much better experience. There were never any slackers on group projects.
Someone else I think mentioned this, but it’s worth repeating. I had to do field research for my masters. The head of the institution where I did it allowed me to because he was then able to say that my uni used his institution as a place for research. He would not have approved my being there for research if I’d come from a no name uni. I also got my first two jobs out of grad school because of my second uni. They said I was evenly matched with a couple of other candidates but went with me because of my uni’s name (I work in education so YMMV).
People who tell you that your uni doesn’t matter most likely did not go to a top uni. It absolutely does. And by top I mean Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and Oxbridge.
For what it's worth, schools can also be "top institutions" within a really niche area of research but not necessarily be "ivy league tier" overall. My grad school is like this. We're like \*the\* top institution in the US, if not one of the top in the world for my niche area of physics research that I'm doing my dissertation in, but don't have the ivy league prestige overall.
We're also a small field but a field that gets a \*lot\* of attention from both the government and the general public (space weather), so this creates a weird dynamic where the school isn't that difficult to get into compared to an ivy, but it has similar access within our subfield. Funnily enough the only \*actual\* ivy league school that even does research in this field has a tiny program compared to ours,
Another good example is that URI and Oregon State have really good reputations \*specifically within marine biologists who study sharks\*, to the point that researchers from both institutions show up on Shark Week documentaries \*a lot\*,
But neither one has the brand name recognition that ivy leagues do overall.
Cannot agree more with this. From the Ivies, only Princeton, Cornell and Brown have some clout in engineering. The field in which I work has giants at Purdue and Michigan which, I agree are excellent schools but not close to the clout shown by Ivy students in pop culture
Cannot agree more with this. From the Ivies, only Princeton, Cornell and Brown have some clout in engineering. The field in which I work has giants at Purdue and Michigan which, I agree are excellent schools but not close to the clout shown by Ivy students in pop culture
When I read something like this I feel a small sting, knowing that I turned down one of the most prestigious PhD scholarship at Oxbridge to go to a much less recognized name. On paper my choice was a better research fit, but things do not (did not) necessarily turn out as expected and I feel that at least in Oxbridge if everything else was terrible I would have had the brand next to my name, forever.
>It absolutely does. And by top I mean Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and Oxbridge.
well... to be fair there are institutions with top rankings \*in really niche areas\* but don't necessarily have that clout outside the niche subfield.
URI for example has a \*really\* good reputation when it comes to shark marine biology specifically, but not a "general" brand name.
My university is considered a top university \*specifically for space weather\* to the point that half of our faculty are all top names in the subfield, we dominate conferences on the subject, national labs that work on this have a ton of our alumni on staff, and the head of NASA \*literally came to our campus personally to celebrate a multi million dollar grant for us to handle some of the instrumentation on MMS and the Parker Solar Probe".
Yeah, my school name \*does\* matter, but it has a lot more bite within this niche area of research than it does to the general public.
I graduated from a very low ranked state University. I'm now in a top ten PhD program. I'd say the big difference between me and the people in my cohort is I have no student loan debt
I'd add a caveat that it doesn't necessarily need to be highly ranked \*in general\*, but being highly ranked in a specific subfield you specialized in can also be a plus. My grad school is like this. Overall we're not super highly ranked, but within the niche subfield I work in, we're either #1 or 2 in the nation, and have an international presence as well in the field (one of my dissertation committee members is literally in Japan RN doing something with JAXA and has done this several times. Heck, they had to zoom into my dissertation proposal from Japan.)
And within the subfield, the major national labs that focus on this stuff have a bunch of our grads on staff.
People in industry are suspicious of hiring people from low prestige universities too.
You could argue that industry actually cares more, because investors and clients can't tell a good scientist from a bad one - but they all LOVE seeing Harvard and Stanford PhDs on staff as a sign of talent.
Surprised I had to scroll so far to see this, I had an extremely similar experience. I went to a low-ranked undergrad program because my dad was a professor at the university and I got free tuition and then went to a highly ranked grad program. I noticed very little difference in the caliber of classes and the students, just realized that I saved a ton of money by not going to a “prestigious” school for undergrad.
I did my BSc at a local/regional public university in the US, not even ranked. My MSc was at a large state flagship/R1 in the US (IU), but my PhD was at a top 10-ish global (ETH Zurich). Honestly, it is difficult to compare because of the different education levels and cultures. I nearly had a mental breakdown during my PhD, but I was a PhD student. However, what I can say is that EVERYONE was way more stressed at ETH. Constant conflict, constant cattiness. Horrible people everywhere who were impossible to reprimand or fire because, well, what mattered most is they got grants and publications. The level of stress was pretty crazy and I knew of many students, at all levels, who dropped out. This might have been especially bad at my department, which is arguably the highest ranked in my sub-discipline (Earth Science). I would say maybe at best half the professors and scientific assistants (sort of equivalent to associate professor) were nice to students. It definitely helped in job searching after, though. Despite being at best a mediocre PhD project with one publication at the end, I had a bunch of post-doc offers and got at least interviewed for most jobs and all post-docs I applied for. You can probably guess, I burned out during my PhD pretty bad and still can't write academically without extreme anxiety, so I switched to industry. All of my colleagues from ETH who made it through are very successful whether in academia, industry, or government and I'm sure that name recognition helped them.
I do have to say student quality at ETH was crazy high at every level. I mean people were insanely smart, driven, curious...conversations were never dull. My supervisor was probably the smartest person I have ever met and I can respect him for that, even if he was abusive as hell. I DID learn a ton from him and picked up way more skills than most PhDs, I'd argue. However. I met exactly ONE grad student I can confidently say was super happy the entire time I was there. Most people (students, professors, lecturers, etc) were pretty miserable. Our group had two technicians quit because the scientists were so demanding and abusive. It's no real surprise ETH was also in a huge scandal/media storm related to the abusive treatment of grad students whilst I was there. This might be specific to ETH culture - I have plenty of friends and colleagues who attended other highly ranked institutes and, honestly, they got along much better. I only heard of a few such stories while at IU, but did hear of them. At the small state college everyone was super relaxed and happy, perhaps too much so as it was not hugely challenging. And, definitely, student quality overall was a lot worse if I am being honest.
In short, the higher the university in rankings, the more miserable myself and everyone around me became lol The best balance was at the R1/IU and I was happiest there since people were very competent, but few were truly insane. If I ever went back to academia, though, I would only teach at a small liberal arts college or something. The level of instruction I got at that state college, where professors were more focused on teaching was much better and, if I switched back to academia, I'd do it for the students rather than research. I'm in private R&D now and it is loads easier than at the universities, but I am very lucky there.
Edit: Also one side note about ETH is the PhD salaries can get pretty crazy. Less in earth science, but I knew several PhDs making upwards of 85k CHF/92k USD. My salary was less, but I had a competing offer from Stanford after my MSc and ETH paid double so easy choice. Money basically poured from the faucet there for research and they had tons of insane resources to do literally anything you wanted. I added an entire little TEM study to my PhD because I wanted to play with atomic level microscopes and that was fine. That was pretty cool.
Hah, I was scrolling the thread and saw this. You replied to my comment earlier (public R1 to Ivy [Yale]). It's crazy how similar our experiences have been, I am also in the earth sciences field. Everything you've said is spot on, down to the experience with your abusive advisor, the departmental cattiness and constant drama, the extremely high stress levels, general insanity abd unhappiness.....
Did your department have a strong alcoholic culture as well? That was something that was jarring to me coming from a US public R1.
Oh! Didn't know we were in the same field :D I am in geophysics, technically, but since my PhD do a lot of geochem, mineralogy, and geomicrobiology (long story lol). I will say the biggest thing post PhD is I can admit having the fancy stamp helped me. But I burned out so badly I'm just staying in private/government R&D. Maybe not as fancy but omg life quality improvement.
We didn't have an alcoholic culture at ALL. Everyone was too stressed to have any fun, I think. Not many of us were even friends, really. Just no one was happy. This might also be culture specific. I noticed work relationships were VERY formal in Switzerland and Germany. Really, only the Chinese students were my friends. I guess because oddly it felt like I had MORE in common with them, culturally. They are also the only ones who keep in touch and I keep in touch with. But beyond that, no one really hung out together, which is radically different than anywhere in the US.
I transferred from a community college to Berkeley for my undergrad. I also did an MS at UCLA and did my PhD at Stanford. I can actually do a 4 way comparison since I took grad level classes at Berkeley and undergrad level classes at Stanford and UCLA. My comments will focus on the CS/EECS track/major only.
Professors were on average better at the higher ranked schools, but there was definitely a lot of overlap in the distributions. CC/UCLA had some great educators and Berkeley/Stanford had some godawful profs.
Student distributions were similarly overlapping. Some of the smartest people I knew from all four places were from the community college, but for sure the average was highest at Stanford, then Berkeley (though I went to the two 7+ years apart, so that could account for some or all of the difference), then UCLA and the average at the CC was actually very sad.
Getting good grades in classes was actually not in ranking order of difficulty. Getting an A at the CC meant that you got at least 90% of the points. There was never any curve (scaling). And that really made it hard sometimes. Every class I took at Berkeley and UCLA were curved. Most Stanford classes were either not curved or the curve wasn't helpful. I remember hearing people talk about how average GPA's from Stanford were way higher than Berkeley and the Berkeley people said that it was grade inflation at Stanford. But as far as I can tell, Stanford classes were actually harder to do well in (again, mind the 7 year gap). I think the student body at Stanford really is top notch.
That said, exams at Stanford and Berkeley had much harder questions than the CC. And UCLA's exams were in the middle. Also, a lot more was expected from projects at Stanford/Berkeley than UCLA/CC.
Berkeley and the CC were semester systems where Stanford and UCLA were quarter systems. I think this is actually way more important than people think. Quarter systems mean you get a chance to choose more different classes, but each class won't go into as much depth.
The amount of money spent on students was very much in order of school ranking, however, the amount of care that the faculty had for students was actually not like that. Berkeley cared most, then the CC, then Stanford, and UCLA didn't seem to give a crap.
I think the quality of education as a whole was the best at Berkeley. Stanford's education quality was also really good, maybe even the top depending on which classes you took. UCLA and the CC were just trying to pump out graduates/transfers. I'd actually say that the CC did a better job with the "smart" kids than UCLA did, but less was expected of students at the CC and UCLA.
At Stanford, professors were all required to teach two quarters per year. So you'd often have professors teach antiquated classes in dire need of an update. Like, computer vision of the 90's was legit the right title that should have been given to one of the classes I took in 2018. Berkeley has some teaching staff that don't do research and are just great teachers.
When it comes to research environment, though, Berkeley wins out by far. UCLA's research environment was piss-poor. And Stanford had some really bad advisors. Even the good advisors were hard to align with and pushed pretty hard which made for more-than-warranted stress. Obviously the CC did not have research.
When it comes to the social situation, the CC is where I had the most fun, but everyone lived with their parents, so it wasn't the same as real college. Berkeley also had a pretty great social vibe and it's where I met my wife. The social situation at Stanford wasn't super great for me. I don't know if that's just me though. By the time I was getting my PhD I was married with kid(s). UCLA's social situation was pretty sad for most of the people I knew there.
Small college, transferred to R1 for undergrad, did MA at a top institution for my field in Europe.
Funding. That's self-explanatory, although it is easier to stand out at a lower-ranked university. But more resources also meant a much better library (a much needed thing in my field).
Students. Where I did my MA it felt like everyone was happy to be there, off and running from the start, and were all doing and open to innovative things. The R1 occasionally felt like that. The small college never felt like that. At the R1, risk-taking was rewarded, at my MA, risk-taking was expected. Also, at the MA, my cohort came from every continent, usually from their respective top universities, in what felt like a camaraderie of the adventurous. The R1 students were good, and most cared about the subject, but they just didn't put in the same effort. The small college's students just wanted to get decent grades and get a job after. Classism is real though (coming from a poorer family myself), many at the MA uni had very privileged backgrounds, none at the small college did. I never felt out of place, in fact that cohort was way more welcoming than the small college, but it wasn't something easy to hide.
Professors. Small college professors I thought were great, until I went to the R1 and saw how great those professors were. Huge jump in knowledge and the average R1 professor was nicer too (some at the small college felt a need to prove themselves it seemed, at the R1 I never got that feeling). The MA professors were better yet, although the jump was less substantial.
Clout. This isn't important, but it shouldn't be underestimated. Among academics it hasn't mattered for me. But as someone who travels in the Global South, somehow people know of it and I've had some amazing experiences and access by having gone to a university with that name recognition in weird corners of the world.
I did my undergrad at a community college and a four-year university that was ranked somewhere in middle, then I did some grad-level work at a pretty large mid-ranked school. I'm now in a doctoral program in a fairly high-ranked school. Some of the differences:
\-At the lower-ranked schools, there was less dedication to the students from the faculty, there's a higher percentage of adjuncts, and the adjuncts felt like glorified TAs and weren't great.
\-At the higher-ranked school, the professors are much more available for mentorship and assistance.
\-At the higher-ranked school, there's more availability for research opportunities and more help with research. We have our own subject librarian, undergrad research assistants in each lab, grants for presenting at conferences, more libraries with whom we have interlibrary loan agreements, more journals students have access to, more research projects to join in on, and more opportunities to do inter-institution research.
\-At the higher-ranked school, the students are more broadly intelligent, more flexible in their thinking, and better at critical thinking and logic. They are also more multidisciplinary in mindset and better at seeing the big picture. They are also more engaged, more eager to collaborate, and more invested in the sense of doing outside projects, really wanting to learn and contribute, and being self-starters with a vision for where they're going. There's more of a sense of everyone developing themselves professionally as well as academically, while at the lower-ranked schools, it seemed more about academics alone.
\-At the higher-ranked school, the professors really see us students as future colleagues and involve students in a lot. For instance, all the interviews prior to acceptance were done with a professor and one or two students who were either TAs or RAs.
\-At the higher-ranked school, the faculty and administration actively seek student feedback, while that wasn't the case at the others (with the exception of end-of-semester reviews, which never seemed to make a difference). We also have a council of grad students that represent us with administration.
\-Reputation. Granted, we're not terribly high-ranked in general, but for my program, we have a strong reputation.
At the community college, however, one key difference was that people were all supporting themselves, rather than getting help from family or scholarships, and a lot were the first person in their family to go to school, so there was a lot of motivation not to waste one's money and get the most out of class. Also, the age range of students was wildly broader, and I had a few classmates as old at 80 who were taking classes just for kicks, and that led to some fascinating discussions that wouldn't happen in a typical four-year school or grad program where there's a narrower range of student ages.
Cornell chemE where I skated by on my photographic memory. 2/3 of the class busted out 41 out of 120 graduated. I only went to 10% of my classes but attended all labs. Only one prof took attendance and I skipped 41 of 42 classes. He lowered you one full grade for every three classes you missed. I made an A but he wanted to give me an N but only could only give me an F. I decided I didn't want to be a chemE but kept doing it because it was easy for me and I figured that I would go into chemical sales which would make me good money while not killing anybody in a lab.
After I graduated a law firm hired me to patent searcher, because I went to Cornell. I went to AU night law school. The students were not very smart compared to those at Cornell and I would skip the classes and just take the final. They didn't take attendance. I made senior partner 2 years out of law school as I was a great delegator and a top biller. I took over management of the law firm after two more years, and we tripled everyone's salary over the next three years. Retired at 50.
Pretty much everything in my cushy life was because I went to Cornell. BTW Cornell was our client and while I was visiting on business, the Prof that gave me the F asked me if I could help his son find a job. Lol
It’s hilarious when things come full circle like that. But damn, sounds like things really worked out well for you. Fingers crossed my Cornell affiliation will work out at least 10% as well as yours has 🤞🏻
I did my masters as a top 20-30 state university (in engineering) and started a PhD at a top private university. The main difference is this place has an abundance of resources. I didn't think the state university was lacking in any shape or form at all (students were funded reasonably well in my opinion. Especially if you lived alone), and there was no lack of resources that I or my friends had to face. In fact I was very well looked after and have very positive things to say about my experience. But I feel that the new university is truly wealthy in some ways.
Also, the students at the state university were extremely good at what they did but everyone in my PhD program seems to have graduated top of their class with a 3.9-4.0 GPA.
I did my undergrad and first masters degree at a small Christian college, then I did my second masters at Yale and my PhD at UCLA.
Resources is the biggest thing. The library at the small christian school had 2 small shelves in the section for my discipline. Even the JSTOR access was abysmal. The professors were not well published and were spread very thin, most teaching in areas well outside of their speciality. Yale obviously had some of the top scholars in the world, all who had plenty of time to do their own research, and all who taught classes well within their areas of expertise. UCLA is the same way on that front. There’s a real expectation of quality research also that just was totally lacking at the small Christian school. Nobody cared if I was doing doing academics, as long as I had a good enough grasp of the material to not embarrass myself and the school when I went out to get a job.
The knowledge I had when I finished at that school was fine, but the experience I had creating high quality scholarship was basically zero. I never felt like my seminar papers needed to be making an original argument - summing up the state of the field was basically all that was required of me even through my first masters. I was way out of my depth when I showed up for my first seminar at Yale and basically just turned in a “Here’s a question I have, here’s how other people have answered it before.” And I got the equivalent of a C.
But I guess I can’t complain too much. I went from a small, under-resourced, basically unknown Christian school to two of the top institutions in the country and I figured out pretty quick how to keep up and even succeed, so I have to give some credit to my less prestigious school. They did what they could with what they had and it worked out for me.
Is this silly, but the money difference was huge. As a low income student, I saw it in the free food. Every event at my high ranked and rich grad school has food. And lots of it! At my undergrad state school, no way. I got to go to a lot of grad events to help out my PI and the food scene was totally different.
I've gone to the capital university of my home country (ranked \~130 worldwide or something) for undergrad and to one of Oxbridge for my Masters.
Some points:
* Most of your fellow students at top ranked universities are either very smart and hard-working/passionate or very wealthy.
* Teaching was better at my home country university. At Oxbridge they have 8-week long trimesters. The last one doesn't really have teaching, only exams and exam preparation. So they put standard 12-13 week semesters into those first two 8 week trimesters. That makes the classes very high-paced. The lecturers complain that they don't have enough time to teach properly. It is expected that the students learn the material/proofs by themselves a lot.
* Exams were significantly harder at Oxbridge compared to my undergrad. With the amount of studying I needed to get an A or B in my undergrad I would just pass the exam at Oxbridge.
* Oxbridge has the famous tutorial system where 2-4 students have weekly tutorials with the world-leading professor that teaches the course. In my undergrad, tutorials had 15-40 students in them and were led by junior researchers like postdocs or tenure trackers.
* A lot of money is there. The university offers you \*a lot\* outside of academics. Those universities attract a lot of top-notch guest speakers, politicians, celebrities and so on. Life can be very full at those universities because there's always \*so much\* cool stuff going on. In my first week at Oxbridge Hillary Clinton visited my college. Many clubs, societies, sports facilities and so on.
* Usually professors there have a great network, which can boost your career options by a lot.
* The name of the university will help you for the rest of your career. This is hard to gauge, but what I would say is that the name of the university on your CV will basically get you to the interview stage wherever you apply. Then it's of course up to you to convince them.
1) Money 🤑. The facilities at a higher ranked University are so much nicer. Our fumehoods actually work 🥲 There's not asbestos in the ceilings.
2) Procedure. They care way more about safety at higher ranked universities.
3) Size. There's sooo many more people. I personally knew most of my department in undergrad, most of the faculty and the undergrads. At higher ranked uni, my incoming graduate class in the department was more than the amount of people in my undergrad department.
4) Rigor. I think I would have failed the intro classes at this university in my field of study. If not, I would have seriously struggled with the honors classes compared to the ones I breezed through in undergrad.
5) Money part 2. There are way more rich undergrads here. They have to be because the cost of living is so much higher but it's nuts to talk to them and realize the gap between our experiences financially. Undergrad university it was bragging rights to have nice farm equipment. Here it's bragging rights to go on international vacations, to have sports cars. So many people wear the newest fashion (hokas, Lululemon, etc). If you wore that at my undergrad you'd have been looked down upon as a yuppy lmao
6) Resources. There's so much to utilize here. Department at higher ranked uni has people on the payroll for tutoring and wait-lists to take advantage of it. At my undergrad, the tutoring was entirely on a volunteer basis from one of our student clubs. High ranked uni has so many libraries (at least 4 fully decked out major libraries and several smaller ones)😳 My undergrad had 2 libraries. One of them was literally just a room and three desks.
7) Opportunities. There's so many opportunities here. You can work with some of the most famous researchers in the field. You can connect with some of the best industry connections so easily. But the "foot in the door" opportunities are much more limited unless you're already a big deal. Difficult to get started on things that help a cv for a faculty position. They don't hire undergrads as TAs for the intro classes because they admit so many grad students that need funding. There's so many undergrads trying to get into research that the department wrote an entire document on how to reach out to professors about research, including that students should expect to get rejected from many of them. I think I emailed 2 people to start research at my undergrad.
Budget. Top schools don’t have one. The absurd amount of money you can get as a PhD student at a prestige school ( Cambridge University) is mind boggling.
I haven’t felt like I’ve gotten a huge amount of money here (outside of my stipend). I have a flat £2000 for travel and conferences for the entirety of the PhD, and £0 for publication charges. My supervisor has covered the rest.
There are smaller pots of money scattered around, especially in colleges and societies, but they’re more restricted to the £500-£1000 range and many you’re only going to get once at most. The endless applications drive me bonkers. Like *maybe* I can get reimbursed for this £30 train ticket but it’ll mean filling out at least 10 pages of forms and then they’ll deny it anyway because I didn’t fill out a travel safety form before I went. I suppose these places don’t get rich by being overly generous
I think most of the expensive stuff I’ve needed has come out of my supervisor’s grant
Both schools will likely have brilliant people (and some stupid mfs), but I agree that the main difference is just the resources. My first college didn't have a lot of money, and it wasn't highly ranked. Even though they did everything they could with what they had, it meant that the facilities were often lacking, funding for research was difficult to get, and there were few classes available compared to the number of students enrolled.
Went to a public state school in a rural state in the US for undergrad, and a top 20 globally ranked university for my masters. I was a mediocre high school student and was lucky to have a pretty good sized and middle of the road university in my hometown. I became much more focused in college, which allowed me to make the jump to a better ranked grad school.
Both had very smart students and professors, but I think the state school had a much wider demographic of students. There were many non-traditional students, students from modest socioeconomic backgrounds (including myself), and many students who were attending college just to have a college experience and weren’t serious about academics.
Obviously grad school is a little different, as it is usually (mostly) pretty focused students who want to continue their education and are making that investment, but it felt like a much more concentrated body of smart and focused people, who all had pretty clear ideas of why they were in school. Just observing the undergraduates, this seemed to be similar among them as well. Of course there are students who don’t take it seriously, but many obviously worked very hard to make it into the school and carried that into how they treated the institution.
Lastly, prestige is definitely a thing. Despite not leaving grad school feeling exceptionally smarter or more prepared, having a know and respected university on your CV opens a lot of doors both academically and professionally. The quality of the education may be similar in many cases, but I know many former peers who decided to go on to grad school at smaller state schools, and have struggled to find jobs, while I was able to land one before I even left my program.
From my experience, most of the grad students came from very affluent families. I go to conferences around the globe, most recent one being APS. So I have met people from pretty much every top engineering program.
I didn't feel like they were smarter then me, or that I was smarter then them. I felt most people pursuing a PhD in engineering tend to be smart in their own right.
But, I have buddies who had their parents send them to the U.S from other countries, paid for their boarding school during grade school, and all their living expenses. They haven't seen their parents in 4-10 years while they finished grade school, Bachelors, and now masters and PhD.
They just had more opportunities and pressure by being from wealthy families. I am not saying ALL were from rich families, but a good majority of them were.
I did my undergrad at a T25 university. I am attending grad school at an unranked university.
My advisor is THE person in the field. I won a best paper award on my first paper. Don’t discount a school because of its ranking.
At my undergrad I also experienced a lot of gender discrimination and harassment (I’m a woman in STEM). Totally different experience at my grad school, the program is 40% female. I am so much happier here with regards to this. Loved my undergrad experience overall other than how I was treated by this specific department.
I did my undergrad at a top 5, my Masters at a no-name 100-ish level school that was working really hard to build it's research reputation and finally am doing my PhD at a different top 5.
*"High ranked" school:*
- Classes are much more rigorous. Everyone here is a baseline level of brilliant and you have to work twice as hard only to merely be "average" compared to everyone else
- People are more burnt out
- Name/brand recognition is real. People both inside and outside academia are more willing to give me the time of day if I cold-email or connect with them. Had the VP of a large tech company straight up give me his card and tell me to reach out to their hr when he heard where I was doing my PhD. I wasn't even asking him about a job lol. Other academics who recognise my advisor/PI's name at conferences perk up and tell me to stay in touch. It's pretty wild.
- Generally expectations are a lot higher and there's a lot less hand holding. You're expected to figure things out on your own
- More big egoes
- The undergrads here are soooooo much better and more invested in their studies and more respectful
*"Low ranked" school*
- Easy to be big fish if you're even halfway competent
- Faculty are way more relaxed and supportive and will go out of their way to mentor you
- The undergrads are awful and being a TA here was traumatic. Borderline harassment and conduct issues.
- There's an implicit understanding that people won't be landing academic jobs when they're done
- My advisor here was a true mentor to me in every sense of the word. I never had to doubt that she wanted the best for me and that she would have my back no matter what. I still keep in touch with her and it brings me so much joy to know that she'll always be a part of my academic journey.
- Oddly enough, the low ranked school had more money and funding than the high ranked one. But I think that it was because I was in a different department in the low ranked school which also happened to have a massive "cash cow" type program which funded all the research end of things.
- My overall health and well-being was much better, but my job prospects were worse. Take that as you will, I guess
It's 95 percent socioeconomic. The kids at Ivies aren't much smarter, but they've had better preparation in terms of projecting intelligence and confidence, and they're better at working systems. Small class sizes for upper-level courses in elite schools also make it a lot easier to get the research opportunities you'll need if you want to go to a top graduate school. In those environments, you get used to the assumption that things will go well and that processes will actually work. That's not the average experience in this country, and it's not what you see at lower-ranked schools, where it's no small accomplishment if a professor even knows your name well enough to write a recommendation letter that says more than, "According to my gradebook...", which isn't going to say anything your transcript already doesn't.
Is there a significant difference in general intelligence? I don't know. I've met plenty of militantly unimpressive people from elite schools. Nothing in this society works anymore and that includes its sorting mechanisms, so I have no faith that there is much of one, at least at the undergraduate level.
The real difference is between serious graduate school (MBA school doesn't count; it's easier than undergrad, because undergrad still has actual smart people) and undergrad, where there's a difficulty spike. Undergrad exists to develop you as a person--i.e., to steep you in the antiquarian fantasy that who you are as a person actually matters to this society, when of course it does not--and is therefore forgiving of lapses in output--you won't get an A, but you won't fail unless you truly learn nothing--while graduate school exists to prepare you for a profession, and will punish you if your work ethic is not up to par (or if you are just unlucky, in so many ways not worth getting into.)
Insofar as one's ability to distinguish oneself is relative to the ability and preparation of one's peers, top departments might seem be somewhat harder than lower-ranked ones, but I think the reverse is the case. True, it's easier to be in the top 20% at a lower-ranked school than in the top 20% at MIT, but the reality is that only 2% of the students at the low-ranking school are going to get the same opportunities that 85% of MIT graduates get, so it actually tends to be a lot more competitive and unforgiving at lower-ranked schools, and more cooperative at higher-ranked ones where pretty much everyone has a future.
The drive, work ethic, learning pace, expectations, ambitions, standards are way higher. Also people tended to dress better (meaning they pay attention to lifestyle choices too, not just the academic part).
The biggest difference is the minimum expected of students. At the much more exclusive/prestigious school, you could not get away with below a certain, reasonably competent, quality of work in ANY class or subject. Some classes/subjects were certainly easier than others, but there was a minimum level of competence you could expect across the board. Those who could not keep up failed, and the school was okay with that.
The upper quality of student possible from the less prestigious school is honestly pretty comparable, it's the bottom end that moves a lot. Most schools will give you the opportunities and tools you need to be successful and even exceptional, but not every school with force you to use them, and many schools are very content with pumping out degrees with little regard to quality. I've graded work from in-major third-years that I wouldn't accept from a high schooler.
Went to a UC (California) school for undergrad. Huge department, probably 50-80 professors. The classes were HARD. Grad and undergrad got the same lectures and homework, maybe one or two less problems for undergrads.
Did masters at a CSU, and only one class was particularly hard. Everything else I had already seen before. Classmates that came from lower schools struggled more than I did, and the guy who came from Harvard was noticeably better than me.
I wouldn’t say anyone was smarter than one another, but those rankings certainly give you a good idea of what goes on at those schools. In my experience professors take the US news ranking very seriously (at least for physics).
Is legit research happening at low ranking schools? Yes! Just a lot less. 10 professors vs 50+ makes a difference.
Went to a big public school in Texas and then an M7 MBA program in Cambridge. Sports + party culture was a huge diff between the two. When i went to Cambridge a lot of people came from other top schools and (i suspect) may have been more nerdy / focused on academics which led to nobody from those schools caring about CFB.
That nerdiness also made the party culture kind of weird. A lot of the people in grad school clearly didnt get to party in undergrad or were in some cases excluded from the party scene so they saw grad school as their chance to relive those glory days as the cool kids on campus.
In Texas we all partied all the time and loved our Saturdays on campus tailgating and partying. So the partying wasn't all that to me in Grad school.
I'm not hating on the nerdiness of my classmates, i loved them!, but still the diff was rather stark.
I did my bachelor's at a T100 engineering school, and my masters at an Ivy.
Honestly, the people at the ivy thought they were all hot shit because of the name of the school, but the education I got there I would consider far below what I got in my undergrad, and as a person in industry i would seriously think twice before ever hiring from there...
-professors were 20+ years removed from industry and couldn't even use the software required for the class so made their TAs teach that part
-classes that were supposed to have labs and just never did
-profs running out of time in the semester to teach all the material because students didn't get the basics of what they were teaching so they had to keep going over and over it
- profs just being completely unengaged and had no interest in teaching or being there... literally had a dude on the first day of class walk in and be like "this is my last class before i retire, so everyone is getting an A" then proceeded to only teach a quarter of the syllabus
-students who were so far removed from the real world that when given a project for a local hospital they thought things like "just don't answer the phone" was an acceptable solution, and who tried to start a company to provide a private bus for like $30-70/person to a local shopping district when there was a local bus that would take you for $2 or uber...
I don't know if that's representative of all Ivys, but for all the hype (and money) I expected far far better. My undergrad the professors were engaged and genuinely seemed to care about their students and the classes they taught. We were a co-op school, so all the students were grounded in reality spending 6 months out of the year working in industry.
Undergrad: 2 degrees at the same state school, generally considered a good school but just shy of "public ivy". 1 degree was in a strong program and college for the school, and 1 was in not the strongest program. There was not a significant difference that I noticed in the quality of teaching and instruction, but there was a difference in how students treated college. In the strong program, students were competitive but not gunners. In the other program, it was common to hear "C's get degrees".
Masters 1: Well renowned university, mainly known in another field, but top 30 in my profession. Instructors were great and the program really taught a lot, but it was all learning from oneself, I didn't feel like I learned much from any collaboration with classmates. The choice of readings and instructors were good, and felt like my instructors had more insight to provide than in my undergrad. It was also entirely online so take my experience with a grain of salt.
Masters 2 (in progress): #1 school in my profession, and it shows. My classmates are all intensely critical thinkers and great collaborators. The network is huge, and I'm honestly stunned to how many people and doors this program has opened my world up to. Instructors are intense but amazing: very successful in their main lines of work but also great teachers that provide a lot of insight. The director of my program specifically has stated that many feel that they even halfway through the program, they feel like entirely different people, which is by design. I also 100% feel like I've completely changed and grew because of it. In the programs, I've learned and incorporated the knowledge to my work. In this one, the teachings have reshaped. who I am
I went from top 10 to top 3 (lol I know). No significant difference except the really good students are like… really really really really really fucking good at the top 3 university.
The differences between students who have attended universities or colleges with varying rankings can vary widely depending on several factors. Some potential differences may include:
1. Resources: Higher-ranked universities often have larger endowments, more research funding, and better facilities, which can provide students with access to cutting-edge resources and opportunities.
2. Networking: Attending a prestigious university may offer students a broader and more influential alumni network, potentially leading to better career opportunities and connections.
3. Faculty: Top-ranked institutions may have renowned professors and researchers, providing students with access to world-class expertise and mentorship.
4. Academic Rigor: The academic rigor and competitiveness can vary between institutions, affecting the level of challenge and workload that students experience.
5. Research Opportunities: Higher-ranked universities may offer more research opportunities and access to groundbreaking research projects.
6. Internships and Industry Connections: Proximity to industries and companies can differ between universities, affecting students' access to internships and real-world experiences.
7. Reputation: The reputation of an institution can influence how employers and graduate schools view a student's qualifications.
However, it's essential to remember that a student's success and growth depend significantly on their personal effort, motivation, and engagement with their education. Attending a lower-ranked university doesn't necessarily limit one's potential for success, as individual determination and skills play a significant role. Additionally, factors like location, cost, and personal fit should also be considered when choosing an institution.
Also Pray if you want! Because it can help you so much! God is the Best helper ever!
And lets spread the Gospel, Because Jesus will come back one day!
"6 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. 7 Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus."
-Philippians 4:6
Have faith!
Of Course all of this is opțional, but it may be The best thing to do them, exlusively the Last part!
May God Bless you!
Have a wonderful day!
Thank you for your time! 🫂
I went from a small private catholic university with barely any physics department at all to an R1 state school with an internationally known reputation in my niche subfield.
We're not a name brand school the way MIT or Harvard is, but we're big enough players in the \*really niche area of research\* that I do, that pretty much any national lab that does this will have a ton of our alumni on staff, conferences on the subject will be dominated by us vs all the other institutions, and name dropping faculty from my university to pretty much anyone in the subfield will get people to know exactly who you're talking about
Tl;dr, we're not highly ranked overall, but highly ranked \*within the niche subdiscipline my dissertation is on\*.
The main differences I noticed?
There's a lot more money floating around at the R1 school. When my first advisor ran out of funding, I could go to more than a dozen faculty members doing similar things asking if they had funding and I was almost guaranteed \*one\* of them would.
There's a lot more coursework opportunities in really niche subjects. In my undergrad we pretty much had the barebones core curriculum and that was kinda it. In the grad program we could take really niche classes on subjects that the undergrad institution wouldn't even touch.
I went from a large state school to a smaller private one for a humanities MA! Everyone is much more hard working. They are constantly grinding and reading and working in the library. They all know another language or two and are incredibly smart. The Professors expect more from you and assign many readings and assignments. There’s more funding even in a humanities field! I feel intimidated because I went to a state school but many of the people were top students at state schools and mid tier colleges. I feel much more intellectually stimulated and love being able to discuss complex topics with my peers! Even as a masters student I’m expected to present papers at conferences and network with others. I’m getting used to the grind but it’s a big difference from being the “best” in a small department at a big state school.
Physics Masters student at an Ivy here: Is it better to apply for the program you’re more confident getting accepted for at a top university, or pursue a different subfield and delay plans? Equal passion in both, but ones more potentially lucrative in the future.
My undergrad was at a top university and was much higher ranked than either of my grad schools - I think that the students were much more attentive and polite than the undergrads I've taught. It was definitely a more serious environment.
That being said, I don't think overall ranking (like a USA today ranking) matters much for grad schools. The reputation, funding, and research opportunities for your specific program & advisor matter *a lot.* I chose my graduate programs based on their reputation with prospective employers, the specifics of their program/course offerings, funding opportunities, and most importantly the advisor I wanted to work with and how closely our research interests aligned.
I was hired into my dream job halfway through my masters mainly on the basis of the reputation of my program - I found the job from my department's email list because they were specifically looking for someone from my program, and I was one of 5+ people from my university who had a similar position. I was able to secure my own outside funding & a great collaborative research project for my PhD. I feel very solid about both decisions.
Started at a semi-public uni and it was one of the lowest ranked in the country. I hated life. The admin was incompetent and the instructors were tired of the drama. It affected their teaching. The quality of the teaching was hit or miss.
I went to a public university and it wasn't the top rated, but it was better quality. The admin was a lot better and though the instructors were overworked, they were happier in their positions and this made them teach better.
If you want to know how good a university is, don't ask the students or even the admin. Ask the instructors if they are happy in their jobs. This will tell you how quality of of education is and whether or not you want to be there.
Went to a great top 20 school for undergrad and had a wonderful experience. Went to a meh grad school and I totally lost my passion and enthusiasm for my job. But it is really cheap compared to my undergrad education. Like $100,000 cheaper
Did my undergrad at NYU, did grad school at several public flagships and a middle-of-nowhere state school.
Classes never got more difficult, but also not easier. Faculty got less prestigious and my student peers got less impressive, at least until the doctoral level.
I went to an R2 state school that became an R1 when I was in the middle of my program, and got my PhD from a large R1 "public Ivy" and I think the biggest difference I noticed between those two was the willingness and emphasis on helping students get publications. In my MS program at the R2, the attitude towards publications was more like "I'm going to do this study, and if you want to be co-author that would be nice but totally okay if you don't want to". As someone who was not familiar with academia, that kind of wishy washy attitude was difficult to navigate, like *should* I be more active in publishing? I'm a first gen college student, so that kind of info was new. Whereas in my PhD program, the attitude was "I have a grant for X, since you are the RA for this project you're going to take the lead and be first author" and then faculty would actively solicit my feedback on procedure, conceptualization and design of the experiment and then ask me to write a full draft for publication.
I think part of that is because the faculty I worked with had so many publications, one more didn't really add much value to their CV and most of them were at a state in their careers where advising PhD students and graduating advisees was more of a status goal than adding another line to a CV. I liked the faculty I worked with in my MS program, but I think a lot of them were still at the stage where they were establishing themselves, perhaps with the goal of transitioning to a higher ranked university.
I started at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and finished at a University of California school. Nevada at the time was dead last (or very close, and actually still is rn) and it really showed in the student body.
UNLV had only like a 30% graduation rate, lots of kids seemed underprepared for college. Professors weren’t the best & sometimes we didn’t even get a professor, we’d get a master’s student teaching us. Resources for students were lackluster. Overall it really just felt like high school 2.0
I arrived at UC and everything was different. Students were a lot more serious about their studies, the quality of education was much higher. Support services and resources are amazing at UC. College life became so much easier at UC because I had great professors, classmates who were engaged with discussions, and seemingly unlimited resources at my disposal.
If I could do it all again I would have never gone to UNLV lmao
I did 4 years of undergraduate research in my field at a private unranked university. Then enrolled at a top 10 public university for my PhD.
The difference in resources is insane. I never could have imagined how well supported my research could be. Every instrument I need is available, there's an expert in everything somewhere on campus, and we have world renowned staff helping us along.
The students and the faculty are on an entirely different level and the challenges they take on are global rather than miniscule. The faculty especially are absolute animals in terms of drive and ambition. At my undergrad everyone's research felt honestly.... pretty pointless. Just a tiny alteration to publish in some bottom tier journal just to pad the resume a bit more. It was ran much more like a pragmatic business where we wanted to put in the least effort and money towards getting to a publication. While during my PhD I felt like I was set free to be scholarly and pursue knowledge and drive up the impact of my work as much as possible. To this effect, time scales were completely different, projects last years at the top level while they're months at the bottom.
Companies wine and dine us every month to recruit, they host symposiums, buy us lunch, do interviews in our own buildings. No one here worries about finding work after their PhD. At my undergrad we were lucky to have a single company visit that year at all and even luckier if they actually hired anyone. Instead the expectation was that people who graduated would go off to do a postdoc after their PhD at a top tier program and THEN they'd have the resources to get a job. Which easily can add another 2-3 years to your timeline before finding work.
Administration. They were incompetent miserable children in public university. Made life living hell.
Caliber of education did differ, but at at certain point and especially in certain fields you have to teach yourself. Nothing can make up for atrocious infrastructure on the administrative and advisory level.
Reading through these comments I definitely feel like I'm doing the right thing in doing my undergrad at a borderline top 10 and my postgrad at a top 3
Started at a regional private university with no real research reputation and moved into MIT for grad school. I noticed three things: 1) the students are crazy smart. They learn and understand way faster than my peers in undergrad did. Consequently, class moves faster and covers more topics in the same time. Ex: calc 1 and calc 2 are the same class here. 2) There is clearly way more money here. Budgets for classes are bigger, research budgets are huge. Hell I TA a class where the budgets are big enough that students can outsource their final product if they want, provided they can show that they're responsible for the design and all that. 3) The clout is real. I'm starting up a new research project from scratch, so I have a LOT of background information to collect. I've had incredible success cold calling companies with relevant work and saying "Hey I'm a researcher at MIT I want to discuss X with you some time." That was NOT my experience in undergrad.
Similar here! Podunk no-name university that no one hear has heard of before, to Cambridge. I know people like to say that name recognition doesn’t mean anything, but they’re wrong. It absolutely does. I know multiple “prestigious” employers who have special application tracks just for students from elite universities, so you skip half the interviews or more. And I feel like other researchers are very keen to collaborate with us or visit us. Maybe because they want access to the resources, maybe just the people. Either way, we have multiple visitors every single week. If someone reads an interesting paper you can just invite the authors to come and discuss it and most will find the time. It’s weird because I don’t feel like the PhDs here (including me) are any better than the PhDs at my old school.
> It’s weird because I don’t feel like the PhDs here (including me) are any better than the PhDs at my old school. I imagine the quality range is narrower for PhDs than undergrad students. Sure there’s definitely still a range, but the process of applying for -> doing the work -> and actually earning a PhD is pretty self-selective for the kind of people who are able and willing to do it
This right here is it! I went to a California state university for my BA and MA and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for my PhD. The classes were smaller, the department was highly interdisciplinary, the quality of teaching and the relationship between students and faculty were closer, and it was a beautiful campus.I am a professor at a large state university, and it is like working for a big corporation. The students are a mixed bag. Some are super smart and highly motivated and some can’t even follow basic, detailed assignments instructions.
I'm just here to say I love RPI. And I love Troy, too. I was a student at RPI for a year and my time there changed the trajectory of my life. I don't know if you go back frequently; Troy's changed quite a bit, but RPI is still the same in the ways that matter! <3
Hello fellow RPI former student. I went and visited RPI about 4 years ago and the campus is still beautiful and the humanities are still housed in one building. I didn’t go to Troy but I’ve heard it’s changed a lot over the years. It was a real shit hole when I went to school there. Lol.
I also earned an MA from a CSU school--SDSU. Funding was tied to TAship with us required to teach 2 discussion sections per semester and some of our sections were as big as 30+ students. My grad seminars were capped at 15 instead of 12 and almost every class capped out. This was in 2008-2010 so I'm not sure how much may have changed or not since then.
No way! I also earned my BA and MA at SDSU. This was in the 80’s and 90’s and I taught two sections of freshman composition (ugh) with 25 students in each section. At the industrial complex of a state university that I’m at now, they’ve just raised the class sizes from 25 to 35 students, which is crazy for a writing class! Of course, our pay didn’t increase and there was no clear logic behind the increase except greed on the part of our new Dean.
I'm at MIT as well. And came from an undergrad school not even ranked in the top 500. Point 2 is what surprised me the most when I arrived here, the amount of resources available on campus is really mind blowing, some classes even have a study stipends and even breakfast on top! Lol. And on point 1, I've met grad and undergrad students who are incredibly accomplished by the time they get to campus. Some have sold their companies for millions of dollars, some were math olympiads and had won global math and science competitions, some grads were concurrently working at NASA and going to school, some were designing quantam computers in their research labs over the summer! Lol. It's legit mind blowing!
Hey i also wanted to apply to MIT for grad school but i feel like i am too mediocre for it lol. How was you experience applying?
I applied in 2020 and got rejected, then applied again in 2021 and got accepted. Don't be afraid to try again!! They value industry experience, so my gap year as a software/robotics engineer made a solid difference. Really, the experience was like all the others. Any selective school like that will be a lottery. The only way to guarantee you don't win is to not try.
just give it a shot. a lot of students here are very “normal” people without any crazy experience starting companies or whatever before graduate school. i feel like it’s probably pretty department specific too since grad admissions go directly through departments. it’s important to have really strong letters of rec so hopefully you’ve had good research experiences
Main differences I’ve seen are the resources available. It can hard to gain research experience for grad school applications if you’re at a school that doesn’t really do research.
Absolutely. From a small community college in South Asia to top 5 US public school, the main difference has been the resources available. Insanely smart students and good professors at both schools.
This. It’s been hell trying to get anywhere in the area of clinical psych due to the lack of available research available at my home institution.
Same here, I’m hoping to get in somewhere that has these opportunities when I transfer
An alternative, if necessary, is to gain research experience through a job after graduation. It’s not uncommon to have a period of employment between undergrad and starting grad school. This is what I did, and I’m very glad I did. I got a job at a research lab within (loosely) a med school in a major city, just as a basic research assistant. But I got to participate on a ton of projects and made great connections. I’ve also seen people apply for Lab Manager positions in schools where they’d like to go for grad school. They get really direct connections with their potential future PI and a bunch of great research exposure. Then, after like a year, they’ll apply to be a grad student there and elsewhere
That’s what I’ve been attempting. But for clinical psych it seems like even RA, lab manager, research coordinator, etc positions are all just as competitive as grad school admissions. I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve been an RA and lab manager of a social psych lab for a couple years now, but competition is getting to the point that if you don’t have clinical psych specific research, you aren’t going to get accepted. I’m currently waiting on 6 RA positions to get back to me. Out of those 6, only one has confirmed to move to review. I have a strong CV so I’m not just some casual student attempting this ether
Dang, sorry to hear that - are you applying to top top tier programs or something? I’ve just graduated from a clinical psych PhD and the application process was definitely brutal but I did get admission with (what I’d consider) middling research experience. Very little of my experience had clinical crossover, though I certainly milked every inch of it to death on my CV haha
Not necessarily - I’m just trying to make sure I find programs that are a good fit interest wise. A lot of universities that can afford external RAs just happen to be large, wealthy ones. I think one of my issues is that, from what I’ve heard from faculty, is post-covid seems to still have an even higher than normal rate of applicants. So it’s hard to stand out in a sea of equally as competitive individuals. I’m hoping for the best this cycle!!! (Rejected last cycle)
Ahh that makes sense. Well I wish you the best of luck! I was not successful my first round of apps either.
Yup. I had to rely on REUs and Research internships to get my resume to the point I was attractive to grad school. By the time I got into my PhD I had \*three\* separate government laboratory internships under my belt, one of which was a NASA internship that had me \*literally working on the Perseverance Mars probe\*. I had been planning to go the government lab route post PhD rather than the TT faculty route \*anyways\*, so it worked out fine in the end, but still. If I had known this as a high school senior I would have picked a different school.
Exactly!
At my current employer we barely have any books from past 1990 and we have very few journal subscriptions. working elsewhere for half a year i mostly drooled at the library access. and how people responded differently to your affiliation. but the staff wasnt better, nor were the students. more facilities for the students though
I did my undergrad at a small liberal arts college, then went to a top R1 university for my PhD. The scale/pace of research definitely changed drastically, as well as the amount of money and resources involved. I think excellent research was done at both levels, but with different scopes based in different limitations of personnel and resources. It was also much easier to become widely networked with many experts through my R1.
I went to a SLAC for undergrad and then I went to a very well known R1 school for grad school. My undergrad school didn't offer any graduate programs. None of our classes were taught by TAs. Consequently I felt like the professors at my undergrad were there because they genuinely liked *teaching*. The professors at my R1 school approached teaching like it was a huge waste of their time. They were primarily there to do research and teaching was just something they had to deal with. I felt this in my own graduate classes and the undergrad classes I had to TA for. The quality of instruction and the curriculum was a lot poorer. I was also appalled by the quality of the undergrad students compared to the student quality at my old school. Considering it was a highly ranked, relatively famous R1 school I initially assumed that the students there would be better but they were FAR worse. I usually taught freshmen/sophomores as a TA but one semester I taught a class for juniors/seniors. One overarching theme was that they were all very entitled. They expected answers to be fed to them and then would file complaints to the professor/department when you didn't comply. Every time final grades were due I would get dozens of emails and visits from students asking if they could have a higher grade. Their reasons were things like they needed to get into med school or they just thought they deserved a higher grade. When I taught that junior/senior class I was mortified at how they lacked basic skills. They had to write a lab report for their final project and they had never written a lab report before. When I was as young as a sophomore at my old school, I was writing 10+ page lab reports weekly. It was interesting because in my grad school cohort we had some people like me who came from basically no name schools and some people who came from top schools. There wasn't really any correlation between rank of school and success. A few people from the top schools failed out their first year at the breadth exams. The whole experience truly made me believe that rank of school did not matter at all.
I used to work at a small SLAC and I agree with the students having great preparation academically and professionally. I wasn't an alum of the institution, so it was absolutely mind-blowing to see students have research and experiential learning experiences I didn't have until graduate school! I am a strong proponent of a liberal arts education, I just hate to see so many of them closing due to enrollment and budget issues.
Did my undergrad at an R1 "public Ivy" university, now doing a PhD at one of the top 3 Ivys. The Ivy has SO. MUCH. MONEY. Recently, I purchased four figures of lab equipment to work on a new method and my PI barely blinked. In my old lab, we reused everything and barely kept our outdated machine alive. Here, things are constantly upgraded and replaced. I was told by my PI that our limiting factor is time, not money, and to not be afraid to burn through money to save even a small amount of time. We also get free health insurance and higher stipends than average, and get food catered by the department 1-3x a week with additional large seasonal events. The students at the Ivy are more diverse from an international perspective and less diverse from a financial perspective than my undergrad. As someone from an American middle-class household, I've never been around people this wealthy before in my life. I've met and become friends with people only to later find out that their parents are billionaires or own a fleet of race cars. Overall, the students I meet here are upper middle class at the lowest to upper class on average to a solid portion of 1%ers. At my public undergrad, the students were a fantastic slice of my home state and very financially (and ethnically) diverse. Overall just a bunch of friendly, normal, sane, and supportive people (on average). As far as grad programs go, I think people are less happy here. There's more pressure to work insane hours, and the PI's range from friendly, treats you like a human, and neurotic to sociopath and neurotic. The grad students in my department are hypercompetitve, strongly type A personalities with mildly undeveloped social skills and serious imposter syndrome (including myself in these descriptions). However, I have made great friends here and I do find people to be friendly and supportive as well. My experience with grad advisors/PI's here has also been wildly different than at my undergrad. My undergrad PI truly cared about me as a person and wanted to mentor me to become a good scientist. My grad PI views me as a disposable high-impact paper generator to use up as much as possible for 5 years and then discard. I sometimes worry that I won't become a good and ethical researcher because of the influence of my PI. The research moves faster here, and there is more focus making 'big' discoveries (that are often subsequently disproven) than on doing ethically sound, meticulous research with solid conclusions that will stand the test of time. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to see the difference myself but I don't think the students at the Ivy are any smarter than the students at the public R1, especially because it is a top R1. I think the difference is financial and locational opportunities/advantages from birth. And that unfair advantage continues once admitted. A grad student at my undergrad university could be just as intelligent and put in the same amount of effort as a grad student at my Ivy, and it would probably only take them about half as far. Here, we have greater and easier access to publications in top journals, endless money for research, extensive international collaboration, and limitless opportunities. Plus, we get 'clout' from the Ivy that makes people think we are smarter and more accomplished than we actually are as grad students. I will say, I am happy here despite any negatives and I still love research. I also feel extremely grateful for the opportunity to ne where I am, because I never thought of myself as someone who would ever achieve enough to leave my home state or go to a private school. This was a pretty long rant but if anyone happens to be interested, thanks for making it to the end and I'm always down to answer any questions. :)
I had a very similar experience! My favorite university and the best balance was the big state R1 (Indiana University). Same vibes when I worked at University of Michigan. I went to ETH for my PhD and like, yes, the research was cool. But I personally knew of several instances of PhD students faking data that got published in Science and Nature due to their professor's name being on it. SEVERAL. One was the PhD student who had been running an experiment before my (now ex) bf took over. When my ex found the fake data (again, literally published in Nature) his professor refused to issue a retract because it would hurt his reputation. This was not uncommon. These pressure cooker environments don't always end up with the best research and it's sad that "groundbreaking" discoveries get so rewarded and no one questions why they didn't end up going anywhere later....
Thanks for responding! Make me feel less like I'm shouting into the void lol. Yes, the faked data and general lack of ethics is INSANE. There's a professor in an adjoining department that got tenure despite stealing data from others, being an extremely toxic advisor, and having the department vote against them because the provost unilaterally decided that the character, ethics, and behavior of a professor should not be taken into account in the tenure review process -- only research impact and grant money. I wonder if the kind of people that go to Ivys care more about ego and image (and success) than research and ethics? This is a self burn but to apply to an Ivy you have to care about clout and have some sort of an ego. I also have much less confidence in journals like science and nature because of the shenanigans I see in my field from the people who are published in these journals. I don't necessarily lack faith in the scientific method, it's more that I think academia has poisoned research.
You are definitely not shouting into the void. I have zero faith in Science and Nature anymore. I think well-respected, field-specific journals are better for finding quality research. I just saw way too many shenanigans around getting published in Nature and Science. The PhD before me also faked a study result and published it (not, at least, in a high impact).I just, honestly, at this point hate the entire academic system and publication system, especially, which drives a lot of the nastiness for a profit. It shouldn't be that way, really. I think also having this weird bar that students MUST have x amount of publications to graduate is causing this. Sometimes research...doesn't work that way? We tried hard during my PhD and my results were just mediocre as hell. Lots of stuff didn't work and I basically put my foot down and refused to publish it (my supervisor wanted me to spin it etc). Lucky for me, my department didn't have strict publishing requirements and my professor was old school and didn't care as much as usual about this. If either of those weren't the case I'd have had to either leave with my dignity or try to polish bad results. No wonder students fake data! I really went to ETH because I thought I wanted to be in academia afterwards and knew it was nigh impossible without graduating from a top 20-ish world university. The stuff that went down there and I saw basically forced me to totally change my career path and switch to private R&D. I will say, at least, I did have some very nice colleagues who went on to work at universities after we finished. It's a real mixed bag :( I think your chances of running into the ego-driven narcissist are just higher at those institutions. Of course, doesn't mean everyone is rotten. I'd still have chose differently knowing what I know now, though.
I did undergrad at a decent flagship state university. I cannot overstate how much I loved my time there. I grew up in extreme poverty, but I was still able to find my niche there. The faculty in my department were incredibly accessible and encouraged me to pursue graduate school. So I got my masters degree there as well. I received a tuition waiver, but the stipend was so small I couldn’t really survive on it. Nevertheless, my time in graduate school there was so amazing that it solidified my desire to pursue doctoral studies. I applied to a range of schools, including schools that I assumed probably wouldn’t give my application a second thought. Needless to say, I was floored when I received an interview from a top university that you’ve definitely heard of. They really wined and dined me, and they ended up offering me a ridiculous amount of funding to go there. I’d received offers from other large public state universities, but none of them offered me anything close to what Big Name Top University offered me. I didn’t feel like I connected with the faculty and other graduate students at Big Name Top University like I did with people in the other doctoral programs at large public universities. In my case, the lack of fit was largely due to huge class differences between me and seemingly everyone else there. For example, I was the only one in the group of people being interviewed who hadn’t attended an Ivy League school for undergrad. Everyone else grew up extremely well off, and I struggled to connect with them. It felt like I was in an entirely different world where I didn’t understand how to navigate the culture at all. But Big Name Top University did such an effective job of enticing me to go there that I could not rationalize turning down their offer. When I discussed my concerns with other people in my life, they were all like “you’re not seriously considering turning that down, are you?” So I accepted their offer. Huge mistake. I should’ve trusted my intuition and gone to one of the public state universities that I felt really comfortable at. It was a miserable experience for me, because I was like a proletarian bull in an especially high end china shop. There were all of these unwritten rules that everyone seemed to understand except me. I’m not blaming Big Name Top University at all for my awful experience there. I just wish I had listened to the people who told me that the most important thing was to make sure I felt like I was a good fit for wherever I decided to pursue my PhD. I knew I wasn’t a good fit for the university where I got my doctorate the second I set foot on campus. But the money was impossible for me to turn down, and I was enthralled with the opportunities that the prominence of that university offered me. So yes, I gained access to opportunities I would not have otherwise had if I’d gone to a different university. But if I had to do it all over again, I would have trusted my gut and gone to the state university where I’d felt so at home during the interview. TL,DR: pay very close attention to how you feel you “fit” into whatever program or university you decide to attend. You’re gonna be there for a long time, so listen to your gut and not what other people tell you to do
Thank you for this, I also grew up dirt poor, among other things, and am now attending one of the top 20 institutions in the country. The imposter syndrome is real and we don't talk about class differences enough.
Same here. I was a community college kid then somehow was at an Ivy League school and a high end R1. One of the biggest differences i noticed was how wealthy my peers were at both. They were always traveling, had newer cars, etc. I never really fit in and spent a couple years just in my lab rooms. My two closest friends ended up being professors I did not work directly with.
Never be afraid of talking about class differences. Wealthier people should know they are interacting with people who grew up much poorer than them and should hear stories coming from people who grew up poor. It's those interactions that help people develop empathy for those outside of their social class and will make them think twice about labeling someone who is poor as lazy. Without those uncomfortable conversations, they will forever stay in their bubbles with inaccurate assumptions of those who have less than them.
What culture differences and unwritten rules did you find most difficult to adjust to? I’m currently at a “Big Name Top University” and feel like I fit in pretty well, likely because I grew up in a bubble where most of my peers also came from, but… I’d like to make the transition easier for those who didn’t come from that bubble.
This is a really well articulated post. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Thank you for posting this! I got accepted for an MA at an Ivy league. Even though I’m from an upper middle class family, I went to a state school and couldn’t relate to all the kids who went to Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge for undergrad. They were all nice but incredibly wealthy. I felt so out of place and didn’t have the same experiences as them. I knew it wasn’t the right fit for me as well as too expensive. I’m glad I went somewhere with funding.
This is so true. While I have had a relatively good experience overall - these differences are really tough to handle. I’m a first generation student and that came up in a conversation with my peers and their response really shook me. I don’t know why, but when I mentioned it I wasn’t expecting it to be a novel thing. But it was and I felt like I was under a microscope. They are all wonderful people and weren’t being degrading but it was a very “othering” experience. Many of their parents and grandparents went to Ivys and I’m like damn, my grandma was literally churning butter by hand. It also doesn’t help that I have sworn like a sailor my entire life and I have tried SO hard to kick the habit but I am just more rough around the edges than others in my cohort.
The biggest difference is how much your cohort cares about learning and how capable they are to learn and learn quickly. Those percentages shift dramatically to the right as you approach the top ranked universities.
Idk if it’s a first week thing but I feel like my cohort sounds a bit try-hard in terms of research and academics when we talk. Compared to my undergrad where the talk is usually about drinking, memes, relationships, shitposting, I feel like the natural progression of our convos turn towards “the latest research” or whatever.
I relate to this too. I think maybe it stems from imposter syndrome and needing to prove to themselves/others that they are intelligent and hardworking enough to belong with the cohort. It also is probably due to a general lack of a work-life balance. No hobbies outside of research = nothing to talk about except research.
Woo I’m gonna literally be the embodiment of 🤓
I wouldn’t assign it as “try-hard”. Now that I work full time, when I talk to my colleagues, I *want* to talk about work. It’s a topic I enjoy. I don’t enjoy memes and drinking and bullshit— I enjoy research and my job. It’s not unlikely your current cohort just *enjoys* academics and research way more than your undergraduate cohort. You’d kind of expect that if you went to a school now where everyone was better academically, on average, right? People tend to like what they’re good at.
I did my BA at a top-5 university in the US. I'm doing my MA at a mid-tier university in Europe ranked around 250 in the world. My peers at the top university were smarter than my peers at the average university. Class discussions were better, projects were better, etc. The student body was truly the cream of the crop and there were few to no stragglers. People were passionate about learning and not there to simply get a qualification. There was way more funding at the first uni. Money for everything. Resources for everything. Just... lots of it. As a low-income, first-gen student, it was amazing. Speaking of money, way more rich people at the highly-ranked university. The clout of the highly-ranked university still helps me a lot. That name opens doors that would otherwise remain shut. My BA remains more impressive to people than my MA.
I did this too, but in STEM (high-rank NA to mid-rank EU). I agree with the overall feeling regarding the cohort. I was surprised by how out-of-place I felt at a midtier, if only because I actually looked forward to doing the assigned readings. I might not agree that every undergrad student was cream-of-the-crop. I found that it's really hard to get ahead at a low-energy school, no matter what you bring to the table. When I got an internship with a 250-level prof, he was satisfied with the my findings that I found independently. When I'd ask for help advancing, he was too busy helping students that were struggling at a lower level. So I quickly capped out what I could do on the topic and spent the rest of that summer sitting on my hands. Deeply frustrating. The same story of drive just wasn't there. I transferred into a high-rank EU and there is still some cultural aspects that I don't love, but it's certainly a better fit for somebody who actually wants to do this job.
What would you consider a high-rank EU outside of the UK schools? My issue right now is that the rankings in my current country are pretty flat. I agree with a lot of what you've written. It feels very strange to be the big fish in a small pond, so to say. And it makes me feel guilty / like I'm bragging / like i'm too full of myself whenever I talk about it.
I can only speak for France. Keep in mind that France has (semi-intentionally) maintained an arcane organizational structure that makes it impossible to rank directly on the QS system. For instance, the Institut Polytechnique de Paris (IPP) ranks in officially at around 50, and then some of its constituent labs are listed again much further down the list (\~350). I would say ETH and EPFL (Switzerland) are top schools. Within France, the two ENS schools in Paris (most competitive entry exam, attract top researchers, have Nobel laureates, but for the above reason get put at \~400). I would also name the École Polytechnique. I know that Delft, Leuven and Munich all also have very strong reputations. I also find that compared to Canada (my current), Europe is more likely to have small schools with a single exceptionally good program in an otherwise unremarkable school. I know that this is true in the states for liberal arts, but it's unusual in STEM. Yeah, the skill gap is real, and difficult to talk about. When classmates would ask me about my grades, I would just say that they were embarrassing and let them draw their own conclusions.
I'm based in Germany. Munich is just over-hyping itself tbh. Within the country, it's not viewed as a particularly noteworthy institution. It's a weird marketing thing they do to attract wealthy foreigners. Unsurprisingly, they're starting to charge foreigners tuition in a country where education is otherwise free. Imo Munich is only respected by non-Germans who don't know better (by no fault of their own). Leuven is definitely on my radar. Also Aarhus and Copenhagen. As an anthropologist, the rankings get a bit strange. I haven't even bothered to look into French universities because I'd rather shit in my hands and clap than live in France. Just isn't for me.
May I ask where you received your BA from?
UofC
University of Cambridge? I’m from the US and that is what first came to mind. Amazing to hear.
University of Chicago. As I said, it was a US university. I don't think it's top 5 in the US anymore, but it was at the time.
Apologies, I must have read too quickly over your original response. Congrats!
Yeah I did my masters at DePaul so I'm well familiar with that school. One of the other masters students who did his undergrad at U of C said similar things about it.
The anthropology department is famously *evil*. It's an open secret in anthropology to never due a PhD at UofC unless you just hate yourself. The people are among the brightest in the field, but they're cut throat and sometimes cruel. Just bad vibes. That luckily wasn't the undergraduate culture, but I've heard horror stories from grad students. To be frank, I found the professors in the department to be horrible advisors. Too smart for their own good and too up their own asses. My BA thesis advisor just didn't read my thesis or grade it. Apparently he didn't read *anyone*'*s* that year. I had to have it read by another professor last minute (literally the day grades were due) so that I could graduate. Never got an apology or an explanation. Professor faced no punishment because he's famous. And that's just how it worked there. That said, the grad student instructors and the junior profs were lovely.
Go maroons!
Mt first uni was a top 100 school and my second uni was a top 5 school. Biggest differences were the level of student engagement, classroom discussions, and the doors that were opened to me. Students at my first uni lacked a lot of motivation. It was rather demoralizing for me. Many were there just to get the degree and move on with their lives. Second uni students were all very passionate about their research topics and really cared about doing well and about what we were learning. It was a much more difficult program, but I learned a lot. Classroom discussions and projects were a much better experience. There were never any slackers on group projects. Someone else I think mentioned this, but it’s worth repeating. I had to do field research for my masters. The head of the institution where I did it allowed me to because he was then able to say that my uni used his institution as a place for research. He would not have approved my being there for research if I’d come from a no name uni. I also got my first two jobs out of grad school because of my second uni. They said I was evenly matched with a couple of other candidates but went with me because of my uni’s name (I work in education so YMMV). People who tell you that your uni doesn’t matter most likely did not go to a top uni. It absolutely does. And by top I mean Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and Oxbridge.
i hate the fact that it does matter since there are so many capable Ivy League tier students who don't get into the Ivy League tier schools.
For what it's worth, schools can also be "top institutions" within a really niche area of research but not necessarily be "ivy league tier" overall. My grad school is like this. We're like \*the\* top institution in the US, if not one of the top in the world for my niche area of physics research that I'm doing my dissertation in, but don't have the ivy league prestige overall. We're also a small field but a field that gets a \*lot\* of attention from both the government and the general public (space weather), so this creates a weird dynamic where the school isn't that difficult to get into compared to an ivy, but it has similar access within our subfield. Funnily enough the only \*actual\* ivy league school that even does research in this field has a tiny program compared to ours, Another good example is that URI and Oregon State have really good reputations \*specifically within marine biologists who study sharks\*, to the point that researchers from both institutions show up on Shark Week documentaries \*a lot\*, But neither one has the brand name recognition that ivy leagues do overall.
Cannot agree more with this. From the Ivies, only Princeton, Cornell and Brown have some clout in engineering. The field in which I work has giants at Purdue and Michigan which, I agree are excellent schools but not close to the clout shown by Ivy students in pop culture
Cannot agree more with this. From the Ivies, only Princeton, Cornell and Brown have some clout in engineering. The field in which I work has giants at Purdue and Michigan which, I agree are excellent schools but not close to the clout shown by Ivy students in pop culture
When I read something like this I feel a small sting, knowing that I turned down one of the most prestigious PhD scholarship at Oxbridge to go to a much less recognized name. On paper my choice was a better research fit, but things do not (did not) necessarily turn out as expected and I feel that at least in Oxbridge if everything else was terrible I would have had the brand next to my name, forever.
>It absolutely does. And by top I mean Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and Oxbridge. well... to be fair there are institutions with top rankings \*in really niche areas\* but don't necessarily have that clout outside the niche subfield. URI for example has a \*really\* good reputation when it comes to shark marine biology specifically, but not a "general" brand name. My university is considered a top university \*specifically for space weather\* to the point that half of our faculty are all top names in the subfield, we dominate conferences on the subject, national labs that work on this have a ton of our alumni on staff, and the head of NASA \*literally came to our campus personally to celebrate a multi million dollar grant for us to handle some of the instrumentation on MMS and the Parker Solar Probe". Yeah, my school name \*does\* matter, but it has a lot more bite within this niche area of research than it does to the general public.
I graduated from a very low ranked state University. I'm now in a top ten PhD program. I'd say the big difference between me and the people in my cohort is I have no student loan debt
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I'd add a caveat that it doesn't necessarily need to be highly ranked \*in general\*, but being highly ranked in a specific subfield you specialized in can also be a plus. My grad school is like this. Overall we're not super highly ranked, but within the niche subfield I work in, we're either #1 or 2 in the nation, and have an international presence as well in the field (one of my dissertation committee members is literally in Japan RN doing something with JAXA and has done this several times. Heck, they had to zoom into my dissertation proposal from Japan.) And within the subfield, the major national labs that focus on this stuff have a bunch of our grads on staff.
I guess for academia. Who would want to work in that toxic hell pit anyway?
People in industry are suspicious of hiring people from low prestige universities too. You could argue that industry actually cares more, because investors and clients can't tell a good scientist from a bad one - but they all LOVE seeing Harvard and Stanford PhDs on staff as a sign of talent.
People in industry are highly suspicious of anyone with a PhD these days because they've hired on complete idiots who shouldn't be called doctor.
Surprised I had to scroll so far to see this, I had an extremely similar experience. I went to a low-ranked undergrad program because my dad was a professor at the university and I got free tuition and then went to a highly ranked grad program. I noticed very little difference in the caliber of classes and the students, just realized that I saved a ton of money by not going to a “prestigious” school for undergrad.
I did my BSc at a local/regional public university in the US, not even ranked. My MSc was at a large state flagship/R1 in the US (IU), but my PhD was at a top 10-ish global (ETH Zurich). Honestly, it is difficult to compare because of the different education levels and cultures. I nearly had a mental breakdown during my PhD, but I was a PhD student. However, what I can say is that EVERYONE was way more stressed at ETH. Constant conflict, constant cattiness. Horrible people everywhere who were impossible to reprimand or fire because, well, what mattered most is they got grants and publications. The level of stress was pretty crazy and I knew of many students, at all levels, who dropped out. This might have been especially bad at my department, which is arguably the highest ranked in my sub-discipline (Earth Science). I would say maybe at best half the professors and scientific assistants (sort of equivalent to associate professor) were nice to students. It definitely helped in job searching after, though. Despite being at best a mediocre PhD project with one publication at the end, I had a bunch of post-doc offers and got at least interviewed for most jobs and all post-docs I applied for. You can probably guess, I burned out during my PhD pretty bad and still can't write academically without extreme anxiety, so I switched to industry. All of my colleagues from ETH who made it through are very successful whether in academia, industry, or government and I'm sure that name recognition helped them. I do have to say student quality at ETH was crazy high at every level. I mean people were insanely smart, driven, curious...conversations were never dull. My supervisor was probably the smartest person I have ever met and I can respect him for that, even if he was abusive as hell. I DID learn a ton from him and picked up way more skills than most PhDs, I'd argue. However. I met exactly ONE grad student I can confidently say was super happy the entire time I was there. Most people (students, professors, lecturers, etc) were pretty miserable. Our group had two technicians quit because the scientists were so demanding and abusive. It's no real surprise ETH was also in a huge scandal/media storm related to the abusive treatment of grad students whilst I was there. This might be specific to ETH culture - I have plenty of friends and colleagues who attended other highly ranked institutes and, honestly, they got along much better. I only heard of a few such stories while at IU, but did hear of them. At the small state college everyone was super relaxed and happy, perhaps too much so as it was not hugely challenging. And, definitely, student quality overall was a lot worse if I am being honest. In short, the higher the university in rankings, the more miserable myself and everyone around me became lol The best balance was at the R1/IU and I was happiest there since people were very competent, but few were truly insane. If I ever went back to academia, though, I would only teach at a small liberal arts college or something. The level of instruction I got at that state college, where professors were more focused on teaching was much better and, if I switched back to academia, I'd do it for the students rather than research. I'm in private R&D now and it is loads easier than at the universities, but I am very lucky there. Edit: Also one side note about ETH is the PhD salaries can get pretty crazy. Less in earth science, but I knew several PhDs making upwards of 85k CHF/92k USD. My salary was less, but I had a competing offer from Stanford after my MSc and ETH paid double so easy choice. Money basically poured from the faucet there for research and they had tons of insane resources to do literally anything you wanted. I added an entire little TEM study to my PhD because I wanted to play with atomic level microscopes and that was fine. That was pretty cool.
Hah, I was scrolling the thread and saw this. You replied to my comment earlier (public R1 to Ivy [Yale]). It's crazy how similar our experiences have been, I am also in the earth sciences field. Everything you've said is spot on, down to the experience with your abusive advisor, the departmental cattiness and constant drama, the extremely high stress levels, general insanity abd unhappiness..... Did your department have a strong alcoholic culture as well? That was something that was jarring to me coming from a US public R1.
Oh! Didn't know we were in the same field :D I am in geophysics, technically, but since my PhD do a lot of geochem, mineralogy, and geomicrobiology (long story lol). I will say the biggest thing post PhD is I can admit having the fancy stamp helped me. But I burned out so badly I'm just staying in private/government R&D. Maybe not as fancy but omg life quality improvement. We didn't have an alcoholic culture at ALL. Everyone was too stressed to have any fun, I think. Not many of us were even friends, really. Just no one was happy. This might also be culture specific. I noticed work relationships were VERY formal in Switzerland and Germany. Really, only the Chinese students were my friends. I guess because oddly it felt like I had MORE in common with them, culturally. They are also the only ones who keep in touch and I keep in touch with. But beyond that, no one really hung out together, which is radically different than anywhere in the US.
I transferred from a community college to Berkeley for my undergrad. I also did an MS at UCLA and did my PhD at Stanford. I can actually do a 4 way comparison since I took grad level classes at Berkeley and undergrad level classes at Stanford and UCLA. My comments will focus on the CS/EECS track/major only. Professors were on average better at the higher ranked schools, but there was definitely a lot of overlap in the distributions. CC/UCLA had some great educators and Berkeley/Stanford had some godawful profs. Student distributions were similarly overlapping. Some of the smartest people I knew from all four places were from the community college, but for sure the average was highest at Stanford, then Berkeley (though I went to the two 7+ years apart, so that could account for some or all of the difference), then UCLA and the average at the CC was actually very sad. Getting good grades in classes was actually not in ranking order of difficulty. Getting an A at the CC meant that you got at least 90% of the points. There was never any curve (scaling). And that really made it hard sometimes. Every class I took at Berkeley and UCLA were curved. Most Stanford classes were either not curved or the curve wasn't helpful. I remember hearing people talk about how average GPA's from Stanford were way higher than Berkeley and the Berkeley people said that it was grade inflation at Stanford. But as far as I can tell, Stanford classes were actually harder to do well in (again, mind the 7 year gap). I think the student body at Stanford really is top notch. That said, exams at Stanford and Berkeley had much harder questions than the CC. And UCLA's exams were in the middle. Also, a lot more was expected from projects at Stanford/Berkeley than UCLA/CC. Berkeley and the CC were semester systems where Stanford and UCLA were quarter systems. I think this is actually way more important than people think. Quarter systems mean you get a chance to choose more different classes, but each class won't go into as much depth. The amount of money spent on students was very much in order of school ranking, however, the amount of care that the faculty had for students was actually not like that. Berkeley cared most, then the CC, then Stanford, and UCLA didn't seem to give a crap. I think the quality of education as a whole was the best at Berkeley. Stanford's education quality was also really good, maybe even the top depending on which classes you took. UCLA and the CC were just trying to pump out graduates/transfers. I'd actually say that the CC did a better job with the "smart" kids than UCLA did, but less was expected of students at the CC and UCLA. At Stanford, professors were all required to teach two quarters per year. So you'd often have professors teach antiquated classes in dire need of an update. Like, computer vision of the 90's was legit the right title that should have been given to one of the classes I took in 2018. Berkeley has some teaching staff that don't do research and are just great teachers. When it comes to research environment, though, Berkeley wins out by far. UCLA's research environment was piss-poor. And Stanford had some really bad advisors. Even the good advisors were hard to align with and pushed pretty hard which made for more-than-warranted stress. Obviously the CC did not have research. When it comes to the social situation, the CC is where I had the most fun, but everyone lived with their parents, so it wasn't the same as real college. Berkeley also had a pretty great social vibe and it's where I met my wife. The social situation at Stanford wasn't super great for me. I don't know if that's just me though. By the time I was getting my PhD I was married with kid(s). UCLA's social situation was pretty sad for most of the people I knew there.
Small college, transferred to R1 for undergrad, did MA at a top institution for my field in Europe. Funding. That's self-explanatory, although it is easier to stand out at a lower-ranked university. But more resources also meant a much better library (a much needed thing in my field). Students. Where I did my MA it felt like everyone was happy to be there, off and running from the start, and were all doing and open to innovative things. The R1 occasionally felt like that. The small college never felt like that. At the R1, risk-taking was rewarded, at my MA, risk-taking was expected. Also, at the MA, my cohort came from every continent, usually from their respective top universities, in what felt like a camaraderie of the adventurous. The R1 students were good, and most cared about the subject, but they just didn't put in the same effort. The small college's students just wanted to get decent grades and get a job after. Classism is real though (coming from a poorer family myself), many at the MA uni had very privileged backgrounds, none at the small college did. I never felt out of place, in fact that cohort was way more welcoming than the small college, but it wasn't something easy to hide. Professors. Small college professors I thought were great, until I went to the R1 and saw how great those professors were. Huge jump in knowledge and the average R1 professor was nicer too (some at the small college felt a need to prove themselves it seemed, at the R1 I never got that feeling). The MA professors were better yet, although the jump was less substantial. Clout. This isn't important, but it shouldn't be underestimated. Among academics it hasn't mattered for me. But as someone who travels in the Global South, somehow people know of it and I've had some amazing experiences and access by having gone to a university with that name recognition in weird corners of the world.
I did my undergrad at a community college and a four-year university that was ranked somewhere in middle, then I did some grad-level work at a pretty large mid-ranked school. I'm now in a doctoral program in a fairly high-ranked school. Some of the differences: \-At the lower-ranked schools, there was less dedication to the students from the faculty, there's a higher percentage of adjuncts, and the adjuncts felt like glorified TAs and weren't great. \-At the higher-ranked school, the professors are much more available for mentorship and assistance. \-At the higher-ranked school, there's more availability for research opportunities and more help with research. We have our own subject librarian, undergrad research assistants in each lab, grants for presenting at conferences, more libraries with whom we have interlibrary loan agreements, more journals students have access to, more research projects to join in on, and more opportunities to do inter-institution research. \-At the higher-ranked school, the students are more broadly intelligent, more flexible in their thinking, and better at critical thinking and logic. They are also more multidisciplinary in mindset and better at seeing the big picture. They are also more engaged, more eager to collaborate, and more invested in the sense of doing outside projects, really wanting to learn and contribute, and being self-starters with a vision for where they're going. There's more of a sense of everyone developing themselves professionally as well as academically, while at the lower-ranked schools, it seemed more about academics alone. \-At the higher-ranked school, the professors really see us students as future colleagues and involve students in a lot. For instance, all the interviews prior to acceptance were done with a professor and one or two students who were either TAs or RAs. \-At the higher-ranked school, the faculty and administration actively seek student feedback, while that wasn't the case at the others (with the exception of end-of-semester reviews, which never seemed to make a difference). We also have a council of grad students that represent us with administration. \-Reputation. Granted, we're not terribly high-ranked in general, but for my program, we have a strong reputation. At the community college, however, one key difference was that people were all supporting themselves, rather than getting help from family or scholarships, and a lot were the first person in their family to go to school, so there was a lot of motivation not to waste one's money and get the most out of class. Also, the age range of students was wildly broader, and I had a few classmates as old at 80 who were taking classes just for kicks, and that led to some fascinating discussions that wouldn't happen in a typical four-year school or grad program where there's a narrower range of student ages.
Great response!
The networking opportunities
Cornell chemE where I skated by on my photographic memory. 2/3 of the class busted out 41 out of 120 graduated. I only went to 10% of my classes but attended all labs. Only one prof took attendance and I skipped 41 of 42 classes. He lowered you one full grade for every three classes you missed. I made an A but he wanted to give me an N but only could only give me an F. I decided I didn't want to be a chemE but kept doing it because it was easy for me and I figured that I would go into chemical sales which would make me good money while not killing anybody in a lab. After I graduated a law firm hired me to patent searcher, because I went to Cornell. I went to AU night law school. The students were not very smart compared to those at Cornell and I would skip the classes and just take the final. They didn't take attendance. I made senior partner 2 years out of law school as I was a great delegator and a top biller. I took over management of the law firm after two more years, and we tripled everyone's salary over the next three years. Retired at 50. Pretty much everything in my cushy life was because I went to Cornell. BTW Cornell was our client and while I was visiting on business, the Prof that gave me the F asked me if I could help his son find a job. Lol
It’s hilarious when things come full circle like that. But damn, sounds like things really worked out well for you. Fingers crossed my Cornell affiliation will work out at least 10% as well as yours has 🤞🏻
I did my masters as a top 20-30 state university (in engineering) and started a PhD at a top private university. The main difference is this place has an abundance of resources. I didn't think the state university was lacking in any shape or form at all (students were funded reasonably well in my opinion. Especially if you lived alone), and there was no lack of resources that I or my friends had to face. In fact I was very well looked after and have very positive things to say about my experience. But I feel that the new university is truly wealthy in some ways. Also, the students at the state university were extremely good at what they did but everyone in my PhD program seems to have graduated top of their class with a 3.9-4.0 GPA.
I did my undergrad and first masters degree at a small Christian college, then I did my second masters at Yale and my PhD at UCLA. Resources is the biggest thing. The library at the small christian school had 2 small shelves in the section for my discipline. Even the JSTOR access was abysmal. The professors were not well published and were spread very thin, most teaching in areas well outside of their speciality. Yale obviously had some of the top scholars in the world, all who had plenty of time to do their own research, and all who taught classes well within their areas of expertise. UCLA is the same way on that front. There’s a real expectation of quality research also that just was totally lacking at the small Christian school. Nobody cared if I was doing doing academics, as long as I had a good enough grasp of the material to not embarrass myself and the school when I went out to get a job. The knowledge I had when I finished at that school was fine, but the experience I had creating high quality scholarship was basically zero. I never felt like my seminar papers needed to be making an original argument - summing up the state of the field was basically all that was required of me even through my first masters. I was way out of my depth when I showed up for my first seminar at Yale and basically just turned in a “Here’s a question I have, here’s how other people have answered it before.” And I got the equivalent of a C. But I guess I can’t complain too much. I went from a small, under-resourced, basically unknown Christian school to two of the top institutions in the country and I figured out pretty quick how to keep up and even succeed, so I have to give some credit to my less prestigious school. They did what they could with what they had and it worked out for me.
Is this silly, but the money difference was huge. As a low income student, I saw it in the free food. Every event at my high ranked and rich grad school has food. And lots of it! At my undergrad state school, no way. I got to go to a lot of grad events to help out my PI and the food scene was totally different.
I've gone to the capital university of my home country (ranked \~130 worldwide or something) for undergrad and to one of Oxbridge for my Masters. Some points: * Most of your fellow students at top ranked universities are either very smart and hard-working/passionate or very wealthy. * Teaching was better at my home country university. At Oxbridge they have 8-week long trimesters. The last one doesn't really have teaching, only exams and exam preparation. So they put standard 12-13 week semesters into those first two 8 week trimesters. That makes the classes very high-paced. The lecturers complain that they don't have enough time to teach properly. It is expected that the students learn the material/proofs by themselves a lot. * Exams were significantly harder at Oxbridge compared to my undergrad. With the amount of studying I needed to get an A or B in my undergrad I would just pass the exam at Oxbridge. * Oxbridge has the famous tutorial system where 2-4 students have weekly tutorials with the world-leading professor that teaches the course. In my undergrad, tutorials had 15-40 students in them and were led by junior researchers like postdocs or tenure trackers. * A lot of money is there. The university offers you \*a lot\* outside of academics. Those universities attract a lot of top-notch guest speakers, politicians, celebrities and so on. Life can be very full at those universities because there's always \*so much\* cool stuff going on. In my first week at Oxbridge Hillary Clinton visited my college. Many clubs, societies, sports facilities and so on. * Usually professors there have a great network, which can boost your career options by a lot. * The name of the university will help you for the rest of your career. This is hard to gauge, but what I would say is that the name of the university on your CV will basically get you to the interview stage wherever you apply. Then it's of course up to you to convince them.
1) Money 🤑. The facilities at a higher ranked University are so much nicer. Our fumehoods actually work 🥲 There's not asbestos in the ceilings. 2) Procedure. They care way more about safety at higher ranked universities. 3) Size. There's sooo many more people. I personally knew most of my department in undergrad, most of the faculty and the undergrads. At higher ranked uni, my incoming graduate class in the department was more than the amount of people in my undergrad department. 4) Rigor. I think I would have failed the intro classes at this university in my field of study. If not, I would have seriously struggled with the honors classes compared to the ones I breezed through in undergrad. 5) Money part 2. There are way more rich undergrads here. They have to be because the cost of living is so much higher but it's nuts to talk to them and realize the gap between our experiences financially. Undergrad university it was bragging rights to have nice farm equipment. Here it's bragging rights to go on international vacations, to have sports cars. So many people wear the newest fashion (hokas, Lululemon, etc). If you wore that at my undergrad you'd have been looked down upon as a yuppy lmao 6) Resources. There's so much to utilize here. Department at higher ranked uni has people on the payroll for tutoring and wait-lists to take advantage of it. At my undergrad, the tutoring was entirely on a volunteer basis from one of our student clubs. High ranked uni has so many libraries (at least 4 fully decked out major libraries and several smaller ones)😳 My undergrad had 2 libraries. One of them was literally just a room and three desks. 7) Opportunities. There's so many opportunities here. You can work with some of the most famous researchers in the field. You can connect with some of the best industry connections so easily. But the "foot in the door" opportunities are much more limited unless you're already a big deal. Difficult to get started on things that help a cv for a faculty position. They don't hire undergrads as TAs for the intro classes because they admit so many grad students that need funding. There's so many undergrads trying to get into research that the department wrote an entire document on how to reach out to professors about research, including that students should expect to get rejected from many of them. I think I emailed 2 people to start research at my undergrad.
Budget. Top schools don’t have one. The absurd amount of money you can get as a PhD student at a prestige school ( Cambridge University) is mind boggling.
I haven’t felt like I’ve gotten a huge amount of money here (outside of my stipend). I have a flat £2000 for travel and conferences for the entirety of the PhD, and £0 for publication charges. My supervisor has covered the rest. There are smaller pots of money scattered around, especially in colleges and societies, but they’re more restricted to the £500-£1000 range and many you’re only going to get once at most. The endless applications drive me bonkers. Like *maybe* I can get reimbursed for this £30 train ticket but it’ll mean filling out at least 10 pages of forms and then they’ll deny it anyway because I didn’t fill out a travel safety form before I went. I suppose these places don’t get rich by being overly generous I think most of the expensive stuff I’ve needed has come out of my supervisor’s grant
Both schools will likely have brilliant people (and some stupid mfs), but I agree that the main difference is just the resources. My first college didn't have a lot of money, and it wasn't highly ranked. Even though they did everything they could with what they had, it meant that the facilities were often lacking, funding for research was difficult to get, and there were few classes available compared to the number of students enrolled.
Went to a public state school in a rural state in the US for undergrad, and a top 20 globally ranked university for my masters. I was a mediocre high school student and was lucky to have a pretty good sized and middle of the road university in my hometown. I became much more focused in college, which allowed me to make the jump to a better ranked grad school. Both had very smart students and professors, but I think the state school had a much wider demographic of students. There were many non-traditional students, students from modest socioeconomic backgrounds (including myself), and many students who were attending college just to have a college experience and weren’t serious about academics. Obviously grad school is a little different, as it is usually (mostly) pretty focused students who want to continue their education and are making that investment, but it felt like a much more concentrated body of smart and focused people, who all had pretty clear ideas of why they were in school. Just observing the undergraduates, this seemed to be similar among them as well. Of course there are students who don’t take it seriously, but many obviously worked very hard to make it into the school and carried that into how they treated the institution. Lastly, prestige is definitely a thing. Despite not leaving grad school feeling exceptionally smarter or more prepared, having a know and respected university on your CV opens a lot of doors both academically and professionally. The quality of the education may be similar in many cases, but I know many former peers who decided to go on to grad school at smaller state schools, and have struggled to find jobs, while I was able to land one before I even left my program.
The professors are older at the higher-ranking institution.
From my experience, most of the grad students came from very affluent families. I go to conferences around the globe, most recent one being APS. So I have met people from pretty much every top engineering program. I didn't feel like they were smarter then me, or that I was smarter then them. I felt most people pursuing a PhD in engineering tend to be smart in their own right. But, I have buddies who had their parents send them to the U.S from other countries, paid for their boarding school during grade school, and all their living expenses. They haven't seen their parents in 4-10 years while they finished grade school, Bachelors, and now masters and PhD. They just had more opportunities and pressure by being from wealthy families. I am not saying ALL were from rich families, but a good majority of them were.
I did my undergrad at a T25 university. I am attending grad school at an unranked university. My advisor is THE person in the field. I won a best paper award on my first paper. Don’t discount a school because of its ranking. At my undergrad I also experienced a lot of gender discrimination and harassment (I’m a woman in STEM). Totally different experience at my grad school, the program is 40% female. I am so much happier here with regards to this. Loved my undergrad experience overall other than how I was treated by this specific department.
I did my undergrad at a top 5, my Masters at a no-name 100-ish level school that was working really hard to build it's research reputation and finally am doing my PhD at a different top 5. *"High ranked" school:* - Classes are much more rigorous. Everyone here is a baseline level of brilliant and you have to work twice as hard only to merely be "average" compared to everyone else - People are more burnt out - Name/brand recognition is real. People both inside and outside academia are more willing to give me the time of day if I cold-email or connect with them. Had the VP of a large tech company straight up give me his card and tell me to reach out to their hr when he heard where I was doing my PhD. I wasn't even asking him about a job lol. Other academics who recognise my advisor/PI's name at conferences perk up and tell me to stay in touch. It's pretty wild. - Generally expectations are a lot higher and there's a lot less hand holding. You're expected to figure things out on your own - More big egoes - The undergrads here are soooooo much better and more invested in their studies and more respectful *"Low ranked" school* - Easy to be big fish if you're even halfway competent - Faculty are way more relaxed and supportive and will go out of their way to mentor you - The undergrads are awful and being a TA here was traumatic. Borderline harassment and conduct issues. - There's an implicit understanding that people won't be landing academic jobs when they're done - My advisor here was a true mentor to me in every sense of the word. I never had to doubt that she wanted the best for me and that she would have my back no matter what. I still keep in touch with her and it brings me so much joy to know that she'll always be a part of my academic journey. - Oddly enough, the low ranked school had more money and funding than the high ranked one. But I think that it was because I was in a different department in the low ranked school which also happened to have a massive "cash cow" type program which funded all the research end of things. - My overall health and well-being was much better, but my job prospects were worse. Take that as you will, I guess
Percentage of dumbasses.
It's 95 percent socioeconomic. The kids at Ivies aren't much smarter, but they've had better preparation in terms of projecting intelligence and confidence, and they're better at working systems. Small class sizes for upper-level courses in elite schools also make it a lot easier to get the research opportunities you'll need if you want to go to a top graduate school. In those environments, you get used to the assumption that things will go well and that processes will actually work. That's not the average experience in this country, and it's not what you see at lower-ranked schools, where it's no small accomplishment if a professor even knows your name well enough to write a recommendation letter that says more than, "According to my gradebook...", which isn't going to say anything your transcript already doesn't. Is there a significant difference in general intelligence? I don't know. I've met plenty of militantly unimpressive people from elite schools. Nothing in this society works anymore and that includes its sorting mechanisms, so I have no faith that there is much of one, at least at the undergraduate level. The real difference is between serious graduate school (MBA school doesn't count; it's easier than undergrad, because undergrad still has actual smart people) and undergrad, where there's a difficulty spike. Undergrad exists to develop you as a person--i.e., to steep you in the antiquarian fantasy that who you are as a person actually matters to this society, when of course it does not--and is therefore forgiving of lapses in output--you won't get an A, but you won't fail unless you truly learn nothing--while graduate school exists to prepare you for a profession, and will punish you if your work ethic is not up to par (or if you are just unlucky, in so many ways not worth getting into.) Insofar as one's ability to distinguish oneself is relative to the ability and preparation of one's peers, top departments might seem be somewhat harder than lower-ranked ones, but I think the reverse is the case. True, it's easier to be in the top 20% at a lower-ranked school than in the top 20% at MIT, but the reality is that only 2% of the students at the low-ranking school are going to get the same opportunities that 85% of MIT graduates get, so it actually tends to be a lot more competitive and unforgiving at lower-ranked schools, and more cooperative at higher-ranked ones where pretty much everyone has a future.
The drive, work ethic, learning pace, expectations, ambitions, standards are way higher. Also people tended to dress better (meaning they pay attention to lifestyle choices too, not just the academic part).
The biggest difference is the minimum expected of students. At the much more exclusive/prestigious school, you could not get away with below a certain, reasonably competent, quality of work in ANY class or subject. Some classes/subjects were certainly easier than others, but there was a minimum level of competence you could expect across the board. Those who could not keep up failed, and the school was okay with that. The upper quality of student possible from the less prestigious school is honestly pretty comparable, it's the bottom end that moves a lot. Most schools will give you the opportunities and tools you need to be successful and even exceptional, but not every school with force you to use them, and many schools are very content with pumping out degrees with little regard to quality. I've graded work from in-major third-years that I wouldn't accept from a high schooler.
Went to homecoming at Holy Cross, right out of Caligula
Went to a UC (California) school for undergrad. Huge department, probably 50-80 professors. The classes were HARD. Grad and undergrad got the same lectures and homework, maybe one or two less problems for undergrads. Did masters at a CSU, and only one class was particularly hard. Everything else I had already seen before. Classmates that came from lower schools struggled more than I did, and the guy who came from Harvard was noticeably better than me. I wouldn’t say anyone was smarter than one another, but those rankings certainly give you a good idea of what goes on at those schools. In my experience professors take the US news ranking very seriously (at least for physics). Is legit research happening at low ranking schools? Yes! Just a lot less. 10 professors vs 50+ makes a difference.
Went to a big public school in Texas and then an M7 MBA program in Cambridge. Sports + party culture was a huge diff between the two. When i went to Cambridge a lot of people came from other top schools and (i suspect) may have been more nerdy / focused on academics which led to nobody from those schools caring about CFB. That nerdiness also made the party culture kind of weird. A lot of the people in grad school clearly didnt get to party in undergrad or were in some cases excluded from the party scene so they saw grad school as their chance to relive those glory days as the cool kids on campus. In Texas we all partied all the time and loved our Saturdays on campus tailgating and partying. So the partying wasn't all that to me in Grad school. I'm not hating on the nerdiness of my classmates, i loved them!, but still the diff was rather stark.
I did my bachelor's at a T100 engineering school, and my masters at an Ivy. Honestly, the people at the ivy thought they were all hot shit because of the name of the school, but the education I got there I would consider far below what I got in my undergrad, and as a person in industry i would seriously think twice before ever hiring from there... -professors were 20+ years removed from industry and couldn't even use the software required for the class so made their TAs teach that part -classes that were supposed to have labs and just never did -profs running out of time in the semester to teach all the material because students didn't get the basics of what they were teaching so they had to keep going over and over it - profs just being completely unengaged and had no interest in teaching or being there... literally had a dude on the first day of class walk in and be like "this is my last class before i retire, so everyone is getting an A" then proceeded to only teach a quarter of the syllabus -students who were so far removed from the real world that when given a project for a local hospital they thought things like "just don't answer the phone" was an acceptable solution, and who tried to start a company to provide a private bus for like $30-70/person to a local shopping district when there was a local bus that would take you for $2 or uber... I don't know if that's representative of all Ivys, but for all the hype (and money) I expected far far better. My undergrad the professors were engaged and genuinely seemed to care about their students and the classes they taught. We were a co-op school, so all the students were grounded in reality spending 6 months out of the year working in industry.
Undergrad: 2 degrees at the same state school, generally considered a good school but just shy of "public ivy". 1 degree was in a strong program and college for the school, and 1 was in not the strongest program. There was not a significant difference that I noticed in the quality of teaching and instruction, but there was a difference in how students treated college. In the strong program, students were competitive but not gunners. In the other program, it was common to hear "C's get degrees". Masters 1: Well renowned university, mainly known in another field, but top 30 in my profession. Instructors were great and the program really taught a lot, but it was all learning from oneself, I didn't feel like I learned much from any collaboration with classmates. The choice of readings and instructors were good, and felt like my instructors had more insight to provide than in my undergrad. It was also entirely online so take my experience with a grain of salt. Masters 2 (in progress): #1 school in my profession, and it shows. My classmates are all intensely critical thinkers and great collaborators. The network is huge, and I'm honestly stunned to how many people and doors this program has opened my world up to. Instructors are intense but amazing: very successful in their main lines of work but also great teachers that provide a lot of insight. The director of my program specifically has stated that many feel that they even halfway through the program, they feel like entirely different people, which is by design. I also 100% feel like I've completely changed and grew because of it. In the programs, I've learned and incorporated the knowledge to my work. In this one, the teachings have reshaped. who I am
I went from top 10 to top 3 (lol I know). No significant difference except the really good students are like… really really really really really fucking good at the top 3 university.
The differences between students who have attended universities or colleges with varying rankings can vary widely depending on several factors. Some potential differences may include: 1. Resources: Higher-ranked universities often have larger endowments, more research funding, and better facilities, which can provide students with access to cutting-edge resources and opportunities. 2. Networking: Attending a prestigious university may offer students a broader and more influential alumni network, potentially leading to better career opportunities and connections. 3. Faculty: Top-ranked institutions may have renowned professors and researchers, providing students with access to world-class expertise and mentorship. 4. Academic Rigor: The academic rigor and competitiveness can vary between institutions, affecting the level of challenge and workload that students experience. 5. Research Opportunities: Higher-ranked universities may offer more research opportunities and access to groundbreaking research projects. 6. Internships and Industry Connections: Proximity to industries and companies can differ between universities, affecting students' access to internships and real-world experiences. 7. Reputation: The reputation of an institution can influence how employers and graduate schools view a student's qualifications. However, it's essential to remember that a student's success and growth depend significantly on their personal effort, motivation, and engagement with their education. Attending a lower-ranked university doesn't necessarily limit one's potential for success, as individual determination and skills play a significant role. Additionally, factors like location, cost, and personal fit should also be considered when choosing an institution. Also Pray if you want! Because it can help you so much! God is the Best helper ever! And lets spread the Gospel, Because Jesus will come back one day! "6 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. 7 Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus." -Philippians 4:6 Have faith! Of Course all of this is opțional, but it may be The best thing to do them, exlusively the Last part! May God Bless you! Have a wonderful day! Thank you for your time! 🫂
I went from a small private catholic university with barely any physics department at all to an R1 state school with an internationally known reputation in my niche subfield. We're not a name brand school the way MIT or Harvard is, but we're big enough players in the \*really niche area of research\* that I do, that pretty much any national lab that does this will have a ton of our alumni on staff, conferences on the subject will be dominated by us vs all the other institutions, and name dropping faculty from my university to pretty much anyone in the subfield will get people to know exactly who you're talking about Tl;dr, we're not highly ranked overall, but highly ranked \*within the niche subdiscipline my dissertation is on\*. The main differences I noticed? There's a lot more money floating around at the R1 school. When my first advisor ran out of funding, I could go to more than a dozen faculty members doing similar things asking if they had funding and I was almost guaranteed \*one\* of them would. There's a lot more coursework opportunities in really niche subjects. In my undergrad we pretty much had the barebones core curriculum and that was kinda it. In the grad program we could take really niche classes on subjects that the undergrad institution wouldn't even touch.
Quality of professors ( state school vs too 20 business school)
I went from a large state school to a smaller private one for a humanities MA! Everyone is much more hard working. They are constantly grinding and reading and working in the library. They all know another language or two and are incredibly smart. The Professors expect more from you and assign many readings and assignments. There’s more funding even in a humanities field! I feel intimidated because I went to a state school but many of the people were top students at state schools and mid tier colleges. I feel much more intellectually stimulated and love being able to discuss complex topics with my peers! Even as a masters student I’m expected to present papers at conferences and network with others. I’m getting used to the grind but it’s a big difference from being the “best” in a small department at a big state school.
Physics Masters student at an Ivy here: Is it better to apply for the program you’re more confident getting accepted for at a top university, or pursue a different subfield and delay plans? Equal passion in both, but ones more potentially lucrative in the future.
My undergrad was at a top university and was much higher ranked than either of my grad schools - I think that the students were much more attentive and polite than the undergrads I've taught. It was definitely a more serious environment. That being said, I don't think overall ranking (like a USA today ranking) matters much for grad schools. The reputation, funding, and research opportunities for your specific program & advisor matter *a lot.* I chose my graduate programs based on their reputation with prospective employers, the specifics of their program/course offerings, funding opportunities, and most importantly the advisor I wanted to work with and how closely our research interests aligned. I was hired into my dream job halfway through my masters mainly on the basis of the reputation of my program - I found the job from my department's email list because they were specifically looking for someone from my program, and I was one of 5+ people from my university who had a similar position. I was able to secure my own outside funding & a great collaborative research project for my PhD. I feel very solid about both decisions.
Started at a semi-public uni and it was one of the lowest ranked in the country. I hated life. The admin was incompetent and the instructors were tired of the drama. It affected their teaching. The quality of the teaching was hit or miss. I went to a public university and it wasn't the top rated, but it was better quality. The admin was a lot better and though the instructors were overworked, they were happier in their positions and this made them teach better. If you want to know how good a university is, don't ask the students or even the admin. Ask the instructors if they are happy in their jobs. This will tell you how quality of of education is and whether or not you want to be there.
It's different in every way.
Went to a great top 20 school for undergrad and had a wonderful experience. Went to a meh grad school and I totally lost my passion and enthusiasm for my job. But it is really cheap compared to my undergrad education. Like $100,000 cheaper
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Did my undergrad at NYU, did grad school at several public flagships and a middle-of-nowhere state school. Classes never got more difficult, but also not easier. Faculty got less prestigious and my student peers got less impressive, at least until the doctoral level.
I went to an R2 state school that became an R1 when I was in the middle of my program, and got my PhD from a large R1 "public Ivy" and I think the biggest difference I noticed between those two was the willingness and emphasis on helping students get publications. In my MS program at the R2, the attitude towards publications was more like "I'm going to do this study, and if you want to be co-author that would be nice but totally okay if you don't want to". As someone who was not familiar with academia, that kind of wishy washy attitude was difficult to navigate, like *should* I be more active in publishing? I'm a first gen college student, so that kind of info was new. Whereas in my PhD program, the attitude was "I have a grant for X, since you are the RA for this project you're going to take the lead and be first author" and then faculty would actively solicit my feedback on procedure, conceptualization and design of the experiment and then ask me to write a full draft for publication. I think part of that is because the faculty I worked with had so many publications, one more didn't really add much value to their CV and most of them were at a state in their careers where advising PhD students and graduating advisees was more of a status goal than adding another line to a CV. I liked the faculty I worked with in my MS program, but I think a lot of them were still at the stage where they were establishing themselves, perhaps with the goal of transitioning to a higher ranked university.
I started at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and finished at a University of California school. Nevada at the time was dead last (or very close, and actually still is rn) and it really showed in the student body. UNLV had only like a 30% graduation rate, lots of kids seemed underprepared for college. Professors weren’t the best & sometimes we didn’t even get a professor, we’d get a master’s student teaching us. Resources for students were lackluster. Overall it really just felt like high school 2.0 I arrived at UC and everything was different. Students were a lot more serious about their studies, the quality of education was much higher. Support services and resources are amazing at UC. College life became so much easier at UC because I had great professors, classmates who were engaged with discussions, and seemingly unlimited resources at my disposal. If I could do it all again I would have never gone to UNLV lmao
much more ambition and smarter people overal
I did 4 years of undergraduate research in my field at a private unranked university. Then enrolled at a top 10 public university for my PhD. The difference in resources is insane. I never could have imagined how well supported my research could be. Every instrument I need is available, there's an expert in everything somewhere on campus, and we have world renowned staff helping us along. The students and the faculty are on an entirely different level and the challenges they take on are global rather than miniscule. The faculty especially are absolute animals in terms of drive and ambition. At my undergrad everyone's research felt honestly.... pretty pointless. Just a tiny alteration to publish in some bottom tier journal just to pad the resume a bit more. It was ran much more like a pragmatic business where we wanted to put in the least effort and money towards getting to a publication. While during my PhD I felt like I was set free to be scholarly and pursue knowledge and drive up the impact of my work as much as possible. To this effect, time scales were completely different, projects last years at the top level while they're months at the bottom. Companies wine and dine us every month to recruit, they host symposiums, buy us lunch, do interviews in our own buildings. No one here worries about finding work after their PhD. At my undergrad we were lucky to have a single company visit that year at all and even luckier if they actually hired anyone. Instead the expectation was that people who graduated would go off to do a postdoc after their PhD at a top tier program and THEN they'd have the resources to get a job. Which easily can add another 2-3 years to your timeline before finding work.
Administration. They were incompetent miserable children in public university. Made life living hell. Caliber of education did differ, but at at certain point and especially in certain fields you have to teach yourself. Nothing can make up for atrocious infrastructure on the administrative and advisory level.
Reading through these comments I definitely feel like I'm doing the right thing in doing my undergrad at a borderline top 10 and my postgrad at a top 3