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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DC is at a lesser Ivy (one of Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, Columbia) and literally can't get a professor to answer an email. Sent one an email a month ago, resent and the professor never responded.  Just had the same experience this week. It's like a black hole at this school. I know because the kid came to us "what am I doing wrong?" I had to say I have no idea. The questions were totally reasonable things that the professors could have answered with a line. And these were not world-renowned people who have 100 independent demands on their time but assistant professors. 
[/quote]

I’m a professor and can say that assistant professors at those schools are incredibly busy trying to get tenure based on their research output. They are maybe more busy and stressed than the senior faculty. Teaching and answering student questions is at best a low priority if not an outright distraction.

I was advised as an assistant professor to spend as little time as possible on teaching.[/quote]

That's true, which makes me think OP's kid does not go to Dartmouth, which is very undergrad focused. The downside to some of these big name research universities is that an email from a freshman is literally the last thing on a professor's mind, whether they are assistant, associate, or full professor.

But regardless of the school, office hours are where it's at. You can ask questions and get to know the professor there. But a lot of 18 year olds are scared of human contact and prefer to communicate on a screen. Their loss. Email is not a useful way to engage, especially at universities where every professor has hundreds of students every semester while they still need to conduct research and prepare for each class.  [/quote]

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