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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]With regards to research, you want to look at that different from how much profs care about teaching undergrads in the classroom.   When you go to a school you want to ask what percentage of STEM students do research, whether they publish papers and do so in the summer.  MIT + Caltech + Hopkins  + UW do great with undergrad research.   So does Harvey Mudd Princeton has an undergrad thesis program that gets students involved.  Harvard, UCSB, Yale and some others I am less sure of.  But the thing to be clear on is that the "culture" of the classroom and of research are different.  And having good grad students would actually be good for undergrad research -- my grad students are the primary supervisors of the undergrads since I couldn't possibly supervise the 10 or more undergrads currently working in my group with any regularity.  I meet with these students once every couple months but the grad students make sure they know what they are doing in the lab.

Also, at some schools doing research in different areas is harder or easier than others.  If your kid is interested in medicine, research at MIT or UCSB will be different because there is no med school, than a place where students work at the med school like Penn (whose med school is right on campus).    Another question is what to do over the summer.  MIT has a fabulous summer research program.  Others have nothing and resulting ad hoc approaches if summer research is a goal.[/quote]

I'm the PP whose question you were answering and this is really helpful.  I'd figured out parts of this (importance of access to med school and that JHU/MIT/Harvey Mudd were excellent places to go for undergrad research), but certainly not all of it (grad students as mentors, institutional investments in summer programs).  Funny thing is I inadvertently went to a grad-oriented school for undergrad (which is probably why I ended up an academic rather than a lawyer or an MBA) and an undergrad-oriented school for my PhD.  While it worked out fine for me, I'm now aware of the issue in a way I wasn't when I did my own applications.

Thanks for taking the time to respond in such detail!

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