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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am the PP who commented on writing.  Here is the thing at a big research university (Michigan, Penn State, etc):  You will not know the research professors.  You might get to know the grad students; they will be the ones who you interact with.

the undergrad population will not benefit from the fancy labs; at best, they will get a tour, but faculty are not going to risk the expensive equipment on undergrads.

So, you are taught by grad students more than faculty, the faculty view teaching as an annoyance that keeps them away from their research.

At the LAC, you will have the graduate of the major research universities (PhD's), but they are paid to teach.  And they are the ones that teach the class.  The people that assist them in research are often undergrads.  [/quote]
[b]You seem confused about teaching labs vs. research labs.[/b] The quality of teaching labs (i.e. labs designed to allow undergrads to do standard, educational experiments) is a function of the school's endowment and annual fundraising. Rich schools, universities or SLACs will have nice ones, less well off schools will have less nice ones. There is some relationship between the quality of education and how nice the teaching labs are, but it's not as direct as you might think.

Research labs (i.e. where faculty conduct their own research) are a different thing. Their quality is a function of the wealth of the school (i.e. what they can provide faculty in lab start up funds) and the prestige of the faculty (i.e. what they can get in research grants). Undergrad students at any school will only benefit from these labs if they seek a research position. But if they do, they will get an opportunity to contribute to scientific research (they will almost assuredly not be doing completely independent research). This type of research experience is typically a pre-requisite to admission to any decent STEM PhD program and increasingly to medical school as well.

At any research university (private, public, etc), I have not heard of advanced STEM courses within the major being taught by graduate students. Usually, only the introductory courses are taught by grad students...and, often, there are separate tracks for majors vs students fulfilling distribution or professional school requirements. The first-year courses for the majors, even at large research universities, are often taught by faculty.[/quote]

+100[/quote]

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