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[quote=Anonymous]"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."

While this is a reasonable general statement, you have to judge each case for it's own merits.

In my experience with big research universities, there is a wide variety of undergraduate doing research.

At my undergraduate institution, that just made the cut for R1, my undergraduate advisor worked with every BS student.  At his retirement party he told me that despite every undergraduate needing to write a 50 or so page "thesis" only two of his 50+ undergraduates published their work.

At my graduate school, that was a medium sized R1, all BS students needed to write a thesis.  Some of these students were published twice and ended up at Harvard level grad schools and others scraped together 20 pages and got jobs teaching HS chemistry at private schools.  Likewise, some of them worked with only grad students and some worked with National Academy members.  I would say about 1/3 of both groups published once but almost always as first authors.

At the competitive R1 I am affiliated with now, again, every BS student has to write something like a thesis (some write capstone papers from more than one lab).  Unlike the old days when only the best students started working in the lab before their senior year, now most everyone starts in the lab as freshmen.  While they have lots more experiments done by the time they graduate, I think the 1/3 publishing rate is about correct.  I guess there are more that are middle authors but often those papers don't come out until long after they are in grad school.[/quote]

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