[speaker001:] um Lee what advice do you have for someone choosing a college
[speaker002:] well uh as a former uh professor in a university and having been through college uh and graduate school myself I guess my own um advice would be to first try to assess the needs of the the kid um some kids do very well in large universities and other kids do very well in junior colleges and other kids do very well in residential college environments um and I think it really depends upon the individual the safest bet for most people who want uh uh a good quality experience is a private college where they're gonna get an opportunity to have more personal contact and uh where they're going to be forced by the circumstances to learn more than might be the case in a big university
[speaker001:] uh-huh did you go to a private college for your undergraduate
[speaker002:] no I went to a big university I went um I went to Pitt as an undergraduate and I looked at small colleges and frankly um I think I had this sense that it would have been more difficult at small colleges and I think it would would have been definitely I mean I I graduated Phi Beta Kappa summa cum laude and went on to do a PhD and I think that uh had I gone to a small college I might have learned a lot more but I don't think my grades would have been nearly as good
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] I think you can get away with more in a big uh a big university uh what what kind of experience have you had in this regard
[speaker001:] well um I went to a private university although it was a large private university it was Bringham Young University in Utah and that's uh has about twenty seven thousand students
[speaker002:] uh-huh that's big yeah
[speaker001:] so it's it's pretty big but I enjoyed my experience there one thing I was thinking about this topic is um I would try and get a lot of input from from other students who had gone to the college in the particular program and see how they liked it for example I made well I had a bad experience in graduate school and I think I would never have gone to the place had I have went and visited the place and talked to some of the students who were currently in the program for example I um started graduate school um
[speaker002:] oh yeah
[speaker001:] in well I don't know if I should give specific names but uh it was
[speaker002:] well that's all right go ahead
[speaker001:] um it was just in a physics program back east and um well it happened to be in Pittsburgh it was the University it was Carnegie Melon University and
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] the teaching assistantship situation just was not very good it turned out that um there were six new teaching assistants from the US who went we all quit after our first year of graduate school um
[speaker002:] no kidding
[speaker001:] it turned out that the undergraduates had thrown a big fit the several years before that they weren't learning from the foreign TAs and they had six new students from foreign TAs TAs also but the foreign TAs could not teach the classes and so there was a huge teaching burden on us the US um
[speaker002:] um-hum right
[speaker001:] TAs and so it's we were really bogged down and
[speaker002:] yeah what I think is one of the problems with with a kid going to a large university generally and this happens at Stanford at Cal out here I I think that the the residential college experience is generally the best for most kids some kids are particularly pardon me
[speaker001:] you mean community college type or you mean by residential college do you mean
[speaker002:] well I mean uh let me let me give you an example of a college that would fit that description um I would say that uh some of the best colleges in the country are small residential colleges like Swarthmore College like um Amherst Wesleyan Williams College
[speaker001:] oh I see oh
[speaker002:] um those are places that that in academia are generally regarded as the best places to get liberal arts educations on the other hand you can go to a big university and do very well and some big universities I don't know whether Bringham Young is like this but some have a small college feel to them you don't get a lot of foreign TAs you I mean in other words that the people who teach really know how to teach
[speaker001:] oh yeah
[speaker002:] and I think that's what important for a lot of kids uh in my case I went through uh between sixty eight and seventy two in college and it was just this big uh grade game for me and I learned some things and I just luckily stumbled in the right area um but I was years out of graduate school I had worked in industry before I ever came back and wanted to use my training as a scientist to um you know to get anything done and as matter of fact I'm I'm working on a book and a theory uh which has its foundations ultimately in theoretical physics and I'd never would have imagined myself wanting to do something like that I had such a negative