{"id":501,"date":"2004-04-18T18:59:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-19T01:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/does-size-matter\/"},"modified":"2004-04-18T18:59:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-19T01:59:00","slug":"does-size-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2004\/04\/18\/does-size-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Does size matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m back from my brief visit to <a href=\"http:\/\/physics.swarthmore.edu\/index.htm\">Swarthmore<\/a>.  Renowned as a liberal-arts college, Swarthmore (like many similar schools) has been placing increased emphasis on having science faculty that do research, with impressive success.  We talked a little about the pros and cons of being a science major at a small school vs. a big school.  At a big research university you definitely get the feeling of being at the center of a lot of action, with great work being done all around you.  More pragmatically, you can take advanced courses in special topics that won&#8217;t generally be offered at a smaller place, and there will (or should) be grad students and postdocs lurking around to ask for advice.  But your contact with professors will be nothing like it is at a liberal-arts school, and your place in the totem pole is correspondingly lower.  I think the happy truth is that there&#8217;s no right answer; different students will respond differently to the different environments.  (This is part of a larger secret that we don&#8217;t like to tell prospective students when we are recruiting them:  namely, that the success of their education depends much more on them than it does on what school they go to.)<\/p>\n<p><em>Update:<\/em>  Victoria Swisher of the Swarthmore student newspaper wrote a nice <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sccs.swarthmore.edu\/org\/daily\/archive\/spring_2004\/20040419.html#n1\">article<\/a> about the talk I gave.<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m back from my brief visit to Swarthmore. Renowned as a liberal-arts college, Swarthmore (like many similar schools) has been placing increased emphasis on having science faculty that do research, with impressive success. We talked a little about the pros and cons of being a science major at a small school vs. a big school. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}