let me be the first person to offer condolences on your decision to go to Tufts. I’m sorry you couldn’t get in anywhere better. In any case, we don’t have any school loyalty, because we are all collectively at a safety school. Oh well–it did teach me a lot about suffering–something that is a life lesson people at happier schools don’t always learn.

xoxo,

elaine

Personally, I’d rather have the 10th best violinist in the world if he’s more friendly and well-balanced then the best. Again, Williams is probably better than almost any other school at getting well-rounded people, but even administrators will say the goal is the well-rounded class. This is an unfortunate trend in America which is discussed best in David Brooks’ excellent Atlantic Monthly article, The Organization Kid.

It should also be noted that many times when at a university and you have a graduate student as your interface to the class (theoretically there is a professor for the course, but you never see them), it is very highly likely that English is not the grad student’s first or even second language.
Especially at a place as high a caliber as Harvard, it will draw brilliant minds from all over the world to study under the best grad program for their particular field (notice I say grad program – I am in agreement with probably all other Williams grads that Harvard undergrad is hard to get into and then easy once there, which is agreed upon by my friends that went there).
Just because someone is brilliant in their field – say chemistry – it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a firm grasp on a language – English in this case. Having sat in on many of my dad’s classes in his early years of his grad school time (at Virginia Tech, not Harvard) – it is incredibly frustrating to be dealing with material that may or may not be difficult in and of itself, and then you can’t even understand the person that is supposed to be relaying the information to you.

This is in no way a slam, derogatory remark, or even xenophobic – it is just a fact of the process that if you have a professor teaching you, they were hired in some part by their ability to communicate their ideas to you.
Whereas the grad student was brought in simply because there was a need that had to be met and they were at the right place at the time. Their communication skills aren’t necessarily all that high on the list of things that they look for out of a small pool of applicants.
Culturally it is fantastic to be around a wide and varied group of people – but in terms of actually learning, it can make an already frustrating experience that much harder.
In my time at Williams, I only had this happen once with a guest lecturer on astrophysics. My notes on that class were fairly amusing.
(I should also note that I too barely have a grasp on the English language and would make an awful prof… and I was born in America)

And then class size is another key factor. One of the greatest parts of my Williams experience was near one on one time with professors that actually cared (even if I didn’t at the time).
This is rare if not nonexistent at large universities.
They have shown that the optimal classroom size before it becomes fairly useless is around 17 (although to be fair, I think that is more applicable to kids than it is college).
Granted, there are large classes at Williams for certain, but they are all 100/101 level classes (Chem 101, Bio 101, Astro 100/101, Psych 101, all huge classes).

With a Harvard education, you can go anywhere in the world and drop that you went there and people will immediately have an opinion of you having heard of it… mind you, perhaps not a good opinion of you.
Perhaps it is annoying when people actually correct you when you say you went to Williams and they put up their hand and say, “I think you mean Williams and Mary” and you want to say “oh yes, of course, how silly of me to forget where I went to school – obviously you would know better that I went to some bastardized creation in your head, thanks!”
Note that “Roger Williams” is also a popular one to mistake it for.