“If you want happiness, go to a tech class at a local private college. If you want pressure, go to a lab at Johns Hopkins, which needs $300 million yearly from the NIH for maintenance and recruiting figures who can then raise more money from them.”

22 comments

  1. I recently came across this quote, and found it intriguing.

    What do you all think?

  2. I chose a small school over a large university for the intimate feel of the classes and campus. I felt like a student and member of the community rather than the number I likely would have felt like in the UC system. So I will say choose small over large when possible strictly from that perspective.

    That said, I’m not sure how that quote impacts students. It seems like it would before applicable to professors, admins, and researchers.

  3. If you want happiness, go to the college that best fits you

    If that’s a local private college, great. If that’s John Hopkins, also great

    Imo, sounds like who ever said this quote doesn’t like John Hopkins very much. Personally, as a liberal arts student, I would be unhappy in any tech class no matter what college I was at

  4. I think it says more about the author’s personal experiences at John Hopkins than anything else.

  5. You can find happiness, or pressure, at any university. Some people go to small local private colleges and are miserable, and some people thrive at enormous universities with obscene endowments. Different strokes for different folks. Sounds like whomever said this just had a crappy time at JHU, and that’s fine. Other people love it. I went to a fairly large university and it was just OK. Others loved it, some dropped out because they couldn’t handle it, and that’s all personal factors. Personally, I would’ve lost my mind at a tiny local college/a small liberal arts school. It’s not my personality. Others, on the other hand, flourish there.

  6. Don’t buy it.

    Different people fit in better or worse at different sized schools and classes. Person A could thrive at a massive school while person B would thrive at a small liberal arts school.

    Also keep in mind that the size of the university as a whole isn’t always a factor on class size. I was in a niche degree program at one of the largest universities in the country. General education courses had hundreds of students in a class, my degree specific courses had on average 15-30 students per course.

    Pressure also comes down to specific degree programs. Don’t like pressure? General Ed studies at any school. Lots of pressure? Enter into a highly competitive degree at a school known for said degree program IE: engineering at MIT.

  7. I was quite happy at my large university. It gets s good amount of funding already. The quote seems more about faculty and administration experience than the student one.

  8. It’s a fascinating dichotomy. I went to a small school and did very good research. I was published three times before leaving undergrad. I had a lot of one on one time with my advisor and the post doc and the lab tech in our lab. It was a hell of a good experience and in another life I would have gone to grad school and been a shoe in.

    After graduation I went to a lab at a big and prestigious department as a lab tech then lab manager. The push for papers and grants was much more intense. The capabilities we had were massively larger.

    What was interesting is that you could do good research in both environments. The papers I was on in undergrad were solid. The papers I was on after undergrad were solid. But the scope of the ones after undergrad were just bigger. I had a whole BSL2 lab to set up and run. We could work with infectious agents and human samples. The third lab I worked in also had a BSL2 lab and we worked hand in glove with a hospital to get human tumor samples within hours of surgery. We had the capability to do mass RNA sequencing.

    All three labs were wonderful environments. But there is a palpable difference in grant writing between a small college lab and the two bigger more competitive labs.

    So there is some truth to the statement but lab work is still a very cordial environment and pretty low pressure even at the big competitive labs. You just have more of a laser focus amongst the PIs for grant writing and getting data. But in the bigger labs you have tools that make gathering that data easier.

  10. I grew up in really small towns. My parents were both teachers, so most of my education I was known as their kid by all my teachers long before I got to their classroom. I was a smart kid and got good grades, but… I always wondered how much of that was my own ability and how much of it was just being a “big fish in a small pond.”

    When I went off to college, I wanted to be a faceless number in the system. I wanted to be a small fish in a huge pond, and I wanted to succeed based solely on my ability, not because of who I was or who my parents were. I wanted the challenge of a Big University.

    Not everybody wants the same things out of college. But I would NOT have wanted a small private school where everyone knows everyone.

  11. I say go to the college that you like and makes you happy. I was accepted to a few colleges and ended up going to the “less prestigious” smaller school. My entire school had less than 5000 students. My smallest class had 7 students in it. It was amazing. Our programs had great teachers and were really great courses. We had awesome such for our computer programs and a massively expensive machine for our Chem program that some Ivy League schools don’t have.

    So glad I chose that school.

  12. ~~The author of that quote is a moron.~~

    That’s an ignorant and unintelligent quote.

  13. Does private America even give a shit about where you went to school anymore? Or how well you did there? I’d figure if you had a degree in something in demand they wouldn’t give a crap and hire your ass.

  14. I went to a larger school because I liked the big campus atmosphere and because it offered more amenities and opportunities in general. I absolutely loved my time in college and could t see myself going to a smaller school.

  15. I think this quote applies to such an infinitesimally small number of Americans that it’s irrelevant what this one person feels.

  16. Dafuq kinda saying is that? At the end of the day you can either do a job or not. I know people who went to some high ranking colleges and are dumb as bricks

  17. (anecdotally) I chose to get a STEM degree at a small liberal arts school, because I appreciated the small classes and easy access to professors. I also didn’t like that large schools often actively cut struggling students from certain STEM programs instead of trying to help them succeed, as a cost cutting measure.

    My wife went to the big state school because she was confident that she could succeed without the easy access to faculty, and she appreciated the greater resources available to motivated students that come with a large university.

    We both feel that our educations worked well for us, and that neither of us would have thrived in the other’s educational environment.

  18. If someone told me that, I’d tell them to go blow it out their ass.

  19. Sounds like something that would be said by a person who hasn’t had to look for a job since 1986

  21. You do an internship at Johns Hopkins then use that to launch a career for your happiness elsewhere.

  22. Sounds like someone has a pretty narrow mind of what higher education is.

    ​

    Small liberal arts college? small technical institute? (WPI/ RPI / etc) Large private university(Duke?) Large Public university? (U of M) Public universities that focus on research (Cal / UCSF) Public universities that focus on education (Cal State Long Beach) Community colleges with good transfer programs, Small public college (California Maritime Academy), National service academies

    really

    ​

    any / all of these will have happiness, sadness, and pressure

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