Very little of the value I got out of my university degree came from the exams or the textbooks. All of that I could have done on my own. Much of the value of the lectures could have been replicated by lecture videos. The fancy name on my resume is nice for the first few years (especially graduating in the middle of the 2009 recession) and then stops mattering.
But the smaller classes, the ones with actual back and forth with actually interested professors? The offhand comments that illustrate how experts actually approach thinking about their fields? The opportunities to work in actual labs even though anyone sane knew no undergrad was going to offer much more than a useful pair of hands in the 3-4 months they could devote to a project? The insights into how science and academia and industry actually work and what that meant for what kind of career I wanted? Those I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere else.
The single biggest selling point of my undergrad institution was the unparalleled access to faculty and the resources available to do research internships with them. Ironically, I didn‘t take advantage of any of that, at all, and made my way through my BS as if I were at OP’s hypothetical institution. FWIW, I still ended up at my graduate school of choice, so maybe the research opportunities weren’t so valuable after all.
Very little of the value I got out of my university degree came from the exams or the textbooks. All of that I could have done on my own. Much of the value of the lectures could have been replicated by lecture videos. The fancy name on my resume is nice for the first few years (especially graduating in the middle of the 2009 recession) and then stops mattering.
But the smaller classes, the ones with actual back and forth with actually interested professors? The offhand comments that illustrate how experts actually approach thinking about their fields? The opportunities to work in actual labs even though anyone sane knew no undergrad was going to offer much more than a useful pair of hands in the 3-4 months they could devote to a project? The insights into how science and academia and industry actually work and what that meant for what kind of career I wanted? Those I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere else.
The single biggest selling point of my undergrad institution was the unparalleled access to faculty and the resources available to do research internships with them. Ironically, I didn‘t take advantage of any of that, at all, and made my way through my BS as if I were at OP’s hypothetical institution. FWIW, I still ended up at my graduate school of choice, so maybe the research opportunities weren’t so valuable after all.