When Shara Pilch chose to attend Williams College four years ago, she was looking for a school with outstanding faculty and resources but also one that would nurture her. "I didn't want to be anonymous," she says. A lover of painting and wilderness and a writer of admittedly bad poetry, Shara figured she would major in either chemistry or French. She never expected that three years down the road she'd be pontificating on reduced local ring theory, presenting her independent research to a national meeting of mathematicians at Rhode Island's MathFest and having her findings published in the journal Proceedings.

Chalk up her success to professors looking to inspire and bond with undergraduates. When Shara walked into her first math class freshman year, the professor, who had memorized his students' pictures, greeted her with a warm "Hi, Shara." Sophomore year, she took what would be her hardest class in college — linear algebra — but the professor, superenergetic Susan Loepp, 33, inspired Shara's confidence and convinced her that talented women in math need to strut their stuff. So Shara decided to major in math (becoming one of 42 math majors in her class, more than at either Princeton or Stanford), and she spent her junior summer on campus studying commutative ring theory with Loepp as part of small, a program funded by the National Science Foundation that grants stipends to students and faculty to do independent math research. "The most valuable thing in my education here has been how close I am with my professors," says Shara.

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She is not alone. For a college student, there is nothing so invigorating, so potentially life changing as working closely with accomplished professors. Liberal-arts colleges, with smaller classes and a greater emphasis on teaching than research, have always fostered tight bonds between students and faculty. Erin Suida, a senior at Amherst College in Massachusetts, can't think of a single one of her professors who doesn't know her name and something about her personally. Some small colleges, like Dordt in Iowa and Sarah Lawrence in New York, even introduce students to professors in the spring before freshman year.

America's 150 large research universities, unlike their liberal-arts brethren, have not been known for their faculty-student interaction. Too often in the past, students drawn to a school for its world-class scholars have ended up needing binoculars just to see their professors up close.

Two years ago, the Boyer Commission, a group of educators convened by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, issued a scathing review of undergraduate education at research universities. The report accused universities of hiring big-name professors to enhance university prestige and attract federal money, while in reality staffing their classrooms with "badly trained or even untrained teaching assistants." The result: "students paying the tuition get, in all too many cases, less than their money's worth." The commission called for a "radical reconstruction" of undergraduate education: large introductory lecture courses run by teaching assistants should be replaced by small seminars taught by professors; undergraduates should be given opportunities to do their own research; graduate students should be trained to be effective teachers; all students should be assigned faculty mentors.

The report struck a nerve, and even its authors have been surprised by how many of its recommendations have taken hold. "There has been a sea change," says the commission's chair, Shirley Strum Kenny. "Universities are beginning to understand that if you're going to grow scientists and scholars, you've got to start with the undergraduates."

Many are starting with freshmen, students traditionally relegated to large lecture halls. The University of Michigan now offers 150 freshman seminars taught by senior faculty on topics like "Insanity and Humanity." The University of Missouri—Columbia has initiated Freshman Interest Groups, in which freshmen are placed in groups of 25 that take the same three classes together, have a weekly seminar with a faculty mentor and meet regularly with professors outside class. Cornell is building freshman residence halls with seminar rooms so that first-year students can both live and learn together.

Indeed, in schools across the country — from research universities to liberal-arts colleges — experiences like Shara's that were once reserved for master's candidates are increasingly available to undergraduates. In the past few years, institutions large and small have been offering smaller classes, more innovative teaching and greater opportunities to work with talented researchers.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, for instance, has divided its large science courses into 48-to-60-student "studio workshops" that combine both lecture and lab. Each spring the University of Florida awards 175 undergraduates $2,500 scholarships to work with professors on research projects over the summer and throughout the year. At Warburg College in Iowa, four students will join a professor in Beijing this fall to complete research on the economic development of women in China.

Of course, small colleges like Warburg will never have the resources or diversity of opportunities that large research universities can provide. Yet more and more of them are finding ways to offer their students cutting-edge research experiences. St. Norbert College in Wisconsin recently expanded its Research Fellows program, which pairs professors with students on collaborative research projects, to include freshmen and sophomores. Engineering students at Messiah College in Pennsylvania will work in West Africa this year installing solar-power pumps for drinking water at a school for the disabled. This past summer the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at Hope College in Michigan brought together teams of faculty and students to work on such projects as building "smart" Lego robots and studying nuclear reactions using radioactive particle beams.

Meanwhile, large universities, which have typically been rich in resources but poor when it comes to undergraduate involvement, are exploring new ways to engage undergrads in research. Last spring the State University of New York at Stony Brook held a fair, complete with $7,000 in prize money, to showcase more than 200 undergraduate projects, including a car built and designed entirely by students and a student thesis detailing changes in the makeup of the AIDS virus. At the same time, Carnegie Mellon University brought together teams of engineering, robotics and computer-science students to show off their mini mobile robots in what will now be the annual Mobot Slalom Race.

Universities are also rethinking how they teach their teachers. Graduate students in Penn State's English department, who teach 30% of the undergraduate sections, go through an in-depth orientation before entering the classroom to teach and throughout the year receive regular training and mentoring. At the University of Virginia, a Teaching Resource Center provides junior faculty and teaching assistants with training and comprehensive evaluations, including videotaped critiques.

Good teaching and small classes are also the norm in most university honors programs. High achievers accepted to the programs are often rewarded with special research opportunities and more interaction with faculty, providing a small-school feel inside the big-school setting. Ohio State University even has special dorms for its honors students.

Not all institutions have concentrated on improving undergraduate teaching though, so prospective students should still look carefully at the departments that interest them at various colleges. Many schools continue to rely on large lecture courses and classes taught by untrained graduate students and part-time faculty, often for economic reasons.

Even élite institutions can shortchange undergraduates. Jason Kalisman, an economics major at Harvard, describes his first two years there as "intimidating" and "annoying." Even though he took classes with such distinguished faculty members as African-American-studies guru Cornel West, philosopher Hilary Putnam and Ronald Reagan economic adviser Martin Feldstein, so did several hundred other students. His real teachers were graduate students, some of whom were too busy with their own work to care about Kalisman's. "The mentality here is that you have to go out and get it," says Kalisman, who after two years finally "got it" and is now writing an honors thesis. "You can go through Harvard without ever having direct interaction with a professor." Students who do so are missing perhaps the most valuable part of a college education. At Williams, Shara's small summer taught her how good she was at math but also that math research is not in her future. "How can you think that hard so many hours a day? It would drive me crazy," she says. So now she is teaching math to high schoolers in rural Mississippi. "I benefited so much from my relationships with my teachers at Williams," says Shara, "I want to give something back."

How To Be Heard: Don't Be Shy

When you're looking at colleges, here are some questions to ask:

• What percentage of students do hands-on research with faculty?

• Are there small seminars, especially for freshmen, that anyone can get into?

• Are there small learning communities or other special programs that encourage collaborative work?

• Do professors take students to dinner? Do students spend time with their professors outside of class?

• nAre there opportunities for students to do summer research with professors? Is there funding for students to create their own projects?

• If graduate students teach, what kind of training do they receive?

Source: TIME/The Princeton Review's The Best College For You 2001