Reed College Top Questions

Academics are intense. At the same time, they are what you make of them. Do not go to Reed if you do not want to push yourself to learn, and if you are not enthused by reading, by writing long papers, and by discussing things in class. Class participation is important, plus more fun, and the professors really engage with their students. I was startled by the fact that all of the professors expect you to call them by their first names. But the thing is, you're not a baby, and you will never be babied. You are spending the money, so make the most of it, immerse yourself in your classes and relate to your professors with respect but humanity. they are not scary intellectual robots! I love it like this, at the end of the year we end up having dinner at professor's houses. I plan to email my advisor over my break, things like that make it worthwhile to me.

Academics are TOUGH. In high school I was a smart student; AP, IB, national honors, etc. However, there have been classes at Reed where I studied as much as I could (5-6 hours a day for one class, every day) and steal feared not passing. However, there are a lot of support networks to help you out. There are almost always student tutors in the DoJo building to help you through tough problem sets. Profs are incredibly helpful. Plus, the difficulty ends up building community where groups of students frequently work together on nightly homework. I think anyone ends up liking what they spend the most time on because it sort of becomes a part of them. At Reed, this is your major. People frequently have a lot of pride in their major and the amount of work students in their department accomplish.

Not only do all my professors know me by name (ha! that question surprised me initially until I remembered that some students go to big, impersonal universities where the profs are too busy to care about your learning), they know my personality, they know my quirks, they know when I've studied my ass off and put effort into a project. The students who do well in their classes study ALL the time. It is notable that the social scene at Reed revolves around the library. It is true, through and through. The students are not competitive with one another. We don't get report cards (though you can ask your advisor to see your grades) and the emphasis is not on the stamp-of-approval marking your learning but on the fact that there is always more to know.

There probably isn't another place in the world that puts so much care into their undergraduate program.

Reed is probably best known for its academics. We are treated as adults and not merely students. The work load can be rather intimidating and the level of inspection is quite high. If you're not ready to work hard, then you're not ready to be at Reed. Historically, Reed grades are not given to students. They can be acquired, but many students choose not to see them. The pursuit of knowledge is the end, not the grade. In anycase, if you're doing you're best what's the difference what your grades are?

Reedies start their college education with Reed's famous Humanities 110: Intro to Greece and Rome course. The course is based on the classical foundations of Western society and is lectured by many professors and absorbed through student-group discussion in Reed's hallmark conference-style class. My prof/conference leader, Dr. Pancho Savery, is one of very few (if any other) black American profs at Reed. His lecture for the course, "Does Your Blonde Hair Have Black Roots?" is a stirring and somewhat controversial look at Ancient Egypt and its contributions to Greek, Roman, and contemporary Western societies. His lecture, ignored by the administration and faculty but ovated by the student body for as long as he has been giving it, hits on the biggest beauty or flaw (depending on opinion) of Reed's academic philosophy. That is, Reed education is old-fashioned. By old-fashioned, I mean conservative, impractical, Ivory Tower programs that strive for the perfection of "learning for the sake of knowledge" in the pure, armchair, dead white guy use of the phrase. The college persists in turning every Reed student into a scholar of his or her archaic discipline (classics, Latin, Chinese, physics, religion...) and produces a singularly competent academician, but rarely ever (and even more rarely without graduate school) someone capable of having a lovable, practical career doing anything but sitting at a big desk and reading or writing essays. My archaic discipline, when I stumbled in to find no Education, no Child Development, no Environmental Studies, and no International Relations, was Chinese Language and Literature. This meant a 3-year career (after the freshie first year) of intense language, history, anthropology, religion, and literature studies which I loved with a fierce passion that can only come of doing something entirely selfish and short-sighted. My department was irresistibly small - 4 during my sophomore year - with 3 fantastically great professors (Hyong Rhew, Korean; Alexei Ditter, European-American; and Jing Jiang, Chinese) with a great love and fascination for the classes they taught. My favorite class at Reed was an independent study, with Prof. Rhew and one other fellow Chinese major, of Tang poetry, in which I read, studied, memorized and wrote classical Tang poetry in Chinese. The end of my Reed career came when I realized I could no more make a lucrative and satisfying career with a BA in Chinese literature in this increasingly unstable society than I could eating dirt and living rent-free. My solution was to do something I considered much more practical and rewarding and to transfer schools, change majors, and enter the much more affordable California state school system by being an Environmental Resources Engineer at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. This, I thought, would help me personally (even if I didn't make any money, I could learn to make food out of dirt) and help the communities I care about at the same time. (As a water engineering specialist, I would be able to help not only preserve the water at my California home of Harbin Hot Springs, but also potentially improve the water condition of one or several communities in China and other parts of Asia as well.) So go to Reed only once prepared for a classical, conservative, and expensive education with amazing professors, probably to fuel only your own interests and probably get you a lot of grant money to go to grad school and do something really practical.

Academics at Reed are hard to describe. I am a religion major. I study with some of the top intellectuals in my discipline. All of them know my name and know a lot about me. Almost more than you would want your professors to know. They know who I date, they know how I really feel about those people. They know my strengths and my weaknesses and whether I am, at any given moment, strong, weak, or falling apart. They are sensitive to these concerns. Competition is mostly personal. If you are a science major, of course you're competitive because maybe you want to be a doctor. If you're a religion major or hum or something like this, you mostly compete with yourself and your demons to try and beat your own status quo. You will be overloaded with work. You will have standards set for you which are completely impossible to meet. You will (hopefully) strive to meet them anyway. Sometimes you will fall apart because you just can't. This is good. It's part of the learning process. Reed will drive you crazy.

The level of deep intellectual thought required to do well here.

Hard. Period. Professors know your name, so when you don't do well, they know who you are and they try to help you. Class participation is a must, and in the non-sciences many of the classes are student run. Not TA run, run by you. You lead the class discussion and the professor will help guide the conversation. As a science major these are the most frustrating classes: I found it hard to trust someone my age or younger to enlighten me as to the true meaning of Marx. Biochemistry is hard. Very hard. Its amazingly interesting and allows you to do lots of cool things. You end your senior year with a senior thesis. Which follows the same design of a Ph.D. dissertation. You spend 1 year writing about your subject. As a scientist, you spend a year doing research of your own design. I attempted to isolate large dense-core vesicles from the abdominal ganglion whole cell homogenate of the sea hair Aplysia, I was hoping that I may be able to discover proteins that are responsible for tethering neurotransmitter releasing vesicles to the synapse in preparation for release. Which has not been shown before (basically I'm looking for a protein that we all know exists, but no one has found). My lab partner discovered that upon stimulation of the abdominal ganglion, mRNA is actively transported within neuritis, a finding that calls into question a research lab at Yale's false findings. Furthermore, her finding implies that there may be translational machinery present in neurites. Which has never been shown. In another lab, a student showed the effects of developmental growth factors on spider embryos, using microinjections and microscopy he made some very nifty videos. In the cellular biology lab, a student disproved a paper from the the Journal of Cellular Biology (a very big journal), in which he found an instance of downstream regulation of an estrogen activated gene vital to cancer research. In the plant labs, a student used fungus to remove the toxic effects of motor oil on the environment. Another student built her very own bioreactor. Unfortunately I'm a little out of touch with the populatio biology students, but I believe one found a very interesting distrobution of newts or some such within the Reed Canyon. The point is that your research experience at Reed cannot be rivaled. Even now, I'm writing this as a form of procrastination from finishing my 60 page Thesis on the large dense-core vesicles. Next week I will then defend my thesis in front of 4 of my professors. They will ask me any question they like, about any subject they feel I should have an understanding of. And you know what? Because of the rigorous teaching at Reed, I'm excited for this oral.

Academics at Reed is very rigorous. The classes are usually small and are held conference-style, so much of the debate and learning comes from fellow students. The faculty are also very supportive and are usually available for any student should they need help. Slackers however aren't going to have a good time here. You are expected to do your work and your reading if you want to pass. The structure of each individual class/conference depends on the professor teaching it, and there isn't some uniform syllabus for all professors to adhere to.