I wonder how much attending different universities matters if we focus solely on the quality of research mentorship available to an EA-oriented student who hopes to reduce AI risks.
I plan to study dentistry at a medical university because I believe having earn-to-give as a backup option is important. However, my ultimate goal is to become an AI safety researcher. I therefore plan to collaborate with computer science professors at a nearby university and may spend around 40% of my time in college on AI-related research.
Suppose Medical University A is located near University C, which has a top 5 computer science department in Taiwan and around 60 professors working in CS-related fields. Medical University B, meanwhile, is near University D, which ranks around the top 10 and has approximately 35 professors in relevant fields.
University C is clearly stronger overall and would probably give me a better chance of finding a lab doing a more EA-aligned research topic. This gives Medical University A an advantage, but A is also more difficult to enter.
For example, suppose I were admitted to Medical University B through the first entrance exam. Would it be worthwhile to spend around three months preparing for another exam in order to enter Medical University A for better research mentorship? (assuming that I would get in medical university A on the second exam and that the two medical universities are otherwise similar?)
Even if you are uncertain, your 1-minute gut intuition about this topic would already be very helpful. Thank you very much for your time.
Hey! Wanna reiterate something I said in the other question you asked.
You need to talk to someone in real life with richer knowledge about the universities you’re considering and ideally someone’s who has gone down the same path.
Rankings are immensely contextual. In some contexts, top 5 versus top 10 has no meaning. In others, it’s a big jump. In rare cases (though I think these are exaggerated), it can be better to get mentorship from the lower ranked place.
I doubt the internet is going to give you good advice on both how Taiwan’s CS and medical schools work. Most answers you get will reflect people’s intuitions about US or UK or Western schools. All of this affects whether the extra 3 months are “worth it” in your situation.
One thing I’d check is how open the universities are to mentoring people outside their university. My hunch is that this it rare or requires many hoops to jump through. That factor could limit your choices to just one place
Also maybe the community of junior researchers (PhD students, bachelors etc) is better at one place than the other. And the better school is which one has the bigger and more open community.
Prestige is decent as a quick pass. But for these finer-grained tradeoffs, the details take over in importance. Overall, the ranking you see may reflect something completely different than what you’re optimizing for.