How does undergraduate teaching compare at UMD and Harvard?

For the priorities you list, Harvard is more likely to provide the stronger and more consistently personal undergraduate teaching experience. UMD has excellent faculty and serious academic opportunities, but its scale as a large public research university makes the experience more dependent on major, course level, and program.

At Harvard, introductory courses can still be large, particularly in economics, computer science, and the sciences. However, those courses commonly include smaller discussion sections led by teaching fellows, and students can move into professor-led seminars and tutorials relatively early. Faculty office hours and a strong culture of undergraduate advising create multiple routes to interaction beyond the lecture hall.

At UMD College Park, teaching assistants often handle discussion sections, labs, and much of the day-to-day instructional contact. Professors remain accessible, especially for students who attend office hours, join research groups, or take advanced courses, but direct access is less automatic in high-demand majors such as computer science, business, engineering, and biology.

UMD can narrow that gap through the Honors College, College Park Scholars, living-learning programs, research, and smaller upper-level classes. A student in one of those communities who actively seeks faculty mentorship may have an outstanding experience. Still, Harvard’s undergraduate structure is designed more consistently around small-group teaching and faculty engagement, whereas at UMD students often need to be more intentional about finding those smaller academic settings.