But the English system has important benefits for students who have clear career plans. For example, a person who wants to be a doctor can "go straight into medicine at 18 and qualify at 23-24," Chirgwin says. "We're more specialized in high school. You decide at 16 what your future is."

Furthermore, because students devote all of their time to one field, they find it easier to get to know their department, the fellows say. In England, "integration in the department is much higher," Hurst says.

"At Cambridge, you're regarded as a member of the department," says Graeme Dinwoodie, here on a Kennedy Scholarship.

By the end of the third year, biology students are included in professional discussions, invited to faculty events and "at 11 and 3 each day we trek off to the tea room and discuss stuff," Hurst says.

And the professors who talk to British students are not just unimportant junior faculty members, says Dinwoodie, who is studying at the Law School. "Cambridge professors are every bit as big in their fields as Harvard professors," he says.

All of this contact allows British undergraduates have a much closer relationship with faculty members than Americans do, the fellows say.

Harvard is "very different from Oxford or Cambridge," Chirgwin says. "Contact with professors seems to be much less. When I was an undergrad at Cambridge, I did a year of philosophy and had a tutor who was a professor. We did a couple hours a week, and it was a real intellectual experience with feedback."

"Here you have a student a few years ahead of you so you don't get much intellectual help. There, you got a lot of enthusiasm from people writing books who are interested in their fields. I really miss that personally. I'm wandering around here by myself. You have to fight to get contact--it's different at Oxford and Cambridge where it's part of the system," she says.

Every British lecture course also has a tutorial section with no more than two students. Thus from their first year, students have personal contact with a full faculty member--or occasionally a graduate student--for each course.

"An important part of teaching at Cambridge is supervision, weekly or fortnightly, with a graduate student or faculty in your college," Taylor says. "I saw a lot of senior academics in my subject. Since people are supervised in pairs, they get more personal attention and comments. It's more satisfying."

The problem with Harvard classes, Dinwoodie says, is "in a class of 200, there's no way that everyone can possibly get to know the professor."

Perhaps because British students have a lot of personal contact with professors, they are not formally tested as often.

"They basically say, 'this is a reading list, go and do it if you want to," Hurst says.

The only exams given at Oxford and Cambridge are at the end of the year, and they are similar to Harvard's general exams. The tests--called tripos--are given at the end of every year at Cambridge and at the end of the first and third years at Oxford. Unlike Harvard's ordinary system where students take exams on specific course material, the tripos cover entire fields of knowledge.

The British fellows say they have mixed reactions to Harvard exams. The English "system of assessing performance I find more desirable but I'm an exam sort of person," Taylor says. "There are three terms when...you're just learning, not assessed. After having time to learn, then you're tested. I find it slightly irritating that here the students are tested week by week, as if they were still in" high school.