<p>My wife and I went to a college with 3,000 undergrads. Our daughters have gone to one with 6,000. I've worked for > 30 years at colleges with 2,000 - 10,000, and I felt the 10,000-student school was too large for my tastes when I was there. Our son, who is an avid marching band drummer, is going to wind up at a school with a big-time band and 30,000 or so students. How do students go about finding their niches at a school that large? He'll try out for the marching band and he's applying to the Honors College, but are there other strategies that you can share for keeping from getting lost in a sea of anonymity at a large university?</p>
<p>I went to the University of Texas at Austin. There were 48,000 students when I was there. The only time it felt huge to me was at football games, and that was a blast! I found my niche in my dorm and in the civil engineering building. My friends and I loved UT - there was always something fun going on. </p>
<p>My favorite class at UT was American History, and it was probably my biggest class - about 300 students. The professor, George Forgie, was such an excellent story teller that I couldn’t wait for each lecture. He assigned quite a few challenging books and expected us to know them well. He wrote challenging tests. He was always available when I needed to see him. He tried to convince me to switch majors to history, lol! If I had avoided his big class, I would have missed out on a lot.</p>
<p>The great thing about a huge school is the number of opportunities available. Last year, my son got to do research in the biomedical engineering lab as a freshman, for example.</p>
<p>I compare UT to being a big town with a lot of small neighborhoods. You get to know the people in your neighborhood really well. I couldn’t imagine going to a small school of 10,000 students! :)</p>
<p>Is your son worried or just you?</p>
<p>The bigger the school, the more clubs and extra-curricular activities.</p>
<p>I go to Penn State - University Park, which is pretty darn gigantic, but feels amazingly small after you feel like you’ve become a part of the community. I agree, at large universities, it’s hard to get lost in the sea of crowds, parties, events, etc…you name it. It’s really important that your son does not mess around too much his freshmen year. It’s ok to have fun, but just don’t let him get sucked up into the party scene too much, because it sucks having a bad gpa to start off with.</p>
<p>Thanks all - son’s not worried, just me, but then he has no frame of reference for what college life is like so whatever he experiences will just become the normal college environment for him.</p>
<p>I go to a school with 20,000 undergrads, and let me tell you, it doesn’t feel big at all! I see the same people over and over. I end up in a lot of the same classes as people. (I share as many as three classes with one person.)</p>
<p>If you want to make a big school small, it’s fairly easy to do. You join clubs that interest you. You try to find classes that are smaller. (I only have one large class.) You find smaller residence halls to live in. (My dorm has 180 residents, most have about 500.) You just get involved.</p>
<p>Even though I go to a huge state school, every one of my teachers knows me by name except for my 200-person class. I really don’t feel like a number and I run into my friends around campus all of the time.</p>
<p>Instead of seeing it as a big school, see it as a small town made up of mostly 18-25 year olds in a small area.</p>
<p>ga- If your son’s not worried then you shouldn’t be worried. Big schools are fine. Mine is 40k+ and I’ve never felt lost.</p>
<p>Like a big city a big university is made up of many smaller communities. Band will be one of those smaller communities.</p>
<p>He’s in the marching band. There’s his niche. Seriously, those people (and even the separate instruments/sections within the band) stick together.</p>
<p>Agree with those that said band will be his smaller community and also to those who say even large schools don’t feel that big, except at football games. </p>
<p>It’s difficult to make a small school feel bigger than it really is but you CAN make a big school feel smaller, if that’s what you want. Some kids even “outgrow” small schools over a 4 year period. The one negative to large schools are the lecture class sizes. My S is at UC Berkeley and he has freshman classes in the mid-400 range. But even those get broken down into smaller sized groups for Q & A, etc., so they don’t seem as daunting.</p>
<p>My sons all chose schools of about 6000 undergrads, which while not huge was a lot bigger than their high school of about 750.</p>
<p>Something they did to find their people when they got to campus was to make sure that for first semester, they put a class on their schedule that was purely something they wanted to take , a class that wias likely to have their people in it.</p>
<p>Often electives have smaller class sizes and by taking a first semester elective they had the advantage of a smaller class, a topic of interest, and a likelihood of meeting some new friends.</p>
<p>I’m in the Ohio University marching band, and let me tell you, the place seems pretty small after making friends within the band. All will be fine</p>
<p>My school has 30,000+ undergrads. I don’t feel overwhelmed by its size. Sure, my smallest class is 12 students with the largest being over 400. But the biggest thing I can stress is to get involved. I see people I know everywhere on campus. People from work, people from my sorority, people from my classes and my residence hall. So it’s not really too hard to make a large campus seem small.</p>
<p>He shouldn’t worry about it, and neither should you. My school has about 27k undergrads, and I’m fine. He needs to make sure he gets to know his hall, since it’s going to be his home for the next year. It’s going to be the base, where to run back to if there are problems. (My hall is only 50 people, which is really small. The largest in the complex is 118, but he should make an effort to know people in his hall really well) He should make sure he gets involved in clubs (band is a good start) and talk to people in his classes. Be more outgoing than normal, at least the first week or two, because people aren’t just going to gravitate towards you.</p>
<p>But he’ll be fine.</p>