<p>I have come up with my final list of schools that I'm thinking about and I'm a little wary of applying to the big schools on my list (UT and Purdue). What would the college experience at those places be like? My high school was small so I'm more used to smaller sized classes. I liked the size of Cal Poly SLO (mid sized) but I'm not sure I'll like the 35,000+ population. Can someone tell me what it's like at these types of school (the big ones I mean, UT and Purdue).</p>
<p>Purdue
UT Austin</p>
<p>Cal Poly SLO
Cal Poly Pomona
University of San Diego</p>
<p>IMHO, yes unless you get into top notch engineering schools like CalTech and MIT.</p>
<p>Here are my reasons:
[ul]
[<em>] Larger schools tend to offer more course in a given disciplines and you’ll have more paths towards completing your degree.
[</em>] At a large university you won’t necessarily be stuck having to take an important core class from a particular individual. A horrible instructor can potentially ruin your interest in a particular field.
[li] You are likely to find more opportunities to do undergrad research at a large university. [/li][/ul]</p>
<p>Not only that but larger universities are more likely to offer required classes more often. For instance, my school offers multiple sections of a necessary PetE course every semester while some smaller institutions offer it only once a year, or in the case of a LAC, once every two years.</p>
<p>35,000 is still small. I hear TAMU and OSU are nearing 50,000 and Arizona State (or U Arizona, can’t recall) had 58,000. That should allay any fears of 35,000 kid schools being too large :D</p>
<p>I went to Purdue and a couple of directional state U’s and Purdue does feel large. But, the directionals with 15,000-20,000 kids also felt large. My daughter’s school near 30,000 is large. It seems to me that once you go past a certain point, I’d bet 7.000=8,000, it might as well be 50,000. From discussions with colleagues who went to truly small schools (Rose Hulman, Case Western) that’s the cutoff point, anything bigger and you might as well be at OSU…</p>
<p>More students also means more students subsidizing the engineering departments, so labs will likely be better in larger schools. A cynic would also observe there’s more people to drop out. But class size, if you value that, is likely to be better at smaller schools. My daughter’s critical classes (architecture studio) rarely have more than a dozen kids in them, 15 tops). And that’s at a large school. At other smaller schools the studio may have one prof for 50-60 kids, so there may be no real correlation between school size and class size. </p>
<p>Do your research and don’t automatically exclude schools because they’re ‘big’.</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. Well I may as well apply because Purdue uses the common app and I’m applying to another school that also uses the common app and UT would be a nice choice because it’s highly regarded for engineering so I will have to get past school size.</p>
<p>Have you check the net price calculators and scholarships at the various schools to see if they are affordable, or at least have a chance to be through scholarships?</p>
<p>I think it’s important to note here that school size and program size are two different things. A large school can offer small programs, and a small school can offer big programs.</p>
<p>ASU, for example may have ~50,000 students, but their Aero Engineering program is dinky (with anywhere from 10-30 students in a graduating class). By comparison, I went to a school with only 1,700 students and graduated with over 100 AE majors.</p>
<p>Social atmosphere, major diversity, access to faculty, and class sizes are perhaps the biggest factors to consider at when choosing the size of a school. Even though a particular program offered at a big school may be small, you will likely end up having to take a few core classes shared by a number of majors on campus. These classes may end up having a lot of students (on the order of 50 or more; sometimes hundreds).</p>
<p>I prefer smaller schools myself for the tight-knit atmosphere, smaller class sizes, access to faculty, and in some cases, less bureaucracy.</p>
<p>fractal is right - you don’t see all 50,000 students at once, except maybe at football games, which are awesome!</p>
<p>I tell students that UT is like a large city with lots of small neighborhoods. You hang out in your area and become friends with the kids in your major. I had a tight-knit group of friends who were all Architectural Engineering majors. But then when we wanted to do something, there was always LOTS going on.</p>
<p>I had a few big classes, but most of my engineering classes weren’t that large.</p>
<p>I go to Purdue. Classes for the introductory engineering courses and some gen ed lectures are large, but you get a small recitation class for the math and science classes for asking questions and such. I don’t think large lectures with recitations are worse than small classes. I’m currently in my specific discipline’s college and my classes are maybe 60 people, max. I have a close group of classmates I see in almost all of my classes, and it’s awesome. </p>
<p>Worst bit is trying to navigate the smaller stairwells of the old buildings between classes, but that’s probably not just a big school thing. I graduated from high school with 500 other kids (30 kid classes though) in the suburbs, so I don’t know if that counts as large or small. I personally don’t get why large schools are intimidating. But Purdue has been awesome to me. Also, bigger schools may mean more recruiters and alumni networks, which are also great!</p>
<p>Big is better, IMO. More resources, greater choices for specialization/electives, more recruiting from big national firms, more clubs and groups to belong to.</p>
<p>Thanks again for the replies. If the majority of math and science classes are relatively smaller at larger universities then I can deal with that. Plus I’d rather be anonymous in a general ed class because I hate subjects like english, history, etc. so I’d rather not participate.</p>
<p>If you want to know the class sizes, look at the schools’ on-line class schedules to see if they have enrollment and capacity numbers for each class.</p>
<p>I went to pretty big engineering school (UCSD), and although the class sizes for required courses can be large, they tend to get smaller as you get into upper division courses. The lower division courses may have 100-200 students in a class while upper division courses may have 50-100 students. The elective courses have much smaller class sizes that range from anywhere between 10 and 50 students. I took one technical elective that had about 8 students in the class.</p>
<p>So if you go to a big school, the huge lecture halls are unavoidable, but the majority of your classes will be held in small class rooms.</p>
<p>Big engineering schools can mean more engineering professors doing research on lots of different things. So, you have an opportunity of finding one who is working on what interests you rather than molding yourself into what a few professors are workin on.</p>
<p>I want to reiterate the point about the frequency of classes at a small engineering college.</p>
<p>I typically like smaller more intimate schools but having to wait a year because the class you need won’t be offered this year (or next) is an outright hassle that can force an undergraduate to make a dramatic change in his/her plan of study. The benefit of a larger COE is the opportunity to take classes out of sequence when it is advantageous. Being able to enroll in Organic Chemistry 1 in the Spring may permit a Chemical Engineering student to avoid summer school and move ahead with Inorganic Chem or Physical Chem the following Fall, rather than wait.</p>
<p>Again, we’re talking about department size here, not ***school ***size. I will agree that schools with small engineering departments generally put students at a disadvantage as far as both breadth of classes offered and availability of classes go. However, this problem can occur at both big schools and small schools.</p>
<p>Where I went to school, for example (Embry Riddle), the size of the school was dinky (~1700 students), however, the breadth and availability of classes was never a problem due to the relatively massive size of the engineering department.</p>
<p>I am reasonably certain that no one here claimed that it was.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There, fixed that for you. There are more benefits than just that one. For example:
[ul]
[<em>]Larger programs generally have a larger breadth of research opportunities available to undergraduates in case they decide they want to get into research (a very rewarding experience, in my opinion).
[</em>]Larger programs often draw more recruiters on account of it being more bang for the recruiters’ buck.
[<em>]Larger programs often offer a wider variety of technical electives than do smaller programs with fewer areas of expertise represented by the faculty.
[</em>]Larger schools have more people, which is a bonus for some people on account of it is a larger pool of people in which to meet people, make friends and date.
[/ul]</p>
<p>The biggest complaint/fear I seem to see from people who are narrowing their search for small programs seems to be that they prefer personal attention from professors rather than sitting anonymously in a large classroom. I think what a lot of them overlook is that large programs can often offer you personal attention approaching the level of the small programs assuming that you make the conscious decision to seek that attention out.</p>
<p>For example, you can utilizing office hours heavily or sit in the front of the class and ask good questions. Having taught classes at a large program, I can tell you that at least most of us standing in front of the classroom teaching are more than happy to work with students provided that they are willing to put in the effort to do so and we love it when the students get engaged with the topic enough to ask questions and participate.</p>
<p>At a large program, you have that option to make that choice. Some people might decide they would rather just blend in with the crowd, pass the class and move on. This is also possible at large programs, but at small programs, that really isn’t an option. In my opinion, therefore, the biggest advantage to small programs isn’t the opportunity for personal attention from faculty; it is the requirement of personal attention to faculty. That works out great for those who would be too timid to participate otherwise, or those who already know for a fact that they are the kind of student who wants to be front and center and engaged in every class. Not every student is like that, though.</p>
<p>I have to say that I am a little confused over the large program/large classroom generalization. Sure that may be the case during the first 2 years of college, but as a junior/senior at big 'ole Michigan State University during 1989/1990, many (and almost all) of my Math/CS courses (at that level) had no more than 12 students. You have to realize that not many folks are taking upper-level Database Systems, Computer Networks, Numerical Analysis, Linear Programming or Computational Complexity anyway.</p>
<p>Now I know the engineering enrollments have increased, but still do not think the junior/senior level engineering courses are in large rooms.</p>