@bouders Thanks for all the info! That’s very helpful. I didn’t realize the structure was like Oxford and Cambridge. I think I’ll have S take a tour of UW before we head out to see U of T. I remember being a bit shell-shocked when I toured UC Berkeley as a HS student since I’d never seen such a big campus. S has been on the UW campus a lot but not actually toured and seen classes. We’ll try to visit Waterloo while there too. S is thinking along the graduate school path, but he’s also just a sophomore and the point of this trip is for him to see different options.
Your experience with professors is similar to mine though I was at a university of 15k (undergrad + grad). I had a faculty advisor and reader for my honors thesis (bio) but that was the limit of my interactions with professors outside of lectures. I interacted with graduate students (who led the discussion groups and lab sessions) and with my study groups (other students). Most of my science classes were big (200-400) and labs were smaller. Math (upper level) was more like 40-50 and German (20 ish). Engineering classes were like 100 with weekly discussion sections (problem set discussion) of 25.