<p>One question I have about Cornell is the class sizes. I'm also looking at Northwestern and ND, both of which have a vast majority of upper level class sizes below 20 students. I'm a prospective humanities major (history, literature, philosophy) and economics too. Could someone elaborate on the class sizes past the large intro courses. Do they compare with my other choices? Are they focused on discussions? All other factors being equal, what should Cornell's humanities and econ department offer me that I cannot get at NU or ND?</p>
<p>I took an intro Econ course here and it was around 300 students in a lecture format. The class was divided into sections where we met once a week to work on the problem set and discuss the previous week's course material.
This was also the format used for an intro US history course I took last year.</p>
<p>Most intro courses here are large...but this is the case anywhere. Once you get to the upper levels..especially in your field the classes get very small. I had a class last semester with 8 students.</p>
<p>Yeah, you have a hard time finding schools that won't give you very large classes for the very 'core essentials' I guess. Don't worry about Cornell's classes being bloated - it's just a few. You'll see for yourself if you visit soon, I imagine. Oh, and for facts, try out theu.com, it's got some cool videos, thejoker0909, that you might appreciate. Not entirely useful, but it's got some feel part of the time for what you want.</p>
<p>True, I think even NU has some pretty big classes in a couple cases. It's also the focus. Cornell wants everyone, absolutely everyone, to learn the basics of writing, or whatever, so they want everyone to have this 'jumping in' experience. But it's not really something you'll encounter in advanced classes like modern economics or anything.</p>
<p>Most upper level English and History courses at Cornell will have 10 - 25 students. Junior and senior seminars will have less than fifteen. Economics, which is the most popular major in Arts and Sciences and doesn't require 'discussion" for most courses, will have upper level enrollments of 40. Boutique ILR, PAM, or AEM econ courses cross-listed with Arts Econ will tend to have less than 20 students.</p>
<p>What the average class size statistics don't show is the number of students in independent study arrangements, which are fairly prevalent at Cornell and there are a good number of professors who are responsive to these types of requests.</p>
<p>Just checked out a stat on usnews: 60% of classes have less than 20 students. But with regards to econ, w/ 40 kids in the class, what if I had a question. Is Cornell's liberal arts school a true liberal arts school like NU and ND?</p>
<p>Yes. No difference. I've sat in on classes at all three schools, and in fact had to decide between those three. </p>
<p>And yes, there are plenty of opportunities to ask a question in a 40 person class at Cornell. For instance, Econ 319 and 320 (required upper level courses in probability, statistics, and regression methods) feature tons of question asking, and if it's not covered in class, you have office hours, after class, or section to ask the question. And if that's not enough the profs tend to respond to email very quickly.</p>
<p>what made you choose Cornell over Northwestern and Notre Dame?</p>
<p>So I'll tell my story.</p>
<p>I visited all three schools and liked them all. Northwestern appealed to me because it was in Chicago (I love Chicago), and I felt Cornell offered the best academics, but Notre Dame stood apart -- the students there were incredibly nice and friendly, and I just felt so comfortable and at home. I'm a white kid from a Midwestern-esque city (Buffalo) with a sizable Catholic population, so it was kind of hard for me not to fit in at ND. </p>
<p>So through the month of April I felt like I was really cementing myself to the idea of attending Notre Dame. But then one day something clicked inside of me. I basically realized that Notre Dame would not challenge me enough -- socially and academically, and I had the thought that it would end up being a lot like four more years in high school.</p>
<p>So upon re-evaluation, a couple days before May 1st, I felt that Cornell offered the best environment for me after all. It's academics were very appealing, Ithaca was a great college town and offered a lot of opportunities to be in the outdoors (hike/snowshoe/backpack) which I like to do, and I think I found the relative insecurity I would have as a Cornell student to be a silver lining. Not everybody would be just like me -- there are people of all different backgrounds and walks of life at Cornell -- and I felt like it would be a great learning and growing experience, socially. It also helped a little bit that Cornell would be a little bit cheaper -- I had received some financial aid at ND and Northwestern, but not enough to match the in-state tuition at Cornell.</p>
<p>The only real catch was that I had applied to the ILR School at Cornell, and not the College of Arts and Sciences. I had wanted to study economics and history in college, and I felt that ILR would offer these opportunities to me, but I was worried that it wouldn't offer the true 'liberal arts' experience that I was looking for. I was also worried that the ILR students might be a bit too pre-professional for my liking. But I realized that my first year in ILR would be mostly general elective courses anyway, and that I could also transfer if needed. </p>
<p>So I attended Cornell. The first year was a little bit rough, as I think it is at at schools, and especially a place as diverse as Cornell, as a student struggles to find his place on the campus and to adapt to college life. </p>
<p>But the next three years were pure bliss. </p>
<p>I was able to shape my ILR curriculum to include a lot of economics, math, history, and biology courses, and in hindsight I think the perspective that ILR provided me on the world was a more sophisticated one than what I would have received through a traditional liberal arts program. My courses were engaging and provocative and I felt like I was getting a lot more out of my courses than my friends from high school were getting out of theirs, I started some research work with a professor of economics, and I was involved in a ton of great extracurriculars -- guiding camping trips in the Adirondacks for Wilderness Reflections, Habitat for Humanity, writing arts and entertainment reviews for the Cornell Daily Sun, and getting involved in student government. And I studied abroad and had a great internship in DC to boot. </p>
<p>This is all not to mention following Cornell sports -- lacrosse, hockey, and wrestling are fantastic at Cornell. And us alums had a lot of fun following the basketball team this year as well. </p>
<p>But the most important result of my Cornell experience is that I forged a great set of friendships that I wouldn't trade for anything in the world.</p>
<p>Was my original concern about the pre-professionalism of ILR students warranted? A little bit. There's a certain subset of the population in ILR that is obsessed with landing a high-paying job or getting accepted into the top law school. But that's really their loss. </p>
<p>But I ended up developing a bunch of friends in ILR that ended up being just like me -- interested in a lot of different things and not obsessed over pre-professionalism. Four of these friends are now in PhD programs (two in economics, one on English (yes, English), and one in public policy). A couple of others are now off in various graduate programs (Harvard Law, Penn Law, Michigan Law, Cornell Law, as well as some programs in international relations, public policy, etc.), and the remainder of us are working -- consulting, teaching, banking, NLRB, Google, etc. Oh, and then there's the girl who got the Rhodes Scholarship. We're a bit jealous of her. </p>
<p>We all have been pretty damn successful.</p>
<p>And those are just the friends I had in ILR.</p>
<p>College is really a combination of the resources a school can provide to you and what you make of it. I'm of the opinion that Cornell offers one of the best undergraduate experiences in the country -- in terms of student life, research opportunities, academics, and breadth of experiences, it's really unparalleled. Nowhere else are you going to find engineers and philosophers and plant pathologists and hotelies. Cornell's a fantastic place to spend four years.</p>
<p>But Cornell's not for everyone. If you are not willing to work hard and go out of your way to track down the resources that you need to succeed, you can get easily get lost at Cornell. The university is going to great effort to fix this problem -- the West Campus houses, stronger advising, etc., but as one of my econ professors put it, "You don't go Cornell to have you hand held for you. Go to Williams for that."</p>
<p>And then there's the students at Cornell who go to Cornell because "it was the best school they got into" and they spend four years complaining about Ithaca and how they got rejected at Stanford or Harvard. It's a small subset of the Cornell population, maybe 10-15% of the student population. But still, good grief!</p>
<p>Incredibly insightful, Cayuga. Thanks so much. I'm a prospective ILR junior transfer and was worried too about the sense of pre-professionalism. That reason, which follows suit with the lack of a wholesome liberal-arts curriculum, pushed me away from applying to AEM. I can only hope that as a transfer I'll be able to share in the flexibility you had enjoyed. I've already been told that pursuing a semester abroad (where would Gatsby be without his Oxford degree?) and/or a minor (ILE-I love Economics, too) is near impossible to do in four years as a junior transfer. And the ILR school won't take more than 12 credits combined of my accounting/foreign language. I have 8 accounting and will have 16 Spanish credits! All in all, 24! Thankfully I've been overloading nearly every semester on courses and won't have a problem graduating in 4 years. Although, I'm starting to consider tacking on an extra semester (or possibly a summer) to follow my heart and go abroad. Anyway, I won't detract any further from this topic and equally so, your post.</p>