<p>It's really pretty, and I love the food, but is it too big for me to be happy there?</p>
<p>I want to be able to get to know my professors and not be overwhelmed by commotion everywhere.</p>
<p>Whether or not you get to know your professors has more to do with the size of your department than the size of the overall college. I go to Virginia Tech with an enrollment of close to 25,000, but nearly all my professors know me pretty well since there are only about 25 people in each graduating class in my major.</p>
<p>It's also largely a function of how interested you are in interacting with faculty. My freshmen year I lived in a residence hall with a professor-in-residence. He hosted dinners and we would have different activities with him and his family throughout the year. A lot of students weren't interested in interacting with the professor at all (different field of study, or disinterest) but a lot of other students became heavily involved with the different activities over the course of their freshmen year. The same thing goes with the residence halls on West Campus.</p>
<p>In my experience professors at Cornell are very easy to develop relationships with. One of the benefits of living in a Collegetown is that all faculty live nearby, and they are very focused on the different cultural and athletic events that the University offers. Not so in a big city, where faculty may live a good distance away from campus.</p>
<p>What do you want to study?</p>
<p>At Cornell, it's only really a problem if you are an economics major where class sizes are a bit larger. Otherwise, most students have personal relationships with at least 2-3 professors by the time of graduation -- hotel to philosophy, ecology to architecture. I personally stay in touch with 5+ professors at least once a year, and I was an economics major.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Whether or not you get to know your professors has more to do with the size of your department than the size of the overall college.
[/quote]
Or sub-colleges, for that matter.</p>
<p>Cornell CAS has 4200 students. That's smaller than the undergraduate colleges of Princeton (4700), Yale (5300), Brown (5900), Penn (6300), and Harvard (6700) and only slightly larger than Dartmouth and Columbia (4100 each).</p>
<p>Sounds like you should be considering a liberal arts college. With very very few or no grad students, and without as much emphasis on research, you're much more likely to get to know professors at places like Bowdoin, Hamilton, or Wesleyan than you would at Cornell. Isn't Colgate like a miniature Cornell in a lot of ways?</p>
<p>Chuy, what was your major?
I'm interested in history, english, philosophy, psychology, paleontology, astronomy, international relations, politics.</p>