<p>UW has been my dream school, I've always been a husky fan, and both my parents are alumni. However, my parents are a little wary about me attending UW as my first choice. I've always been a fairly independent learner, but they are worried about the sheer size of the university, and that I may have a hard time succeeding here because of how impersonal the university is as a whole.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any opinions about this? Are they right or wrong? If anyone has any stories or experiences with how large UW is, I'd love to hear them.
I appreciate any opinions, or information I can share with them supporting either side.</p>
<p>Yes. This inevitable at a university this big. Though I believe that after you declare your major and start taking major-related classes, it won’t be the case anymore.
I’m in the business school and my classes have 69, 63, and 39 people in them. All of them are in just two buildings and the library is in one of them. I have a TA only in the quiz section of one of the classes. So far I don’t feel much different than I felt when I attended a small community college. …</p>
<p>Most of the lower division courses that you take consist of three days of lecture (you sit in a large room with hundreds of other students as the Professor teaches) and the other two days are quiz/discussion/lab sections where you’ll be in a classroom with between 20-40 other people and a TA will clarify concepts and go into detail. Once you get into the upper division courses, the lecture sessions will have a smaller number of students (anywhere between 20-80, but the classes on the upper end of that range tend to have quiz sections as well). You can see professors and TAs face to face during office hours.</p>
<p>There are also many student communities, groups, and clubs to join. </p>
<p>At UW Seattle, you start out a “number”, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I think they do a good job of leaving alone those who want to be alone and being personal to those who seek it.</p>
<p>" Though I believe that after you declare your major and start taking major-related classes, it won’t be the case anymore."</p>
<p>This depends entirely on your major. I’ve already got my Sociology requirements (and am graduating this quarter) and unfortunately all classes i took had 100+ people in them.</p>
<p>to flip that, I once took a 100 level finnish culture class where only 12 people showed up (24 enrolled) consistently</p>
<p>And yes, UW is a huge school. It is what you make of it. it’s been fine for me because i’ve made the proactive choice to approach my teachers and get to know them. </p>
<p>Also, going to community college for my AA helped alot (Personally, I think almost everyone would benefit from going to community college and then transferring…to get the best of both worlds. In fact, the very best teacher I’ve ever had was at my community college not UW)</p>
<p>There are a number of ways to avoid huge classes at UW. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Honors classes are all relatively small. Intro math and science honors courses typically range in class size from 20 to 60 versus 120 to 600+ for the general intro sequences. Interdisciplinary honors courses are typically 20 or fewer, and involve active discussion.</p></li>
<li><p>Summer quarter classes are small, typically 1/4 or fewer seats than the corresponding fall/winter/spring courses.</p></li>
<li><p>English classes are all small, typically capped at around 20. English classes linked to other courses (ENGL 197/198/297/298) tend to be particularly small, in the teens or even single digits.</p></li>
<li><p>Intro math courses are typically capped at 120 and upper division are 30-50.</p></li>
<li><p>Classes in less popular majors are small. And less popular doesn’t mean poorer quality. Courses in these majors can fulfill distribution requirements regardless of your intended major.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>My DS is a pre-engineering freshman (a category with typical class sizes in the hundreds) who has been able to find small classes by starting in Summer Quarter and taking honors classes in Autumn Quarter. So far his class sizes have been: 35, 147, 10, 17, 36, 63, plus even smaller quiz and lab sections.</p>
<p>Do your homework if you want to avoid “Huge classes, …, just being a number.”</p>
<p>I have no idea about those classes, but I know that some of the majors have much smaller groups of students and it makes it a lot easier to make friends. The world becomes smaller when you know all of the students in your program.</p>
<p>My younger brother just started his 3rd qtr at uw. He too is an independent learner intending to major in math, physics and political science. He is not bothered by large class size. He is getting much better individual attention from advisors than what we get at a highly ranked private university.</p>
<p>I think the new buildings that have come up on uw campus have made a huge difference to the look and feel. Even the Paccar Hall doesn’t feel out of place. </p>
<p>You really gain a greater appreciation for that place (uw & Seattle) when you move away.</p>
<p>Yeah, that’s what I meant. The juxtaposition between the two is striking because they’ve got such an ugly HQ building and such a lovely Business School namesake.</p>
<p>From my friend, who graduated UW Comp Sci + Econ around 8 years ago …</p>
<p>“I used to save my CSE 142/143 homework on 3 1/2” floppies. The desktops in the old Sieg lab would crank hella loudly whenever you tried to compile."</p>
<p>Its big/huge yes, but its possible to not feel like a number. At some point it comes to personal preference. Some people, like me, like huge schools.</p>
<p>3.5 floppies were far in the future when I took CS (it was not at UW, but a similar school). My entire undergrad CS dept had terminals all connected to a single 16-bit PDP-11 box. Half of CS 1 was just figuring out how to use esoteric Unix line commands to input, edit, compile, link the program. The tired old PDP-11 was timeshared with so many concurrent users, it took ten minutes to compile hello world. Interactive debuggers? Not invented yet. The only way to get enough time on a terminal to complete assignments was to sneak in the windows of the CS lab when it was closed at 3am.</p>