<p>you have those at dartmouth too :-(</p>
<p>Yeah but "big" intro classes at Dartmouth are about 100 people. At places like Columbia and Penn intro classes can be 300 or larger.</p>
<p>Stick with liberal arts and social sciences and the biggest class you'll probably ever see will be 30 people. If you insist on taking the absolutely most popular classes available in these departments, you'll still never be in a class with more than 50 people. You only get the occasional 100 person lecture in something like an intro chem or bio class, which is designed to weed out premeds. A word to the class of 2011 - if you think you're premed now, statistically speaking, you probably won't think that this time next year. You can make more money in other fields while majoring in something easier (thus, a more fun 4 years in college), doing less work (both academically and professionally), and fewer years of education.</p>
<p>I agree, halfbaked. Also, smaller classes will let you get to know a professor much better than a lecture can, because the students actually help run the seminar and participate in the lesson plans. I know students who went to Dartmouth and Yale who, except for one or two lectures, took all of their classes as seminars with between 5 and 15 students in each class. They had to write longer papers and prepare material for each seminar of course, but in return had fewer exams (and also more times for extracurriculars, since lecture courses are often shorter and more often than seminars). I talked with two graduates of Yale who said that the entire classes were invited over to professors' homes for dinner to continue the discussions and sometimes even took class "field trips" to Europe that Yale paid for. Pretty awesome and a good reason to stick to smaller classes, if you ask me. </p>
<p>What's also great about places like Dartmouth, Yale and other top-tier schools for undergraduate education is that you don't have to preregister - you can choose your classes after trying them out for a few weeks and seeing how large they are. At most universities you have to register beforehand, which means you might end up in classes you don't particularly like, which are too large/overbooked, or with professors who are dull. At a top school there's almost no chance of that happening unless it's a requirement for your major. Specific course requirements generally apply only to science majors... but even then, places like Yale, for example, offer 5 different courses you can take to fulfill your introductory chemistry requirement -- this not only makes classes much smaller than a single, Cornell-style intro chem lecture with 100-200+ students, it also lets you shop around for better profs.</p>
<p>Of course, at HYP/Dartmouth-level colleges, there are always a few seminars in certain fields taught by particular professors that can be very popular and capped at 15 students. But that doesn't mean you have to settle for another seminar or for taking that professor's lecture course. All that means is usually that upperclassmen get priority. So you can always take other great seminars, and apply for the one you really want to take during your junior or senior year. This doesn't happen too often at colleges like these, though, because the student:faculty ratios in the most popular departments are so low.</p>
<p>Right, and if the thing that's drawing you to a certain class or seminar is the professor, you could just take the initiative of sitting in on the class without registering at all. For instance - I'm narrowing my government major to political philosophy, but I'll definitely sit in on classes taught by Professor Ben Valentino (a leading genocide scholar) and Professor Daryl Press (a leading nuclearism scholar). I'd feel like I sold myself short if I failed to expose myself to these superstar professors.</p>
<p>It's awesome that you're going to school to learn, and not just to get your degree. Seriously.</p>