<p>Penn is the largest private school I'm considering, at nearly 20K when combining undergraduates and graduates. Can any current student comment on the size of Penn and whether you think it's a positive or negative?</p>
<p>^Why would you bother including grad students in that number? As an undergraduate, you don’t live with them and you’ll probably never take any classes with them.</p>
<p>Even when ignoring grad students, the number of undergrads is almost 10K - about 3K more than other comparable private schools like Duke, Vanderbilt, Brown, etc. Just wondering about how current students felt about the size.</p>
<p>First of all, why would you not include grad students? Almost all of my 400 level courses had graduate students in them, and some of my other classes were crosslisted with graduate classes. All of my student groups had at least a few grad students in them at any given time, as well. Don’t make statements when you have no idea what you’re talking about.</p>
<p>In any event, it’s hard for anyone to gauge whether a college’s size is a good or bad thing without having experienced different types (i.e. transferring from big to small or small to big). That said, here are a few tid-bits from my experience at Penn.</p>
<ul>
<li>If you are big on personal interaction with professors on a daily basis, recognize that at Penn, it will not usually happen until you get into upper level courses. Professors have office hours and are happy to talk to students, but you likely will not develop a deep relationship with a professor of ECON001 or PSYC001, since they have up to 700 students a semester.</li>
<li>Penn is a large school, but like any other large community, it is broken into hundreds of smaller communities. While you may be one of 10,000 undergraduates, when you join a student group, you will be one of maybe 30 or 40 people. In your dorm freshman year, you’ll be one of 15 or 20 people, and you’ll probably hang out with everyone pretty frequently to start out, so again, you’ll have that small community feel.</li>
<li>Because Penn is so big, there is something for everyone. It is easy to start a group, and you’ll probably be able to find interest in even the most ridiculous ideas. Every religion (even the atheists) has a presence on campus; there are something like 45 performing arts groups; Penn fields a team in just about every sport in existence.</li>
<li>You will never know everyone in your class, and the whole matriculating class will only be entirely together in one place once - on Convocation (not at graduation because some people graduate early while others graduate late). Is that a bad thing? I don’t know… personal preference!</li>
<li>There is a lot of bureaucracy since Penn is enormous… beyond the students, Penn employs 40,000 people, making it the second largest private employer in Pennsylvania and the largest in Philadelphia. That’s a lot of logistics to handle, and sometimes it is a pain in the neck.</li>
</ul>
<p>Hope that helps!</p>
<p>^ And I’d just add that once you get to a certain range of numbers, differences in size aren’t really that perceptible. So, for example, do you really think you’d notice much of a difference being one of 6500 people in a group, as opposed to one of 10,000, as long as there are sufficient resources to accommodate each group? You’ll never get to know the vast majority of the 6500 or so undergraduates at Brown or Duke, and you’ll similarly never get to know the majority of the 10,000 undergrads at Penn. The question is whether a school adequately supports your ability to become part of constituent smaller communities, as chrisw points out, and any of these schools is exceptionally well-equipped to do that.</p>
<p>Now if you’re comparing the experience at a small liberal arts college with only 1500 undergrads to that at schools with 6-10,000 undergrads and thousands more grad students (i.e., your typical top private university), the experience WILL be significantly different. But the atmosphere and experience on a campus with 6500 undergrads versus 10,000 undergrads, or 15,000 total students versus 20,000 total students, won’t be perceptibly different, at least based on number of students, alone.</p>