<p>And by tomorrow, I meant Tuesday night!</p>
<p>Davidson IS very small. Is it too small? For me, not so much. Actually, I really like the size. I graduated with 81 people in my high school class and fewer than 300 in the whole high school. My CLASS here is almost 500 people. To me, this is a lot. But even so, I still see that it is very small and sometimes it is too small for me. If you attended a high school with upwards of 2,000 people, it may feel much smaller.</p>
<p>Personally, I like the smallness most of the time. I am guaranteed to see at least twenty people I know just between my dormitory and my classes. On my way to class and just hanging around campus, I feel like I’m surrounded by friends and family, because people know me and I know them, and we all speak to each other when our paths cross. And I don’t mean just students. I also mean physical plant workers and janitors, professors, Commons dining hall workers, Residence Life staff, and Jackie, the loveably loud lady at the Post Office. </p>
<p>In my experience, when you come here, you’ll find you don’t know EVERYBODY, but you’ll have a friend or acquaintance in common with everybody. And then there are those individuals who the whole campus knows because they are sports stars on campus (eg. Stephen Curry) or they are noticeably different (eg. “Nametag Stephen” - a senior this year who has worn his Orientation name-tag every day since he’s been at Davidson) or they are involved in a large-scale scandal on campus (eg. last semester, a senior submitted an editorial to the Davidsonian, our school paper, in which he argued that the school should not support gay students…the whole student body protested the publication of this article, because it was not at all representative of how the majority of students think here on campus), or a large-scale triumph (eg. Student Government winners; those who make research breakthroughs, etc.).</p>
<p>The size is really only stifling when I’m stressed out. If I’m stressed out and am trying to get a lot of work done, I get really annoyed when I have to make nice in the Union when all I really want to do is get my work done. Or if there’s a major drama going on in my life here, I start to feel like it’s too small, because inevitably people will know about the itty bitty details of that drama. The gossip scene is big within halls, and occasionally whole classes, and sometimes even throughout the whole school. When I am overwhelmed by circumstances in my life, I become much more aware of the drama, the gossip, and the everybody-knows-almost-everybody community, and not always in a good way. I find it healthy to leave campus once or twice a week. Some people never leave Davidson, in a whole semester that they’re here. But I think it’s important to leave pretty frequently to scrub my mindset of stuff that happens in the “Davidson Bubble.” </p>
<p>I feel like the negatives in this post are probably coming out much more strongly than the positives, so I do want to emphasize that I really like the smallness. It’s bigger than my high school by a lot, so I have much more space now compared to what I had then. But it’s still small enough that all of my professors not only know my name, but also know me. Most of my professors know that I speak a lot of foreign languages…that I like to write…that I’m going to be a hall counselor next year… They know where I live on campus…they know who I’m dating, who my friends are…they know about the drama in my life, both here and at home. And similarly, I know them pretty well, too. I’ve been over to several professors’ homes for study sessions, for end-of-the-semester parties, for Political Science (my major) department barbecues, for book club discussions, and more. I’ve met many of my professors’ kids and I’ve played with their pets. I’m even Facebook friends with some. I’ve babysat for a professor! I go in for office hours just to chat about life and they love that! And this is very, very typical here! I love that - professors really care about us. And they care less about grades and performance than they do that we learn. They would rather make us think and analyze than get the answer right because we memorized it. I genuinely enjoy classes here because of the size. I just thought it was really important to emphasize that even though I sometimes find this place stifling, I mostly LOVE how small the school is. Size was not a draw for me originally, but now it’s one of my favorite things!</p>