<p>I said something very similar to the quote way upthread, based at D1’s experience. Choose classes by looking at professor rankings–look for anyone who gets high marks for being compelling and challenging, and take those classes. Go to office hours. Ask questions. Ask for advice! </p>
<p>Students who are going to follow that advice are going to bloom anywhere, be it big impersonal state U or teeny nurturing LAC. Students waiting for life to come to them might end up not falling through the cracks at a more nurturing small U or LAC, but there are no guarantees. One frequent poster here on CC sent a child to a well-regarded CTCL LAC, but there simply wasn’t enough support.</p>
<p>annasdad,</p>
<p>The author is in poli sci department, the second largest at NU. Is it really that difficult for you to realize this? You took one professor’s experience from almost the most popular department to generalize the whole school. Based on your posts in other threads and here, you sound like a very biased person and when you form an opinion, you’d keep cherry picking and digging only the data to reinforce that opinion. That’s not really a very good practice to look at things, IMO.</p>
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NU does not have any 400 person lecture class. Also, all the freshmen seminars are capped at 20 students. That’s already an improvement from what the OP had. While we have some students (usually majors in econ, bio, poli sci, and psychology) complaining they don’t know professors well enough, I don’t recall students saying they “feel overwhelmed”.</p>
<p>Well, then they’ll have to live and learn, like everyone else. No one ever said life wouldn’t be full of regrets - whether that was trying to go to a “better” school, making an effort to know a professor better, taking a course in an area that was outside their comfort zone, or, heck, for that matter, having more of a social life in college. I certainly would do some aspects of my NU experience differently over again in terms of courses I’d take or relationships I’d nourish (whether with peers or professors) - but so what? That’s how people live and learn. I don’t have life down at age 47, so I don’t expect 18 - 22 yo’s to have it down either.</p>