Transferring from LAC to University

<p>Hey all-</p>

<p>For a variety of reasons I'm considering transferring from a top 50 LAC (think gettysburg, skidmore type place) to a top 100 university (uconn, uvm type place). Are the academics going to disappoint me? I'm a philosophy major so I've gotten used to 10-15 person seminars and carefully graded essays- not exams. I'm worried that I'm going to end up with 30-80 person classes with JUST exams and no essays- is this correct? </p>

<p>Has anyone gone through such a transition?</p>

<p>Thanks for any input!</p>

<p>For the most part, you’ll only have classes with 50+ people for those general education requirements which most majors have to fulfill. For instance, I’m concurrently taking a Macroecon course (required for a lot of majors) and a History of Central and Southern Africa course. While the econ course houses about 100 students, the Africa course only has about 10-15. Therefore, as you move up the ranks, your class sizes will decrease.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>For science, math, engineering, etc. maybe yes; for philosophy, no.</p>

<p>Why not transfer to a similarly sized university (e.g., Brown, Dartmouth) and leave the state schools out of the equation? The state schools (and larger private ones) are where you find enormous classes and little to no face time with professors, so I’d suggest going for a happy medium.</p>

<p>To build on entomom’s comment:</p>

<p>Science exams will vary by field. My chem is COMPLETELY multiple choice, but my Human Ecological Adaptation exams are 66%% essay. A virology class I had was ONLY essay and some short answer (second example since some don’t consider evolutionary biology to be a “real” science.) My GF had a philosophy prof whose exams were completely multiple choice…it just really can vary wildly.</p>

<p>I transferred the other way-- from a university to a LAC. The online course catalog may list course caps, so you could check out enrollments for the upper division courses. I would also suggest visiting a class at the schools you are investigating (or see if you can sit in on a friend’s class that has a lot of students) to see if bigger classes work for you. After a point, it doesn’t matter if a class has 100 or 300 students, although the time needed to pass out handouts increases exponentially. There is a big difference between class sizes of 20 and 40 and 40 and 60 though.</p>

<p>long, that’s pretty amazing about your GFs philosophy class! Large school or not, I’m hoping that was an exception for her humanities/social science classes.</p>