<p>At MIT, you will default to anonymous. This will change as soon as you seek out your interests. While I will probably not be known to the entire MIT community, I nonetheless get a “Cheers” mentality from my subcultures of the MIT community. I, for instance, can walk onto my hall, the Rainbow Lounge, my service group’s office/lounge, etc, and be greeted by people where everyone knows my name. While I cannot say I am known by everyone at my school (like someone at $smallUniversity), I doubt the numbers of my close interactions are different. I simply have more options to what my “Cheers” can be :)</p>
<p>This doesn’t necessarily hold true for every large university. For a while, I attended Calstate LA, which does not have nearly as strong a student group culture and hardly has a living group culture at all (being a mostly commuter college). There, I did not develop any sense of overall community, though I did make a decent number of good friends.</p>