Back home, I have a lot of friends who attend schools much larger than Kenyon (like that’s difficult to do). I’m talking undergraduate numbers in the tens of thousands, sometimes close to 50,000 students at one school. Although I’ve mastered the most basic differences between large universities and small colleges (like, that a college only has undergraduates, and a university has Masters and PhD students as well), there are still some aspects of huge schools that I will never understand.
- Having more than one dining hall on campus: I love the community aspect of Peirce and that everybody I know eats meals in the same place. Which is why I can’t grasp how university students navigate more than one dining hall. What if my friends told me they’d meet me at such-and-such dining hall, but I forgot and accidentally went to the dining hall all the way across campus? Talk about confusing.
- Off-campus housing: Even though our housing lottery is extremely stressful, it’s comforting to know that housing is guaranteed for all four years. But some of my friends from large universities tell me that housing is only guaranteed to underclassmen, and that they might have to live in apartments off-campus if they aren’t lucky in their lottery. I’m so used to having everything on this campus be so contained and accessible from the comfort of my own dorm, that I can’t even imagine not living on campus.
- Sports: I have never been to a Kenyon football game. When I tell this to people who attend big schools, they look at me like I’m crazy. But that sports fan culture just doesn’t exist at Division III schools! I can never picture myself painting my face purple or tailgating before a big game. Seriously, it’s so much more likely that I end up sitting next to our star quarterback in econ class rather than only seeing him at the ‘big game.’ To me, this shatters the illusion of those huge sports heroes that exists at some larger universities.
- Large lectures: None of my classes have had more than 40 people. How am I ever supposed to imagine as many people as my grade here at Kenyon (almost 500, in case you’re wondering) fitting into one lecture hall, with one professor at a podium? And no participation points counting for ten percent of my grade? That just doesn’t seem like it would work for me.
- Not getting lost: One of the reasons why I chose Kenyon was because it is so easy to navigate; the campus is essentially one straight line. I will never understand how students at campuses the size of small towns get around their schools without getting lost all the time.
I’m sure that anybody from a large university can make a similar list about things they don’t understand about small liberal arts colleges that are completely normal to me. But just because we may not understand each other, doesn’t mean that one college culture is better than the other. We’ll just have to live separately in our two different worlds for now, and hopefully meet somewhere in the middle after graduation.