First off, let me start by defining a huge high school. When you graduated, you heard people’s names called that you didn’t even know existed. There were multiple middle schools and at least eight elementary schools that everybody came from. You are used to the idea of it taking more than five minutes to get to class, and your high school was larger than any of the buildings on your college campus.
1. You’re used to walking by people who you have never seen before
With over 3,000 kids in your high school, you didn’t expect to see anyone you knew on your way between classes. Seeing a friend was a pleasant surprise rather than an expectation. Similarly, at UMass, walking around campus, seeing somebody who you actually know is always a nice coincidence.
2. The idea of graduating from a class of over 1,000 students is not foreign to you; in fact, you’ve done it before.
Before the graduation ceremony began, you and your friends had to designate a spot on the football field to meet up after throwing your caps into the air. Otherwise, it would have been nearly impossible to find each other amongst the crowd of graduates and their families.
3. You don’t know everybody in your classes, and that’s fine because you haven’t known everybody’s name in a class since sixth grade.
Obviously, having a lecture of over 200 students is going to be a unique experience in college, but having a class of 25-35 students and only being able to name the students in your corner of the room is not. Having a class with one of your best friends is even more uncommon.
4. The concept of having to walk ten minutes to get to your car is a familiar one.
Even getting a parking space as a freshman is a struggle, and if you’re lucky enough to do so, you will surely have to park at least ten minutes from your dorm. At a high school with hundreds of faculty members and thousands of students, you always had to factor an extra 15 minutes into your morning commute to account for the traffic getting into the parking lot and the walk into the building. Don’t forget the extra 5 minutes it then took to actually walk to class once you got inside.
5. Being a part of a massive student section at sporting events feels like home.
Whether your school stunk or not, football games in high school were huge social events. You had t-shirt tosses, themed games, announcers, and some games even got broadcast on television. You had booster buses that took students to away games, just like the buses that take our Minutemen to Gillette Stadium.
6. You’re slightly less impressed by the large variety of clubs and activities on campus because your high school had almost as many.
Service clubs, cultural clubs, school papers, and more were taken for granted at your school. When you started going on college tours, they better have listed over 50 clubs, otherwise your high school could have outdone them.
7. You immediately know how special finding your group is because there are thousands of people you could have chosen from, but you found each other.
You and your high school friends found each other within the masses, and you love them with all of your heart. So, when you came to college and found that special group of people who you now call your own, you could really appreciate just how precious that connection was and how grateful you should be that you found them amongst the crowds.