You plan, you visit, you do your research and you've finally found the school that you're willing to spend your next 4+ years at. Whether this school is 20 minutes or 2,000 miles away from your home, it is now YOUR school. Depending on what type of person you are and what type of career path you're interested in, these types of things probably played a role in choosing your place of higher education, I for one chose a small school, and I love it.
Here's how you know you go to a small school:
You can't go from class to class without seeing at least three people you know.
If you can walk from your res hall to an academic building without seeing someone you know, you do not go to a small school.
You could walk your entire campus is probably 15 minutes.
Having to wake up an hour before class to get ready and make sure you're there on time; not an issue. Here at small schools, we roll out of bed 10 minutes after our alarms went off and still make it to class with 5 minutes to spare.
There's people you know that don't know you and visas versus.
Oh the blondie beau from your 11:30 intro to religion class? Yeah, he has no idea who you are, and yet all of your friends know is name and you often refer to him as your "boyfriend"...good luck trying to explain to him how you already know he has two sisters and his ex girlfriend goes to school in California.
You've had the same main group of friends since orientation.
Before you figured out you went to a small school, orientation was like the scariest thing ever. So you found a group of people that seemed relatively normal and you clung to them. Now you're moving in with them in the fall and you couldn't be happier.
You and said friend group go to every sporting event you can.
Odds are you know at least two people on every sports team. This means you make promises to go see games and make stupid signs (that you secretly look forward to making). You guys only have one gym so volleyball and basketball games have to be on different days, this means you get to rep your school Friday night and all day Saturday.
Going to sporting events means bringing your backpack.
Of course you want to go and support your friends on the team, but you also have a paper due at midnight tomorrow that you haven't even looked at. A lot of the time, time outs and halftime means that you whip out your laptop and start typing away. Oh that huge anatomy exam on Monday? Don't worry, your flash cards are in your front pocket.
You don't feel like you're missing out with the lack of Greek life.
Who needs frat parties when you have the sports houses? Why wait to get that coveted invite from Sigma Delta Don't Care when you can roll with your friends from any sports team to one of their parties?
Moving off-campus is what every sophomore looks forward to, but it's hard as hell.
Your entire class of whatever year is looking to move off of campus at the same time and there's only so many landlords that will rent to college students (particularly fewer that will rent to college boys). Come March and April everybody and their mother (literally) are looking for a safe, cheap place to live. If you don't know someone that knows someone, you're going to be SOL, sorry!
Awkward half smiles to bridges burned.
This one's a little unfortunate but only slightly! If you go to a small school, odds are there are going to be people that do not like you. You've probably gotten into a heated argument once or twice, but no one completely interesting was ever universally liked, so don't sweat it and kill 'em with kindness.
They've probably "talked" to someone you know.
This one is a little more unfortunate. When you meet someone "new," aka you've followed them on social media but never actually spoken in person, they're probably going to give you a name of someone they know that you know too. The unfortunate part is they've probably had some type of relationship with this person, which makes it only slightly awkward when you start dating/hooking up and see their ex (who happens to be in your calculus class) out or around campus.
You're teachers know when you're not in lecture, and it sucks.
Class sizes get capped at around 35 or 40 and a lot of your professors are adjunct which means you're probably going to have them for more than one class. Everyone knows professors take pride in being able to remember their students names, this is even more troublesome when you have the same professor for three classes a day and you happen to skip all of those classes to catch up on Grey's Anatomy...it only makes office hours a little awkward.
But all in all, you love your school and you couldn't imagine spending the best years of your life any place else!
