Current students?? Is UF too big?

aforautumn
Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:47:25 +0000

another perspective here:

the online classes have generous tutoring available for free. while professors for these classes hold office hours, its preferred that students attend the TA hours. As someone close to this, i would highly recommend it. TAs are class specific, and work directly under the professor, and are available about 8 hours a day for at least the econ classes. the other classes don’t have quite as much availability, but they also have people available for several hours a day every day to help students. large online classes are not daunting, and have the very real advantage of letting you rewatch parts of lectures that you got distracted on or didn’t understand the first time through. for the easier ones, you can even speed them up. and i would disagree with glasswright on another point about professor availability. yeah, their office is a little packed during their hours, but thats not how you get to know them. If you’re genuinely interested in getting to know them and want to know more about the subject outside of the class, careers, or something else, you should email them and set up a time where you can talk with them that isn’t their office hours. if you only want to go to office hours to have a relationship with someone who knows the content of the class, and who can help you, you’re much better off going to TA hours.

that mostly had to do with business classes. calc classes are usually pretty large. my current class is probably 30-40 people, but it feels like 20. it isn’t an assembly though. assembly calc classes are more common and have 100-150 people, but meet with a TA in a class of about 30 once a week to review content. these classes are also taught by grad students, who aren’t as great of resources as professors, but they’re usually very friendly and know what they’re talking about.

bio, chem, and all those general ed classes are all going to be large. period.

and i think its funny that you expect advisors to know your name. not that theres anything wrong with that, i know a lot of people knew their high school advisors well. i’ve never heard of anyone knowing their general advisors well at UF though. I can see it happening when you get close to graduation, because some departments advisors are actual professors and they’re great to talk to, but its not something you can count on happening. but this isn’t detrimental; i’ve been to an advisor once, and it was a waste of my time.

on the other hand, i’ve been to the career advising center a few times, and you do have the opportunity to meet and get to know a single advisor who you can go to when you need help figuring out what you want to do and stuff like that.

i think OPs most important question is whether or not students regret having gone to a school as big as UF, and wish they’d gone to a smaller school. i think the best way i can answer that is to say they i’ve NEVER heard of someone complain about the size of the school. Many buildings are as big as high schools, and the campus is large. Eventually you will only very rarely interact with departments outside of your own, and its extremely easy to get involved with your department if you really want to.

imagine UF not as a single school with 35000 undergrad students, but as 20-30+ little schools all built right next to each other. this is essentially what a college campus us, where each department has its own set of faculty who only deal with students in their department. honestly, it should feel less crowded than high school.