When looking for colleges, I always knew I wanted to go to a larger school. Since I am from such a small town, I wanted to expose myself to a much larger academic setting. Now I am going to Penn State and hopefully living out my dreams.
While at my orientation for college, I met people whose graduating class sizes ranged from 80 to 1,000 people, where the overall average was around 450 people per class. Meeting all of my future peers started to make me more nervous about deciding to choose such a large college. Many of these people came from much more diverse schools than me with much larger administrations, and I started to feel like my education was inferior to theirs.
Just as I started to feel that way, I had to remind myself that it wasn't at all true. Being from a small town doesn't make you any less intelligent than someone who went to a large high school. I just had to remind myself that we all took the same AP Calculus class, and we shared the misery of reading "Plants" on our AP Literature exam this year. In addition to our AP courses, we had to take the same SATs and ACTs, which college admissions used to decide whether or not they wanted to accept us.
Even though in college students from larger schools may have had more options for classes and more diverse school districts, we all got accepted to the same college where we will have the same class options, whether we were in a high school class of 2,000 or a high school class of 20.