In March of last year, I transferred from a small school in Missouri to here, Tuscarora. The high school I went to before only had about three-hundred students or so total. That’s about the size of a whole grade here, if not a bit less. In a school that small, it’s fairly easy to get around and you really don’t have any problems with getting to class. Everyone pretty much knows everyone and if you’re new, everyone is dying to meet you. When we got new students, it was exciting, we rarely got those. Schools like that also have your basic cliques, unfortunately. Popular, jocks, nerds, outcasts, you name it. The cliques are one of the extremely unfortunate things about a smaller school. There’s also a lack of electives, extracurricular activities, and clubs. There’s really nobody there to start them or there’s nobody really interested. It differs immensely from a large school such as this one.

Large schools have all sorts of clubs and activities, the lists almost seem endless. Cliques really can’t exist because there’d be too many people fighting for popularity. New students almost go unnoticed because there’s just so many people already, nobody can really figure out who is new and who is not. As everyone knows, the hallways are always crowded and that makes it a struggle to get to class at times. It may not really appear like that much of a change, it’s just school. Though when you look at the differences, you start to see it.

I had never been to a school as large as this one before coming here. When I was in elementary school, I had been to larger schools, not that much larger though. Finding out that this school was so large, I was honestly pretty scared. It was a pretty big upgrade, three-hundred to fifteen-hundred. I remember that on the day I was transferring in, there was a couple other new students. That was already a surprise to me. As I mentioned before, at my previous school we barely got new students. The changes just continued, all of my classes had at least thirty students and that just baffled me. In a school of three-hundred you often have classes that only have ten or so kids in them. Most of my classes in my previous school only had about twenty, maybe one or two more, sometimes less. The thirty-minute lunch was a very big change for me, it was a change I enjoyed though. Lunch at my previous school was twenty minutes, sometimes fifteen. It was (and sometimes still is) hard not to get lost when looking for my classes. I was used to a one floor school that was really easy to get around. The list of changes could probably go on, but those are the main things I noticed.

Small schools and large schools are pretty different, as you can see. Going from one to another brings many changes, some good and some not.