If you’re anything like me, you won’t realize just how many people are in those large lecture classes until you sit in Foellinger Auditorium for the first time. After that, you’ll quickly realize that sitting in the back of the room and avoiding all contact with your professors won’t always work out as well as it did in high school.

Here are some tips that could help you deal with the unavoidable, large class sizes.

Sit in the front and pay attention; try to participate.

It’s easy to sit in the back row of a lecture and blend in with everyone else. It’s a surefire way to make sure that your professor will never know who you are. Staring down the rows filled with over 100 students can make any lecture feel large; by sitting in the front (or at least near it), you can easily forget about the majority of your classmates and have a much easier time paying attention. You will also have the luxury of participating when you actually know the answer, not because your professor stared you down or called on you randomly.

Get to know your professors AND your teaching assistants.

Go introduce yourself and take advantage of their office hours; it gives you the opportunity to get extra help or ask questions that you didn’t want to tackle during lecture. They are here to help you! I have never met a professor that genuinely didn’t care about a student that was putting in effort to do well in a course. Get to know your TAs too; they can be very helpful and will often be the ones grading your work. When you show them that you care about the class and are trying your best to learn the material, it really benefits you at the end of the semester.

Make friends in your lecture.

Having some familiar faces during class can make a large lecture feel smaller because you won’t have to sit amongst strangers. You might meet some study partners that just last for the semester or you could even make a lifelong friend. At the very least, it doesn’t hurt to have someone, especially if you are absent and need to get notes from them.

Go to class and to discussion sections.

The more you actually go to class, the more accustomed you will become to it. Hardly showing up to a class will make it unfamiliar and less comfortable in the environment. Always go to your discussion sections, too; if you aren’t getting the one-on-one attention that you want in your lecture, you are much more likely to get it in your discussion sections with your TAs.

What you put into your class experience dictates what you get out of it. If you put forth the effort to learn best, you’ll have no trouble feeling comfortable in any lecture, whether it has 15 students or 150.

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