Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/194

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tenth as many. There is more chance, therefore, in the small college for the shy, unaggressive, commonplace man to gain prominence than in the larger one. There is, perhaps, more general comradeship, brotherly feeling, the life is more like home life, though the number of men whom one can know in a small college is not greater if so great as is possible in a big university outside of a great city.

The larger institution makes the stronger appeal to the man with initiative because it offers to him greater possibilities. To be manager or editor of a great college daily, to be captain of an athletic team whose victories are heralded from New York to San Francisco, to be president of a student organization in which there are five thousand votes to be considered, makes a strong appeal to the ambitious student. The opportunity, too, to touch elbows with men from all over the world, such men as one finds in a big university, is no small matter. The student in any large American university has a chance to know men from almost every civilized country in the world. The variety of interests, also, in the big institution is worth considering. I count it as one of the most valuable experiences of my college course, that though I was primarily interested in languages and literature while I was an undergraduate, yet I had daily associations with engineers and chemists, with prep-medics and mathematicians, and that, without consciously doing so, I acquired a considerable body of information and grew interested in a thousand incidental things through this association. One