I often hear students say they want to go to a medium to large size university and have small classes where they will get to know their professors well. Those characteristics can be hard to find but Emory University provides a creative answer. Located in the heart of Atlanta on a peaceful and pastoral campus, freshman applicants to Emory University can choose to apply to Emory College or Oxford College. Emory College is located in Atlanta while Oxford occupies the original Emory University location 40 miles outside of the city. Oxford can be described as academically equivalent to Emory but environmentally distinct with faculty devoted to teaching undergraduates and involvement in the community.
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| Oxford College |
The Oxford campus is exclusively for freshmen and sophomores (a total of 800 students) and there students get the individual attention and small classes they seek. After two years, they automatically transferred to Emory College, where they assimilate easily into the fabric of city life and the pace of a world class, research oriented university. Over 40% of the classes at Oxford have a service learning component where students apply the knowledge they have gained in the classroom to real world situations. In addition, leadership skill development is stressed at Oxford where student organizations are run by freshmen and sophomores, not juniors and seniors. Emory professors think the Oxford students stand out with well developed writing and research skills and welcome them enthusiastically when they transfer to the Atlanta campus.
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| Dooley, the unofficial mascot of Emory University |
Emory University, which refers to itself as a "pre-professional university", has 5000 graduate students (business, law, medicine, public health, theology, nursing) and 6000 undergraduates. It has strong academic and financial connections to Coca Cola, the Center for Disease Control and the Carter Center. The required freshman seminar class is capped at 15 students and our tour guide, who was from Palo Alto, said her other classes freshman year were about 75 students. Student supported research is a very important part of Emory and it appeared that most students took advantage of this opportunity. About a third of the students join a fraternity or sorority. There is no doubt that Emory students take their studies seriously but they also have serious fun, taking advantage of a generous array of college-sponsored activities and all that Atlanta offers.
