Every Professor knows your name. Class sizes are maxed out at 40, and those are the intros. The median class size is less than 20. My Russian class was six, and it was just a russian discussion mixed with grammar every day. Similarly, my 425 econ class had 8 people, and we just discussed theories and models in financial markets with our professor (who wrote the textbook). Professors know who you are, and they are teachers, not researchers. They are always available and eager to talk to you about whatever you want. That it includes tangential topics to their courses, extracurricular advice, and just about anything else. Usually, you need to take the initiative to engage your professor, but that is to be expected.
Class discussion is normally tame, but students are always happy to discuss extremely controversial subjects. Furthermore, the fact that everyone is so smart as well as extremely relaxed means that you're in a learning environment 24/7. It's common to be downtown at the bars or a house, trashed, and you'll bump into a friend and end up discussing whether pareto efficiency is a good definition for efficient markets, and then probably not remember it the next day. I have never seen anyone criticized for being into their schoolwork. It's admired. People are only criticized for not being socially active.
Students are not competitive with one another at all. The school is very small, so you will know just about everyone, and by your senior year you will have taken a lot of classes with other people in your major. They will help you and teach you as much as your professor, and you will help them. Students do care deeply about their grades, but it's not a competitive environment.
As an economics major, I am incredibly impressed with the department. The courses are difficult, and I've become an economic encyclopedia. The professors are extremely friendly, brilliant, helpful, and approachable. My advisor is chair of the department, and a borderline savant. Yet I can drop into his office and chit chat about just about whatever, and he is happy to take time out of his work. The best part is that there are no lectures anywhere, including economics. Professors will teach a lesson, but every class is discussion-based, and much of the education comes from the discourse of questions being raised and answered in concert with the lesson.
Finally, the educational environment of the school is excellent. As an economics major, I've only taken theory courses. We are a liberal arts school, and we are being taught to train for jobs and industries that don't exist yet to answer questions that won't even arise for 20 years. We're all smart enough that we don't need to learn information, we learn conceptual framework to digest whatever information we want. The only quasi-vocational class I've seen at school is accounting, which is not included in the economics department precisely because the department does not believe it should be encouraging vocational education. Of course, all the students joke that we will never take accounting, because then we might end up being an accountant.