Some of the classes are huge lecture halls with at least 200 students. Professors of those classes never know your name, of course. But the smaller classes tend to be about 20-40 people, I would estimate, and teachers often try to learn students' names in those classes. Class participation is common in some classes, and definitely minimal in others. Some teachers are really good at getting the students interested in the subject and initiating discussion, while others are more passive in this respect and would rather do most of the talking themselves. Each class has a different atmosphere, I've noticed.
Having to take four semesters of a foreign language (because I'm in the college of arts and sciences) sucks! I am really bad at learning other languages, memorizing vocabulary, etc. So I can't wait to get that out of the way. I think most students would agree with me on that. I also think the Spanish department here is pretty terrible: the books they choose to use are awful. They don't give hardly any examples, they aren't organized at all (it's impossible to find things in them), the dictionaries in the back don't have half the words you need to look up in them, and the requirements for the course don't help you learn how to speak Spanish at all. I haven't learned how to construct sentences. I can't even say a single sentence in Spanish, and I've taken two semesters of it! I mean, the books we had in high school were much easier to use than the stupid Sabias Que series we're using here. I would like to be able to speak another language, but I've found out college isn't the place to learn one!
Also, being a music minor here sucks a lot, too. Music majors are usually in performance. For they most part, they're uppity bastards who think they're smarter at everyone else and better because they also play an instrument all badass-like. If you're a music minor, all these majors think you're some sort of push over or something. You still have to take classes with the majors, and they go around and say what "their instrument" is. Like the own the world's supply of the damn thing. And I always don't know what to say when that happens because I play like three different instruments and I wouldn't consider any of them "my instrument." The practice building sucks, too. like 80{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} of the pianos in there are pieces of shit. The keys stick and they're always out of tune. This is supposed to be one of the best music schools in the country or something, and the practice building is really small and has crappy pianos? What kind of nonsense is that? Being a music minor has been difficult for me because of how discouraging it is. They pretty much make you feel like if you're only a minor, you probably suck at music but you just like it so you're wasting time and taking up space in the Jacobs School of Music. It has been very frustrating for me, having grown up with a love for music and learned to play multiple instruments and having been involved with a lot of music programs in high school. Now I have to take really basic classes about theory and music history where they treat you like you're in middle school, just because I'm a music minor and wanted to learn about other things rather than being couped up in a stinky room practicing "my instrument" for about 12 hours a day.
As far as what the education is geared towards, I would say that depends on the school or department the student is in. Some schools, probably like the business school and SPEA definitely focus more on getting a job and what types of jobs are available to those students, and a lot of classes required through the college of arts and sciences, which often have nothing to do with a students' major, are more geared toward learning for its own sake, like culture studies and arts and humanities. Some students' majors have nothing to do with courses in those subjects, but they have to take them, anyway.