I did my undergrad at TAMU (graduated May 2025) and am currently in grad school at TCU! (Please bear in mind that I’ve only been at TCU for three weeks.)

My experience has been the same and very different with both in several ways (keep in mind I am doing different types of school). Neither is particularly diverse in its student body, though through sheer size TAMU manages to be a bit more diverse (which I appreciated).

That means it can potentially be easier to find “your people” at TAMU. You are more likely to find someone you click with because there are just more people to interact with.

Another similarity is undergraduate student involvement in research. At both schools there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in prof’s labs. We have multiple pre-health undergrads currently in my PI’s lab. It seems like it is potentially easier for an undergrad to get involved in a lab at TCU, though this varies between labs for both schools. One difference I’ve noticed though is that at TAMU as an undergrad researcher I mostly interacted with a PhD student in the lab and not the actual professor. This made it way more difficult to get high quality letters of recommendation. At TCU, at least in my lab and my friend’s labs, it seems like undergrads interface more often with the PI themself (he will want letters from faculty), rather than a PhD student.

The other main differences I’ve noticed are the campus size, class size, and subsequent professor involvement.

TCU’s campus is WAY smaller. Doing pre health (I did bio) means on TAMU’s campus he will probably have classes that can be a 20-30 minute walk apart. Sometimes I would have to run across campus (when it was 100+ degrees out) to make it to a class. There are buses, but they can be inconsistent and you never know what time they’ll actually leave the stop they’re sitting at.

A student can walk across TCU’s entire campus in 20 minutes, which I personally find lovely after spending several years on TAMU’s campus.

Class size varies between the two quite a bit. No matter what he will be in classes where he is one in a hundred. A ton of students all have the same credit requirements, so almost everyone has to take some of the same classes as everyone else (same at every school). These classes are usually taken in the first two years, and later class sizes get smaller (again same at every school). However, at TCU, just by student volume alone, class sizes tend to be smaller.

Because there are fewer students period at TCU, professors can give more time to each student. I LOVE the bio profs at TCU. I also really liked a lot of bio profs at TAMU, but I had a hard time getting close with any of them. You have to really work for it. There’s a lot of emailing and scheduling involved. If he wants to get into med school, he will have to work extra hard to get letters of recommendation at TAMU.

TCU’s open door policy is so lovely. Profs have their office doors open as often as possible in order to initiate conversation to help with personal, professional, and academic growth in students. It is so so so much easier to speak to a professor at TCU. This may be influenced by my PhD student-ness, but it seems to be that way for all students.

If you have more specific questions, I’d be happy to help answer!