These Advisor Seminars help to close the gap. Like all freshman advisors, the Advisor Seminar leaders are looking for enthusiastic and committed upperclass students to work with them as Associate Advisors. Groups must be small enough to ensure that everyone joins actively in discussion and feels directly responsible for making it happen. Some of them start getting too comfortably passive. UROP is a classic example.
Many departments have close-knit seminars for their upperclass majors.
Some HASS subjects preserve manageably small classes. Tutorials, special topics, labs, and thesis work are all part of it. But VSG is something MIT can never get enough of. We have to keep finding new ways of building it, always pressing hard to reduce the scale. Each cluster will last no more than a couple of days, but it will run pretty much around the clock, with built-in breaks for eating, recreation and sleep.