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Yes!  (And thanks for asking :)  What you write about students' feeling alternatively diminished and enlarged reminds me of what it felt like to me to live in Manhattan when I was a young adult.  I walked around a lot -- often from my apartment at 44th and 9th and my school at 70th and Lex.  Or all the way down 5th Avenue to Washington Square Park.  I loved it, and still do.  I would feel so much part of something big and vibrant, and endlessly interesting, and often loved the feeling of anonymity-and-possibility, and also a satisfying connection to people and buildings, scenes, traffic around me -- not personal, but not impersonal, either.  At the same time, I do think it was daunting, and sometimes made me feel small and insignificant not in a freeing but more in a cowing way. 

I appreciate your recalling me to Arlo's important session last year.  This reminds me that an idea I have for our group this year is to investigate the meaning, import, and possible transformation of the idea/issue of scale.  What is it?  Could we come up with a new mathematics for it, one that would somehow integrate particularity with magnitude?