Tell me about the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I live in Shoreline, WA, and I’m considering applying to the UAF. I have read about it, and it sounds right up my alley: strong ecological, environmental, and anthropological departments, not to mention a supposedly beautiful campus and surrounding area. Also, financial aid is supposed to be relatively easy to get, and tuition isn’t too high.

Can anyone tell me more about UAF? Has anyone here gone there? What can you tell me that the books can’t?

Joey

P.S. If this belongs in factual questions, that’s fine.

2

Okay…first let me qualify this by stating I went to school there from '87 to '89 so it’s been a while.

It is a nice little campus, and the tuition was very reasonable back then. The joke also was that if your check cleared you were accepted. Pretty close to true actually.

I could go into details about the classes, professors, academics, etc., (of course I don’t really remember much of that stuff since I was drunk most of the time), but the most important thing you need to know about attending UAF is:
It’s really FRIGGING COLD!

I don’t mean cold as in you need to put on another sweater, I mean that if you live on upper campus and on the way to lower campus and the cafeteria, and it’s January, and you fall off the trail and lay there for awhile, you will die. If you forget to plug your car the night before (if this statement doesn’t make any sense to you, you should do more research) you will not be able to start it the next morning. In fact you probably won’t be able to start it until July.

I grew up in Alaska (not the interior where Fairbanks exists) and still was not prepared for the amazing cold of that place. I suppose you do kind of get used to it after a couple of years, but it’s going to take some work.

It’s cold.

Great place if you like the whole outdoors scene. The mosquitos might surprise you though. Bring a shotgun for them.

Any questions?
Mark

3

Cold. Wasn’t there a winter in Fairbanks where car/truck tires froze?

And dark. Speak of the darkness of a Fairbanks winter.

Long.

And dark.

4

Yep…all of 'em. :slight_smile:

The last winter I spent there the coldest it got was -52 F. That was without wind chill thrown in. I learned quickly when you buy an extension cord to plug your car in at night, don’t buy a cheap one. The first one I had, when I went out the next day to unplug the car, it snapped cleanly into about 5 pieces.

Cold.

Mark

5

Funny, I was on their website the other day looking to track down a prof I thought worked there and, while browsing, noticed they offered a minor in “arctic skills.” Man would I love to offically have arctic skills on my resume. Girls love chicks with skills, especially arctic ones.

Actually, I think it was a program for would be bush pilots.

6

Hey, chicks love girls who want to be bush pilots.

Too easy, couldn’t let that one slip by…

Mark

7

Hey, my brother went there in 86-87. We lived in Upstate NY but he got a full ride. They were looking for out of state students and he had a very good high school record - awesome grades and test scores. He majored in Visual Arts.

Now, he will tell you being there was wonderful and he’d love to go back, but the fact of the matter is he never went to class because he was so depressed being there he couldn’t get his ass out of bed. He lost his scholarship after the first year and got booted out completely the second year. He ended up living in a shelter for awhile before my parents found him and got him to come home. By then he had sold everything he owned.

BTW, he chose it because of the reputation for ugly women and large portions in the cafeteria. This is the kind of person we’re dealing with.

On the upside, he did cross country ski into the side of a moose once while he was there.

8

Holy cats, a thread for which I am probably the most qualified person on the Straight Dope.

Yes, you are looking (well, not looking…you know what I mean) at a graduate from UAF. I attended from 1984-1988. And I grew up in Fairbanks. A;lthough I’ve been living down here in Seattle for the last 12 years my mom and dad and sisters still live up there, so I’m not totally out of touch.

So I am a Fairbanks and UAF subject matter expert. Hell, yeah, baby!

Now, you might not know this, but if you live in Fairbanks in the winter, it’s gonna be cold. And dark. Freezeup by mid-October. Breakup in April or early May. And it’s likely to get down to 60 below a couple of times, I remember one Halloween as a kid when we went trick-or-treating at 30 below, although there’s been a warming trend lately and a few winters it has only got to 50 below for the winter. But it is absolutely still when it gets that cold. Think about it, at 50 below you’re in one of the coldest places on earth at that particular moment. If there were any wind that would imply the air is moving, and the odds are that air from anywhere else would be warmer. So no wind, but you’ve got ice fog. And it’s totally dry, dry as a bone. So it’s cold but it’s a DRY cold! Seriously, I’ve felt colder here in Seattle when it’s 35 degrees and drizzling than in Fairbanks when it’s 15 below. And it only snows when it’s warm, like 10 above and over. Any colder and any moisture in the air has already frozen out long before it reaches Fairbanks. And the snow is very very dry most of the year, like sand or rocks.

But yeah it’s true that you really no-fooling can freeze to death in short order if you make a couple of bad decisions in a row. But if you’re on campus you can sprint from building to building even in a t-shirt without lasting damage…a few minutes of exposed ears won’t give you frostbite even at 40 below. But longer than that and you could be in trouble. But most people have no trouble putting on a parka…the problem comes when you mix walking around at 40 below and alcohol. Those are the guys that freeze to death.

Yeah, you gotta plug in your car. But it’s not true that if you fail once your car is frozen in until spring, you just need to jump it. Every car in Fairbanks carries jumper cables. I was shocked when after I moved down here and accidentally left my headlights on and called up a friend to get a jump and he didn’t have jumper cables! WTF? I thought everyone had jumper cables.

And yeah, it’s dark in mid-winter although Fairbanks is below the arctic circle so you always have some light. Only a few hours of daylight, plus a few hours of twilight. Expect to leave for classes in the dark, see the light while you move between classrooms, then dark as you head for home. The flipside is in the summer, the sun sets for a few hours but the sky never actually gets dark.

As for “large portions in the cafeteria”, well, when I went there you bought a meal card and then it was all you can eat. And there are slightly skewed sex ratios as well…a lot more men choose to move to Alaska than women. If you like hippy-granola outdoor type women you’ll be happy, but there are all types.

Let’s see…Fairbanks is a sizeable town, there are malls and stores and restaurants and one movie theater and cable TV and all that. I’d strongly advise not renting a cabin to live in until you’ve spent at least one winter somewhere where somebody else is responsible for making sure the heat doesn’t go out and the pipes don’t freeze.

Any other question can be answered on request. Moose wandering through campus? Sure it happens, but not every day. There are bears in the interior, but I’ve never actually seen one around Fairbanks, only in Denali state park, although I’ve seen plenty of bear sign…prints and scat (during blueberry season bear poop looks like overripe blueberry jam). Northern lights? Sure, all the time, but you’ve got to be outside to see them and some people hardly venture outdoors during the winter. Crazed loners bent on murder-suicides? It’s happened, but not that often. Watch out for depressed people though. Alcohol and 40 below and 20 hours of darkness don’t mix very well for some people.

9

You can’t go wrong with a Wikipedia link:

and

But the UAF wikipedia entry is totally weak. Barely more than a stub.