One of the Shibblets is in her Junior year and getting a little more serious about deciding where she might like to attend school. To that end, I want to get Doper insights that aren’t in the colorful brochures.
Tell me about your school. Why did you love it? Why did you hate it? What don’t most people know about it? Would you do it again, if you could do it all over? What were you looking for? What did you find? Be creative, letter grades will not be given.
Thanks,
Shibb
Congratulations to Shibblet #1 for getting started on this. Miss DrumBum started looking around in 8th grade.
I went to Stanford for undergraduate studies as well as graduate degrees, and really enjoyed it. It was a school full of bright people from around the US and was located in a scenic part of Northern California ( just south of SF ). What attracted me to it was the location and relatively small size of the student body. It was nice to be close to the beach and the ski resorts when you needed to relieve some stress.
I can think of only two things that I did not like about it. The dorms were quite old and in bad need of upgrading ( mine dated from 1945 ) but money went elsewhere. The other gripe was the “visiting professor” syndrome. This occurred when a academic would arrive for a teaching sabbatical and was not very interested in student feedback. They would also possess an impenetrable accent and horrible handwriting, leaving the student to guess at the direction they were taking. As they were only visiting, disagreements around grades had to be taken up with the dean.
I went to the University of Michigan for undergraduate studies and I cannot say enough positive things about it. I am heart and soul committed to that school for all that they gave to me.
Growing up in rural Michigan, Ann Arbor is one of the few liberal bubbles that exists, and I visited there frequently far before attending school there. It’s got a very hippie/multicultural feel (LOTS of international students, very large LGBT community), and there is a good live music and art scene and is a great place for creative types. Oh, and the awesome restaurants - great middle eastern eating as it’s so close to Dearborn. My favorite Ann Arbor event is the annual art fair, which is an enormous event where people come from all over the country to set up their art kiosks for blocks and blocks. It’s not kitschy stuff, it’s just full of creative genius. I decided when I was 9 years old that I wanted to attend U of M, and I did, and it was just as awesome as I expected it to be.
Academics are very rigorous with a heavy emphasis on critical thinking. (I took classes in Spanish Lit, English, Existentialism, Philosophy, political economy, etc. so my perspective is very humanities-oriented.) I was in the Residential College which is a self-contained living-learning program within the larger university. In order to get an RC degree you have to pass a proficiency exam in a foreign language. That doesn’t have to be your major and you’ll take a mix of classes all over campus, but the RC has its own dorm, classrooms, cafeteria, theater, music rooms all in the same building, so it’s a lot more intimate feel and you can totally just roll out of bed, shuffle down the hall and go to class without changing out of your pajamas.
You can take a class on just about anything, and some of the classes are weirdly specific. For example, one of my Spanish classes was ‘‘Homosexuality in the Carribbean and its disapora.’’ Another class was, ‘‘1889: Nietzsche’s final year and descent into madness.’’ Yes, an entire class about one year of Nietzsche’s life. For someone who had lived a pretty isolated life without exposure to so many ideas, it was mind blowing. It was like each class contained an entire new universe of ideas.
The campus is beautiful. It looks like a college campus should. Not far from there is a great park called the Arboretum, and there’s a botanical garden as well.
One of my favorite things about U of M is that its administrators are just as committed to social justice as the students. The school has notoriously defended affirmative action, equal benefits for same-sex partners and a number of other liberal causes. I took that for granted a lot, because when I went to Penn for grad school I was stunned by how relatively conservative it was.
Cons - you’re one of 50,000 students so good luck getting any administrative work done. I was lucky because the RC has its own administration department and they knew me by name, but dealing with the university administration is like pulling teeth.
There are some spoiled rich kids there with entitlement attitudes who don’t really add anything to the classroom environment, and if you’re really into academics, it’s annoying.
It’s fucking expensive. I lucked out with financial aid and scholarships, but in-state tuition in 2007 (when I graduated) was something like $20k a year. That’s not including room and board. Rent is expensive, food is expensive, and all campus stores are expensive. You have to take a bus to get to normally-priced stores like Target or Walmart.
A lot of classes are taught by grad students, which is fine in and of itself, but there were a lot of complaints from the science/math students that these grad instructors really didn’t speak English well enough to teach.
But yeah. I know I’m gushing. I don’t know. I just love U of M. I owe so much of who I am to that school and the way it taught me to think (not to mention I met my husband there!) Maybe it wouldn’t be so mind-blowing from someone with a less culturally homogenous upbringing, but for me I’d say it set the course of the rest of my life (so far.)
Purdue was exactly what I expected it to be, I guess. It’s big and there are a lot of rigorous science, engineering, and agriculture programs. At the time I attended (undergrad started in 1998) they hadn’t begun the big sexy building boom that was in swing by the time I left; the computer science program still lived in the “Memorial Gymnasivm” and the art classes were still in quonset huts.
It’s easy for an in-state applicant to get in to Purdue (SAT cutoff 900, I heard) but it’s really hard to stay in some of the programs, once you’re there. Purdue believes in weedout classes.
I spent more or less time in the computer science, biology, psychology and English lang-lit departments while I was there. In the science-oriented classes, class numbers were huge and lectures were impersonal; you could always go to office hours if you wanted one-on-one attention though (and office hours were usually sparsely attended). I appreciated this; I like to blend in to the crowd and figure things out on my own.
There was plenty of weirdness on campus. A camel walked by my dorm room window once, Indian kids played cricket on the mall, enginerds build their own scooters and tootle around campus on them, and in the summer the Mexican kid working the hotdog stand got bored and started bringing his guitar and serenading passers-by.
I loved it. It’s not a small-class touchy feely liberal arts campus, it makes you find your own way, and that was fine with me.
I attended Penn State, and other than “growing up in rural ¶” and the “liberal bubbles” I could pretty much change a few words in this post, and it would apply…
Got a degree in Psychology, but took courses in just about everything and got to work in some really cool laboratories… prepared me well for graduate school, and I am now a professor in a smaller liberal arts University… I have a lot of respect for state universities.
Having just gone through this process with my soon-to-graduate h.s. senior son, I will proffer a few words of wisdom (?), mainly because I went where I went because Dad said, “This is where you are going to go.” College selection process complete. 
Campus tours, IMHO, are a monumental waste of time, unless you get a one-on-one tour, and even then, the value is iffy. Tours tend to be rushed and admissions-spiel-driven. Of course, this may be the only way you get to see the inside of residence halls. YMMV.
The thing I (and my son) found most helpful was attending a class and talking with a professor. We tried to schedule the same kind of class at each place he was considering in hopes of having an apples-to-apples comparison.
Good luck! We’re now in the “waiting for financial aid packages” phase.
I went to the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and all of it describes Madison pretty well, too. 
Like Ann Arbor, Madison is a uber-liberal, counter-culture sort of place, in a state that’s otherwise pretty conservative. It has a lot of very well-regarded programs – the business program (which I completed) isn’t top-of-the-top, but most third-party rankings put it in the upper tier.
As olivesmarch4th noted, I had some classes taught by TAs, which was often dicey, as many of them were foreign, and difficult to understand. But, most of my classes were taught by professors, and most of them were very solid teachers.
I had high-school friends who cautioned me, “Madison’s so big, you’re going to feel lost in the crowd there”. Yes, there’s 45,000 students…but it’s not like you need to meet all of them. 
One advantage to a bigger school is that, whatever niche interest or avocation you might have, you’re going to be able to find others who share it. I made a lot of dear friends, many of whom I’m still in regular touch with, 25 years later.
Madison has a beautiful campus, with hills, woods, and lakes; the dorms I lived in were directly on the shore of Lake Mendota. However, it’s a little spread-out, and it wasn’t uncommon to have to walk 20-30 minutes to get from one place to another – lovely when the weather was nice, but brutal in January.
I definitely loved the atmosphere in Madison, but the ultra-liberal aspect, and super-political-correctness, started to wear on me after a while (and I’m a political and social liberal). There was always something being protested, and something that had the student newspaper’s undies in a twist – as this was the 1980s, one month it was the U.S.'s involvement in Nicaragua; the next month, it was trying to get ROTC kicked off campus (because gays weren’t allowed in the military). After getting my bachelor’s degree, I stayed in Madison for another 2 years for my master’s (MS in market research), and by the end of 6 years, I was ready to live somewhere else.
Probably my only real regret had nothing (directly) to do with Madison itself, but there was so much of a social life there that I didn’t study as hard as I might have. I wasn’t a grinder, and enjoyed doing things with my friends (sometimes more than I should have). I got fairly good grades, but I could have done considerably better had I applied myself more.
Would I go to Madison again, given the chance? Definitely.
In grad school I met a lot of people from U of Wisconsin and Penn State and they all seemed to love their alma mater. I hear Madison is awesome.
The University of Hawaii. Got a wife out of it. And it’s in Hawaii. A major downside is living expenses. But did I mention it’s in Hawaii?
Started at Salisbury State on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It’s a very small state school in the University of Maryland system. It was a nice quiet little school in a nice quiet little town.
I transferred to the main University of Maryland campus in College Park. It’s a typical big state school, in a typical college town, with all of the typical distractions and trouble.
I should have stayed in Salisbury. I wouldn’t have had as much fun, but I would have gotten a better education.
CalPoly, San Luis Obispo - great location and small town feel. Known for it’s engineering programs with emphasis on “hands on learning” but I still had a few roommates in the liberal arts. Small class sizes (with no TA’s that I was aware of when I was there). Professors very accessible. Most programs are undergrad with a few grad degrees in engineering, business. A lot of prestige for a CalState school. You must declare a major in order to apply and admissions are competitive (depending on which program you apply to). 37.4% acceptance rate with a 91% freshman retention rate. Student body ~19,000.
I thoroughly enjoyed my undergrad experience there 
Besides San Luis Obispo is known as the Happiest Town in America 
I go to Wentworth Institute of Technology and love it. I’m a freshman right now but when I am a junior, I will have co-op which means I will work in my field(computer science) for two semesters instead of taking classes. Wentworth is a specialized school so almost all of your classes are related to your major. I also have done some awesome things with a club called AITP(Association for Information Technology Professionals.) The location is great too. It’s in the Fenway/Kenmore area in Boston.
It’s also the “Eat it guy’s” alma mater.
Maybe, but they sure beat looking on the website. My daughter went to Maryland, and gave tours, since she was the girl from California who chose Maryland over her state schools. (And a good choice it was.)
That is good, but so is staying in a dorm. When my daughter visited the University of Delaware, she found that a lot of students were trying to transfer to Maryland! When I visited MIT and stayed in a dorm, I stayed with a batch of phone hackers who had talked to bombers over Vietnam from the hall phone using various secret tie lines. I immediately knew that was the place for me.
I chose MIT after a visit because I found computers around every corner. (This was in 1969, when that actually meant something.) My older daughter chose the University of Chicago because it was quirky, and she loved it. My younger daughter was looking for equestrian teams and chose Maryland both for having a barn not far away and because she liked the bricks. She loved it also.
Do the tours, have your kid stay in a dorm for the night, go to classes, but trust the kid’s reaction. Colleges are very individual. Chicago was rated as about the worst party school in the country - but it has ScavHunt, and these things were both big pluses for my kid. It would be a total turnoff for other kids - even my other daughter.
If the kid is interested in research type work, pick a university with access to famous professors and some sort of way for undergrads to do research. If not this won’t be useful. My older daughter got to work some with a famous professor that helped her on her way to PhD research. My younger one took advantage of the year abroad program and a special office which helped her get a Fulbright.
And I met my wife at MIT, which just goes to show you can never tell.
College of William and Mary. Loved it. It was full of smart nerdy people, and while I think the institution’s priorities have tipped a little too much toward trying to compete with the big research universities, in the '90s it was still a small liberal arts college at heart. I had, I think, a grand total of four big lecture courses in four years; otherwise, it was pretty much all seminars, all reading-and-writing-intensive.
The downsides are that it is in Colonial Williamsburg – not the most exciting place to turn twenty-one, although there is a certain amusing level of surrealism – and there is a certain amount of claustrophobia that sets in after a while, particularly when you’re cooped up with a bunch of other nerdy kids with poor social skills and about as little common sense as most people have at that age.
I had the total opposite of a traditional college experience. I took fashion classes beginning in 10th grade and decided then that I wanted to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. When I was a senior I wasn’t even going to apply to any other schools except my counselor made me apply to a state school as a back up. I got into FIT early admission however, so it wasn’t a problem.
I liked FIT and I love living in New York, but it was not an intellectually stimulating environment. I didn’t expect it to be being a fashion school, but I was surprised how vacant, for lack of a better word, many of the people there were. A lot of people went there because they liked to shop and thought that would translate into enjoying a career in fashion. I knew a bunch of people who dropped out because they either weren’t college material regardless of the subject or they decided fashion was not a career choice for them.
FIT is part of the SUNY (State University of New York) system so it wasn’t a complete intellectual wasteland plus they had a program for people with high grades that offered “serious” classes. If it weren’t for that I don’t think I would have survived.
Before going to school I read in a magazine that going to college in a big city is more like being someone who lives in the city and happens to go to school, not the other way around, and I agree. Going to FIT and getting school work done was just like one more thing I had to do. I also worked and was living in Brooklyn for most of the time so I didn’t really have a sense of school pride, or belonging to a school community.
Despite all this I learned some valuable skills at FIT. Being almost like a trade school in a way they placed a lot of emphasis on “real life” skills like how to interview, how to handle delicate work situations, how to write resumes and cover letters, etc. that may not be discussed in class at a more traditional institution. There’s also a lot of emphasis on networking at FIT and a strong alumni network. There were also many interesting people there and I feel like I experienced “being an adult” a lot sooner than my friends who dormed on an isolated campus at state schools did since I was living in Brooklyn, working, paying rent & bills, etc. while in school.
I ended up not working in fashion but I felt it was best to stick it out at FIT rather than incur a bunch of debt starting over. My degree is essentially a business degree with a fashion emphasis anyway. I did take a bunch of extra classes so I could get out early though as I started to find school very tedious. I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree after 3 years- best choice I ever made. And of course I’m grateful for the friendships that I made although to be honest I didn’t fit in with a lot of FIT kids. I can count my friends from FIT on one hand, but I believe in quality over quantity, so that’s fine. Also got a great gig catsitting from going there!
University of Notre Dame. Pretty much hated it. It was isolated and insular and conservative and it just didn’t work for me at all. The campus is pretty. I only remember having a TA once. There was no curve. The dorms were sex-segregated and the male students could get their laundry done but the female students had to do their own.
That’s about all I remember.
I went to Illinois. Ditto everything said earlier in the thread about Big Ten schools.
I went there for grad school though the town was a lot smaller 40 years ago. I liked it fine.
My wife went to William and Mary, and liked it, and then went to Dartmouth for grad school. She says she wouldn’t send a dog to Dartmouth.