The State University of New York Binghamton

Date: Apr 29 2010
Major: Unknown (This Major's Salary over time)
After attending community college for a year I transferred to Binghamton, and I am not pleased with the overall experience. The faculty here is less than helpful, and they are extremely arrogant. When you politely ask for anything most of them look at you like you are wasting their time. The students, for the most part are very "cliquey" as some others have said and remain in their own groups avoiding anything new. If you want to have fun on the nights and weekends you have to blend in to all the other sheep and cram yourselves onto the overcrowded buses to take you downtown to the bars and frats to be met by a bunch of stuck up over-made-up completely shallow individuals. These people are constantly partying, and zombie walking through their classes, which means that the curves at this school are pretty intense. I managed to get through all of my classes without doing much more work than I did in High School, and with pretty horrid attendance because of this. I have found that missing 25% of your classes still makes it possible to get decent grades. Some profs though have very strict attendance policies to combat this, though I find all they really do is force you to sleep on your desk instead of in your bed ;). Thus you don't really have a reason to take pride in the school, or your education. Most people are here to get a degree, to get a job, to make M-O-N-E-Y. The food is terrible. The disciplinary system is completely unjust. I was caught smoking the sticky green stuff as a first offense and the school ordered me to probation until my graduation as well as 10 hours of community service. Seems pretty fair since I broke the rules, but there's more. The "community" service that they assigned me to was cleaning up coal in the central heating plant that heated the school. This involved wiping down pipes with a rag, putting on a mask and going into the giant, dark and dank basement to shovel coal into a wheel barrel and dump it into giant hoppers, as well as vacuuming up any remaining coal dust. I wouldn't have minded the community service so much if i was actually serving the community, and not doing a job that is dangerous to my health. The thing I find most troubling about this school though is the lack of good professors. During my time here I have come to meet very few good professors. Most of the profs don't speak English, and none of them do their own grading. The grading is all done by Ta's whom I believe have no authority to be doing this seeing as the professor has infinite more knowledge on the subject than they ever could. Also from what I've seen it's a lot easier for a TA to swing to either side and be either extremely biased and opinionated, or a careless grader. All in all the Ta's get stuck doing most of the work since the school is so overpopulated. Which leads to another problem, class enrollment. IF you manage to get into a class you actually want, you are considered lucky. Classes fill up very quickly, even for an upper class-man, and some departments get precedent over others for choosing classes, like the all favored Business majors. Even so, finding a glass you will enjoy is nearly impossible since the lack of diversity in classes is practically non existent here. Overall if you are willing to conform to the herd of sheep and mindlessly pursue that degree for the job that will make you some serious dough then this is the school for you.