Rider University

When I applied to Rider, I was an underachieving honors student. I realized that I botched up my high school career after receiving not-so-wonderful grades for some very hard high school classes. My SATs were strong but my GPA was under a 3.0. I was accepted to Rider and reluctantly went, carrying a bad attitude with me in the beginning. Well, that changed quite abruptly! Weeks into my first semester, I learned that the Rider faculty was serious and the workload was pretty heavy. It definitely rivaled schools that were ranked higher (I know this through friends) and it certainly was more challenging that schools that ranked equal or lower (again, I know this through friends). I remember spending countless hours working on writing assignments--they broke me--but, in the long-run, those assignments put me ahead of the game when I entered the workforce. Classes that I thought would mean nothing to me in some distant future, have paid off. I took a course called Logic and Language that changed my whole sense of thinking when trying to prove an important point. Jeez, and it is 15 years later, and I am still babbling about it!!!!On the downside (yes, I think there is a downside), Rider needed to work on building a strong community back then and based on the other comments on this board, they still have the same problem. Not only does Rider become a ghost town on the weekends (I, too, was a sorority girl--the only thing to really do on weekends) but there is a real sense of a homogeneous, sterotypical type of person that attends Rider. Twenty years ago, they seemed to be the future Yuppy types. I assume not much has changed. There is a lack of diversity in style and thought at the school (forget demographics, that is another story). In retrospect, I feel as though I played a different person because I wanted to be like everyone else. I worried about my hair, my clothes, my overall image. Today, I think I am just me...a little funky...a little artsy...a little hippy...something un-Rider.

Alumnus Male -- Class 2000

When I applied to Rider, I was an underachieving honors student. I realized that I botched up my high school career after receiving not-so-wonderful grades for some very hard high school classes. My SATs were strong but my GPA was under a 3.0. I was accepted to Rider and reluctantly went, carrying a bad attitude with me in the beginning. Well, that changed quite abruptly! Weeks into my first semester, I learned that the Rider faculty was serious and the workload was pretty heavy. It definitely rivaled schools that were ranked higher (I know this through friends) and it certainly was more challenging that schools that ranked equal or lower (again, I know this through friends). I remember spending countless hours working on writing assignments--they broke me--but, in the long-run, those assignments put me ahead of the game when I entered the workforce. Classes that I thought would mean nothing to me in some distant future, have paid off. I took a course called Logic and Language that changed my whole sense of thinking when trying to prove an important point. Jeez, and it is 15 years later, and I am still babbling about it!!!!On the downside (yes, I think there is a downside), Rider needed to work on building a strong community back then and based on the other comments on this board, they still have the same problem. Not only does Rider become a ghost town on the weekends (I, too, was a sorority girl--the only thing to really do on weekends) but there is a real sense of a homogeneous, sterotypical type of person that attends Rider. Twenty years ago, they seemed to be the future Yuppy types. I assume not much has changed. There lacks diversity in style and thought at the school (forget demographics, that is another story). In retrospect, I feel as though I played a different person because I wanted to be like everyone else. I worried about my hair, my clothes, my overall image. Today, I think I am just me...a little funky...a little artsy...a little hippy...something un-Rider.

Alumnus Male -- Class 2000