The State University of New York - Albany

I transferred in from SUNY Purchase, am from the Bronx, and have lived in Brooklyn and various parts of Long Island. I've spent a few years now living off campus in downtown Albany and am about to graduate. So as it goes, I consider myself a pretty well rounded person with a good deal of perspective in regards to the general makeup of the experiences and students you will encounter at SUNY Albany. I have a lot to say and will try to remain objective as best I can.

The most disappointing thing about SUNY Albany is a toss up, split between the student body and the "why am I here?" academics. As you could tell from reading other student reviews, the student body is completely fractured. I could sit here and whine about particular groups of students and how they ruin the experience, but the base problem isn't found in nitpicking how annoying and laughably out of touch the Long Islanders can be, or how the upstaters and "western New Yorkers" (upstaters) somehow feel like Albany rightfully belongs to them (presumably based on geographic location alone) and carry righteous attitudes. Oops, I'm nitpicking. The point is that this sort of nitpicking is a very real daily fact of student life, and do you really want to attend a university where the students are so divided? Keep in mind this is where people are supposed to "become adults", yet nobody can get over something as insubstantial as the area you were raised in. These attitudes reveal a problem that is something much more serious and urgent- a large portion of the student body is comprised of individuals who aren't in college for the right reasons.

A few years ago UAlbany struck it big on the Princeton Review by being named #1 party school in the nation. You can imagine what kinds of students the school ended up attracting. Now, don't get me wrong, I love to party and and can black-out in the bathtub with the best of them, but that was never my primary motivation in going to school. For a lot of the students here, college was just the next step in life. When I first went to SUNY Purchase, I was completely directionless, but soon I found what I wanted to do, and realized that SUNY Albany would be a good match based on the programs they offered. I might be generalizing here but most students I've met, when asked, don't say they chose Albany for the programs they offered.

The most popular undergraduate programs here reveal the intentions of the student body. The most popular majors include business, psychology, and social sciences. Now, if there's anything that says "Uh, I guess so." in a major, it's psychology, and the glut of students who pursue a psychology degree is ridiculous. The business majors as a complete total are vapid and here to party and no one fools themselves into thinking otherwise. You can major in whatever you want and by no means do you have to go after basket-weaving degrees like those, but take note that A LOT of people here do. And you have to live with them, both in a figurative sense and a more literal sense, like when you get assigned random housing first year. The freshman roommate nightmare stories are plenty. It's almost a right of passage. And all those roommates who so many people ran from, they all still exist on campus, in YOUR potential group of people to meet later on throughout the years. It wasn't like this at Purchase at all, so it's not simply a state college thing.

The academics. Having double majored in Japanese and Computer Science I feel like I can say again that I have a slight advantage of perspective, as Japanese is humanities centered, and Comp Sci is a technical field. But before I go in about my experiences in the majors, let me talk about the general education requirement.

Gen ed requirements are among the aspects of college that most desperately needed reforming. It's not at all just a SUNY Albany problem, or a public school problem. However here at Albany the problem of gen eds gets magnified by the "I don't give a damn" faculty. Think you hate learning things that you don't give two turds about? Imagine the people who have to teach these things, to audiences of students who they know couldn't care less. One of my requirements was Intro to Psychology. Remember when the Boston Red Sox beat the Yankees in the World Series in 2004? The professor played a clip of the last few plays to my lecture hall, which sat about 450 people. When it was over, he made no attempts at even a half-hearted connection to any of the material we were learning at the time. He just wanted to make us watch baseball. We were paying money to receive an education, not to mention we have to spend something even more precious to go to class- our time. This is an extreme example, but this attitude prevails throughout the gen eds.

Japanese. Professors were amazing, and I felt like I learned a lot and I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

Computer Science. Not so much. Computer Science professors suffer from the same attitude that math professors suffer from- they know the things they're teaching you in their sleep, so so do you. Their expertise handicaps their roles as educators. Not to mention that the comp sci faculty is a full spectrum of mentally "off" people. That's to be expected in some way, computer science people are all a little off and too geeky for their own good sometimes (myself not at all included, of course), but for a good taste go read Harry Hunt's reviews on ratemyprofessor.com.

I could go on forever, so to cut it short and sweet, I don't feel secure in entering the job market with the education I've been given. I feel like I wasted my time with busywork when there are real concepts out there I could have learned. I guess I should have gone to MIT or GT, or Carnegie Mellon or even RPI. Oh well, that boat sailed a long time ago.

Albany. Now if you've gotten this far I congratulate you. This means you passed the attention test and you are the type of person who will have wasted themselves at SUNY Albany. But just to really convince you let me talk about the area itself. Albany mirrors the school in that it has two major negatives going against it. One, the winters here are BRUTAL. Without exaggeration, they're almost 6 months long, from late October to early April. It snowed the other day, April 7th, 2009. Seeing snow in April is always no fun. Then it snowed harder the next day. You can look it up.

If you live on campus, you won't notice it as much, because there's underground tunnels and you can kind of live within the main campus. But if you live in an off-campus apartment, it's a struggle. Albany is a poor city, and people, either out of laziness or poverty, don't shovel their sidewalks. It sounds sort of trivial but Albany is located at the beginning of a different climate system (you can look this up too) from the rest of the south of the state. If you come from above Albany, you won't notice any real difference. But anyway, the winters are brutal, and the snow piles up, melts partially, then solidifies into ice for about 2 or 3 months. No one salts because you'd be wasting your money, because it snows so often. So Albany becomes an arctic wasteland for a quarter of the year.

Two, Albany is incredibly dangerous. I grew up in the Bronx, probably the most seedy and dangerous area of NYC as a whole, and yet I have to worry at times when I walk around Albany. This past year a student was murdered, Richard Bailey. Months later their are no leads on this senseless and tragic crime. Also in the past year residents of Albany began an anti-gun violence movement, resulting from the shooting of a 10 year old girl on her porch, Kathina Thomas. Shirts were printed saying "ENOUGH" and depicting a gun with the Albany skyline rising off the barrel, and a lot of people wore these shirts on the streets.

When I first moved downtown to what they call the student ghetto, I heard that a body was dragged from the lake in Washington Park. When I moved out of that apartment to move further downtown, a month later the teenager who lived in the house directly opposite mine was stabbed to death, Francisco Delacruz. You can look up all of the people I mentioned. And maybe you should.

Lately the violence and crime has moved to the campus, which used to be somewhat safe and removed. All students receive email notifications when incidents happen, and it's getting worse. Do you really want to live and study and party in an environment like this?

Lame student body.
Pointless academics.
Terrible winters.
Crazy amount of crime.If you're thinking SUNY, there's always Buffalo or Stony Brook or Binghamton. But forget Albany. Run.