George Mason University

Students can largely be segregated into two groups:

1) Spoil, rich kids who are too stupid for their wise affluent parents to justify tuition elsewhere
2) Really bright hard-working individuals from humble backgrounds and cannot afford higher tuitions at quality schools

Unfortunately, the administration's stated mission is to become the "college of Northern Virginia" and are striving to grow the student body by leaps-and-bounds. Thus, more and more student in category 1 are being admitted and the administration is not focused on quality education to attract more students from category 2.

The School of Management is a joke. More students than not were struggling with the concept of net present value....AND these were finance majors in senior level finance courses.Do not choose GMU unless you have no ambitions.

The other exclusive groups include the older returning to college students who walk around with their books in those suit-cases on wheels, (hey, they do have their own lives, and kids to get back to, so you won't be chilling with them anyway) and the asian, south-asian, and middle eastern ethnic cliques that just associate with their own kind and speak with each other in their own language.

The campus is really structured like it's assumed that you are coming here WITH people that you know; the way the tables are set up for large friend-cliques in the student centers and the main outdoor areas are large expanses of tile and concrete with hardly any benches or other seating, encouraging people to just walk through (quickly) without taking time to sit or talk to anyone around them. There are also really no places to go on campus to meet people that aren't full of exclusive cliques that just want to hang out with their own friends.

Trying to have a social life at Mason is like walking up to a stranger you see walking by in a shopping mall and asking if they want to hang out, or doing that in a movie theater when everybody is getting up and leaving after the movie.

If you transfer in, and you're not from the area you won't get on-campus housing, (it's PACKED and heavily wait-listed) so you'll have to get an apartment in the area and commute; and you REALLY won't meet people then.

The surrounding area of Northern Virginia is similar; it's not a college town. The Main campus is right smack in the middle of super-suburbia, Fairfax County. Most people around are family oriented; they have houses, kids, and commute to somewhere inside the beltway. There are no real college-night type bars or clubs or young-people hangouts.

Academically, I'm a Government and International Politics major, and I find the program pretty weak. Most of my professors have been moron adjunct faculty that grade unrealistically when you consider the low quality material that they teach; Kamal Beyolough regularly gave his Government 101 classes an average C-. And if it's not that, they're busy working on their projects for tenure-review or something similar and say (well, I'm writing my book right now, I can't really talk to you about that)

The only people who have anything nice to say about this school are the ones who went to high school in the area and go here with lots of their friends.