The University of Utah

Date: Mar 14 2003
Major: Anthropology (This Major's Salary over time)
As someone who fancies myself to be a reasonably intellectual person, I found the University of Utah classroom to be friendly and intellectually stimulating. The professors and other departmental functionaries are always happy to give you their time and are very approachable and surprisingly cheerful and funny.

The academic environment in my departments was actually quite rigorous, relying less on testing and more on serious papers (often, only one or two 10-30 page term papers) and intelligent participation in classroom discussions. Students who take extra time to converse with their professors about class subject matter outside the classroom also tend to score more highly, as I think they should. There are a lot of bright people at the University of Utah and a lot of excellent faculty; taking the time to get to know some of them was one of the better experiences of my life.

For a university of this size (it's quite large), the number of mammoth-sized classes that I had to contend with was surprisingly small. As an underclassmen, I rarely had classes that exceeded 200 in size; by the time I was doing senior-level coursework, most of my classes were 15-40 people large and by the end of the semester I would generally feel quite familiar with other students in my classes.

Notice that I've discussed only academics thus far. That's because there is NO NIGHT LIFE and NO SOCIAL LIFE in Salt Lake City. It's the nature of the place; the entire state of Utah is very devoutly Mormon and as such, things such as drinking or even going to a PG-13 movie after 10:00 PM are frowned upon, really in an almost puritanical way. The University of Utah is easily and by a large margin the most liberal few square miles in the entire state of Utah, and you will find that there is a lot of dislike and distaste for

those liberals at the University of Utah

in the suburbs surrounding Salt Lake City. For most residents of the state, the respected school is the less rigorous, but much more conservative rival school, Brigham Young University (BYU) whose students are not even allowed to wear shorts or have facial hair!

But I digress. For academics, Utah is a solid school with a very high cost/value ratio compared to most other schools in the nation. I would consider Utah to be among the "best" of state schools because of the number of programs in which it is nationally ranked, something that most people outside academia don't even realize (check the NRC rankings, for example).

My degree from Utah, along with good recommendations from its respected faculty, got me accepted into an Ivy-leage school for graduate work—so don't discount Utah as a great foundation for an academic career. Just don't expect to be drunk too often…