The University of Maryland - College Park

Date: Jan 03 2004
Major: Computer Science (This Major's Salary over time)
Perhaps my first mistake was not visiting the campus before deciding to apply. Sure - my friends were quite pleased with it - but, unfortunately, I now believe that my friends' priorities and mine are somewhat different. Let's see, where might we begin? Oh, yes, the academics. Bland, uninteresting, boring, easy. No challenge at all. I consider myself lazy, a master of procrastination, but of the 12 midterms and finals that I took last semester, all of them in classes of 30 or more students, I got the class-high grade on 6 of them. Got 100% on 3 of them. Give me a break. The classes are unchallenging in the extreme if you're willing to study and put a little time into them. I would rather take courses that were actually hard - it's difficult to believe that the comp sci program here is #11 in the country as of this writing. As an upside, though - the faculty is usually quite nice. I've only had one truly bad prof so far, and it was obvious that she just didn't know what she was doing. For you CS nuts, how hard is it to make a function that returns the number of nodes in a binary search tree? Oh, come on, it's *4 lines*. A single if-else. Give me a break :) It took her *45 minutes*, and her function was *two pages*. This is anecdoctal, sure, but it's characteristic of the intellectual level of many of the university's programs. On the upside, even my less-than-qualified profs have been quite receptive to my concerns :) But now… for the straw that broke the camel's back. The STUDENTS. Wow. Um, I don't know what to say. I've never been in an environment in my life that so effectively prevented me from finding meaningful, deep, and personal friendships. You see, I don't want alcohol, drugs, sex, partying, and so forth. I want people who have interesting traits, anything really, as long as it's going to benefit me somehow instead of sending me plummeting to the depths of a moronitude so profound that my skull caves in. But it seems that the majority of students either are so insular that they cannot relate to you at all, or they are concerned only with their trite, immature, hedonistic attachment to the finer points in life - alcohol, sex, et al. So if you want some sort of intellectual gratification, I highly recommend a more favorable institution, like MIT, or cal-tech, or berkeley, or *any place* but here - may I suggest UNC Chapel Hill or Michigan for those of you who are not ivy-league inclined? Oh, but if you like destroying your brain cells every weekend, you'll love UMD. If my style of prose causes your eyes to droop and your hands to involuntarily twitch with an unknown rage, you'll love UMD. Or else maybe I'm just an easy target. There is one upside, though, which will perhaps cement for you once and for all a perception of my characteristics. The libraries at UMD, of which there are eight - seven on campus - are quite nice and very well endowed, although it is possible that I am suffering from a serious dose of naivete. Still, they're nice primarily because the vast majority of students perceive no need to attend. And it appears that time is drawing short. So even though it may sound like I am bitter - and in a sense, I am, but only because I am consigned to spending another two years at this dismal institution because of monetary concerns, since both of my scholarships disappear in an instant should I go out of state - UMCP *is* decent. However, if you still have other options open, I would strongly suggest looking elsewhere. No matter what your interests or needs, there will be another place that far better serves them.