Madison Area Technical College

Date: Feb 26 2004
Major: Other (This Major's Salary over time)
I'm attending MATC as a college transfer student. I'm a returning adult student, and am basically taking a few classes to get back into the swing of things.

Pros:

To be honest, I expected my classes to be much easier than they have been—MATC has a reputation as being very easy due to its open-admissions policy. But I believe that it is not as easy as it used to be—the school and state have upped the standards. This is great, though, as I'm learning knowledge I can apply when I go on to the Big Pond (UW-Madison).

I'm finding that I do have to study to stay ahead, but that my classes are in general very interesting.

I'm fairly impressed with the services MATC provides. As a student enrolled in even one credit course, you have free access to the on-campus nurse (she has helped catch a few cases of breast cancer!), access to a fairly nice gym and pool, and other little extras—I attended a

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workshop for free. This is nice; I don't think many other tech schools have the resources that come with a large student body.

MATC seems to have a strong relationship with other Wisconsin schools—including UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, and Milwaukee School of Engineering. I would recommend coming here if you're thinking about transferring to another in-state school.

Cons:

Something that has been disheartening is that many of my classmates are surprisingly small-minded for people who live in Madison. Sure, the town isn't as diverse as say, Los Angeles, but many of my classmates seem to teleport here from small towns in Northern Wisconsin; they only sit with people who look like them and talk to people who look like them. In my Psychology class, I'm heard some anti-homosexual things that seem to come out of the 50's.

One class I started to take, on developmental psych, was very weak and flimsy; the syllabus had us basically writing short 1-page essays on our life experiences at different life stages. The class would have taught me about myself, but not about developmental theory. Guess what? If I want therapy, I'll pay for that. I don't need to pay money to write myself a diary. I would suggest checking out your classes to see which ones are strong and which not.