Lebanon Valley College

Date: Mar 30 2005
Major: Physical Therapy/Exercise Science (This Major's Salary over time)
Only a select few professors are genuinely interested in the success of their students and seem to wholeheartedly enjoy teaching, helping them out, and learning about them as individuals. This was a shock to me thinking I was coming to a smaller private school that gave the impression of caring and individual attention if needed. I have had teachers that do not even know the material they are teaching or anything about the class. They had to sit in on another class earlier to see how that professor ran the class. This was absolutely horrible, especially when we asked questions about material- they could not answer any of them. I also feel that by not having a religious background I am behind in my classes and do not understand what everyone else is talking about. It seems like you are expected to have this knowledge, and if not, you are out of luck. I think that you should not need to have this knowledge for basic classes, and it should not be assumed that you do. Also, there is a lot of busy work given in classes. I find this a very unproductive way to spend the limited amount of time we have to fit in work for all our classes. My personal opinion of the general education classes here is that they should be some of the easiest classes to take. I think that a general understanding of these classes is sufficient since they are not contributing to our real majors. We need to focus our attention on classes for our major and not have to worry about passing a gen ed. An especially disappointing thing I and many others have learned the hard way, is that our academic advisors do not even try to help us out. A particularly alarming example of this was my friend's advisor did not even know when the last day to drop classes was. The date consequently passed, and her advisor told her to go to the registrar and make up an excuse as to why they should still let her drop her class. Mine and others' experience with advisors has been very impersonal, unhelpful, and has caused us to not even want to talk with them anymore. We feel like we are on our own, but we do not know what we are supposed to be doing. I feel like there is not a lot of people here that are willing to help you out with your questions about college, classes, life, and what your academic plans are. When I was a freshman last year, I did not have a talk with my advisor about what I wanted from this college or my plans. Instead I was given a list of classes to take for the first 2 semesters and then I was on my own to come up with a schedule. I was completely lost when I registered for this fall semester, and still I am not sure exactly what I am doing. Also, registering is so frustrating. I sit down and take a couple of hours to plan out my schedule before I register. Then when it is time to register, all the work I put in to making a schedule that I like and works, goes all out the door. Most of the classes are filled by the time we register. Then I have to sit and come up with a completely new schedule on the spot. This makes me not look forward to my next semester because I do not have hardly any of the classes that I had planned on taking.

The typical students at LVC are in the band or music program, or are in a sport. The music students study most of the time and are immature. The sport people come off as jerks and too good for anyone else. There is quite a separation between these two groups. So much so that in the cafeteria, the music people sit on one side, and the sports on the other jokingly calling the music side 'The Dark Side.' It is very much like high school here with exclusive cliques. I did do cheerleading my first semester as a freshman, this I thought would help me to get involved and make friends. Well, that really was not the case. The football team was horrible and won one game, and the cheerleaders were very unfriendly to me. They would make plans to go out right in front of me, never asking me to join. The only time they were nice was to ask me to come back and cheerlead again in the winter just so they would have more people on the team. Other students not involved in sport or music do not have a lot of people to relate to. Some people are nice and will talk to you, but not much more than that. People are pretty much set in their ways and their own friends. I really have nothing to even bond with people about because I am not in a sport or music. I feel like it's my couple friends and I most of the time, and we struggle with finding fun things to do that we are interested in.

Life at LVC in general is very subdued and for the most part uneventful. There are limited on campus activities that appeal to all. There are however an abundance of religious activities, musical recitals, and a fair amount of sporting events that the students and public can attend. LVC does try to offer other more social events like a dance on Saturday nights and comedians on Friday. Students have to pay for the dance and usually there are no more than 20 people there- Not worth your money or time. Sometimes the school also sponsors bands and singers at a local coffee house, but this is also a small setting. There are also other events such as group trips and outings, but they are not always publicized well. I was hoping that the fraternities and sororities at our school would supply the kind of social activities that I enjoy- going to parties, dancing, and meeting new people. Unfortunately this is not the case. The fraternities and sororities here do not have houses, rather parts of floors in the dorms. Some of the members of these groups have houses they rent off campus, but its not really worth going to. One reason in particular is because of the cops here. They are always driving through campus and will stop people just for walking. Last year the first weekend at school, my 2 roommates and I were walking up to the dorms and the police pulled over and started asking us all these questions like 'how old are you?'and 'have you been drinking?'and then they tried to tell us that they pulled us over because there was a curfew for the town and you had to be 18 to be out at that time. As freshman and our first weekend at school, we were very scared of what was going on when we got pulled over. We were doing nothing wrong by walking up to the dorms and we got stopped and interrogated. This experience has made us very uneasy of walking anywhere for fear of this happening again. And this behavior by the cops happens frequently as well- pulling people over that are walking, just to see if they can find some reason to breathalize them or something else. Also, somehow the town police always end up on campus busting people for drinking. I was under the impression that drinking would be dealt with on campus by the school and our public safety, but that is not so. Since there is really not much on campus that interests us, or is even safe from police to go to, we try to go away every weekend. The only times we really have a good time are when we are at other schools. We get to go to parties, dance all we want, and we meet tons of new and fun people. Sometimes I wish we could just bring some of the people we meet back to our school so we would have more people that are in common with us.