The University of Wisconsin - Platteville

Date: Aug 02 2008
Major: Mechanical Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
I'll start with a few good things. Staff and faculty are generally quite available and friendly. The whole town is extremely safe. It's very uncompetitive. If you just want to get your degree for cheap with little muss or fuss, then Platteville will work out great for you.

However, if you want to do anything interesting or challenge yourself, Platteville will make you miserable.

Let me emphasize that Platteville is a very, very small town. You probably cannot comprehend how tiny and boring it is if you are not from the Midwest. There is literally nothing to do but drink, and I mean LITERALLY. Hardly anyone participates in extracurriculars, so forget meeting people that way. Most people here are from small towns and as such are friendly on the surface but are terribly closed-minded and dull. Yes, the girl/guy ratio is a bit unbalanced, but don't get too excited, ladies, unless the thought of hooking up with chubby borderline-alcoholic rednecks titillates you.

As far as the ME department itself, well, again, it's great if you just want to get your degree and get out like most MEs do. Co-ops and internships are highly emphasized and there's an extensive support staff willing to help you get them. Academically, it's not competitive at all. In fact, pretty much everyone cheats together so even the biggest idiot can get through the program if he has a couple of friends around his age. And you will encounter a lot of idiots: ME students here either weren't smart enough to get into Madison or chose not to go there because of

those gosh darned hippies.

While there's a very nice Women in Engineering program, if you are female, your male hick classmates and even some of your professors will hate you for being female because they assume you will get through life riding on quotas and affirmative action. While I have a couple of very nice and friendly professors, quite a lot of them are absolutely terrible, and they don't have the excuse of having a lot of research or graduate students to take care of either. Oh, and since there's no graduate program here, forget doing undergraduate research here. The curriculum itself is fine up until you get to later classes where you will be doing lots of stuff that was a lot more relevant 50 years ago than it is now.

Basically, if you really can't live without a small-town atmosphere, then Platteville will make you very comfortable and happy. For anyone else, it's pretty much a prison.