Temple University

Date: Dec 29 2009
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
I attended Temple from 2006-7 and lived in one of the newer dorms. The only problem with that was that everybody got rip-roaringly drunk at the frat parties (held in the rowhouses one block east of the college) from Thursday night until Saturday. The revelers would act as sober as possible to the lobby guards (all buildings had them), then go to their floors and smash the snot out of the exit signs, the water fountains, and the furniture in the study lounges. Despite building meetings, the damage went on the entire year I lived there. We all were fined ten dollars for vandalism.

During my tenure at Temple they had just finished their newest building (The Edge), which had a seperate two-story mini strip mall with a multiplex theater. The night the theater opened, a student was shot on the sidewalk outside. I don't know if North Philadelphia has gotten worse since 2007 but there were streets and alleys you woulden't walk through in broad daylight. In fact, Temple had a policy of

one entrance, one exit

in all their buildings because students used to get mugged in the bathrooms during the 1970s-1980s. Because the school had the only 10-15 storey buldings in the area they plastered them with blinding security lights which lit up the entire campus. East of Broad Street they had these same lights on the tennis courts so that students could walk to the frat houses without fear of being mugged. To top that, they also had unarmed guards in kiosks by the courts. It felt less like a school at night and more like a combination of prison and a semi-futuristic military installation. Everything else in the area was low-income housing, boarded-up rowhouses, crumbling storefronts, and the occasional store or fast food joint. If you want to experiance the nightlife in town, you have to take the subway. As I had two part-time jobs I depended on the Orange Line.

Academics were pretty middle of the road; as a transfer student I got a mix of class types: the huge introductory courses in the ampetheater classrooms, small seminar-like classes in the Anthropology building, and some medium to small classes in Anderson Hall which were a pain to get to because the building had only two elevators. I did a lot of stair climbing. Of all of the things that happened to me at Temple, the academics were pretty straightforward, and I was lucky to have a lot of good instructors.

Besides the buracracy, the worst part being at Temple were the student body itself. They set the bar very low, and it seemed that most of the freshmen quit or transfered every semester, to be replaced with more and more freshmen every semester I went there. I never heard from the clubs or other student organizations, and there were none for transfer students. You had to make your own way, and that was alright for me, but I'm sure there were a lot of people who got lost in the shuffle. I noticed that a lot of the students in the dorm began going home on the weekends midway through the semester. So in conclusion, if you are a Philadelphian, you're going to go to this school (or U Penn if you can afford it.) If you're from the opposite coast like I am, Temple will be the last place you'll want to go but if you are willing to go out of your comfort zone the school would be an interesting choice if just for the city it's in.