The Colorado School of Mines

Date: Feb 05 2010
Major: Chemical Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
Colorado School of Mines awarded me a great scholarship, which was the reason I enrolled. However, as the fall term approached, the school began to decrease the amount of money that I was originally offered in the way of grants to compensate for the scholarship. In his convocation, the President of the school said that we'd be taught by professors with terminal degrees whose purpose was to help us succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth. My Calculus III instructor only had a Master's degree - from Mines. Not only that, a friend of mine, who is dyslexic, asked for class notes (which she was entitled to because of her learning disability). The instructor not only didn't have notes but he also seemed indignant that she would ask, as if she was trying to cheat. He taught 3-D calculus without props. He would wave his arms and tell us to

imagine an object…

My chemistry lab instructor barely spoke English. In the lecture, the instructor sometimes used a grad student from China who told us the wrong information in a language we couldn't understand. One of my instructors would come to class, turn off the lights, turn on her power point presentation, and that was that. It was the only class that I ever fell asleep in. The course was one that was considered too easy the year before so this year, she decided to make it more difficult by including ancillary information from sidebars on her power point slides in the tests. Name twelve amino acids. That kind of question.

I expected the courses to be challenging, but their difficulty was more a result of poor teaching then it was because of the material. I mean, really, the same material is taught in first semester chemistry throughout the country, how can it be any more difficult at Mines than, say, at the University of Colorado where they have Nobel Prize scientists teaching undergraduate classes? Perhaps Mines is a good place to go for graduate school, but the professors are not very good undergraduate teachers.

The campus exudes stress. I made many friends at Mines, and everyone of them is either stressed to the max or has simply given up and accepts their "C". The only real distinctive engineering here is Petroleum Engineering. Otherwise, I suggest going somewhere else. Mines (look it up) isn't really a top-tier engineering school. They made the classes hard, in my opinion, because the need to maintain their reputation as a hard school. Why put up with 4 years of stress to come out with a bad g.p.a. and a degree you could have received from one of the better engineering schools in Colorado? If I were you, I'd consider driving a few more miles north and enrolling in CU or CSU.