Case Western Reserve University

Date: Sep 06 2010
Major: Computer Science (This Major's Salary over time)
Case Western Reserve University was the biggest disappointment in my life. Nothing at this school makes any sense. Everyone's miserable, but they're all constantly grinning. There's this bizarre Stockholm-esque attitude where if you're ever not happy, it must be your own fault, since there are so many amazing opportunities for you in Cleveland and at Case and you should be taking advantage of them, you worthless sack. Consequently, nobody's willing to admit the obvious: that their lives suck.

There's this bizarre setup where the administration looks on the undergrads as customers and the graduates and faculty as employees. As an undergraduate at this school, you're nothing but a customer; you are to be serviced, but you're an outsider, and you shouldn't be given access to anything beyond the necessities?the rest are for the employees.

The computer science program is a joke. It pains me to say this since so many of the faculty are terrific people who are actually quite brilliant, but the department is severely understaffed, is completely overwhelmed by political in-fighting and bureaucracy, and has its hands tied by the broken administration. There are courses?e.g. Programming Languages?listed on the department website right now that haven't been offered in nearly a decade.

If there's any discernible overall direction to the chaotic stagger that the school has adopted over the last decade, it's towards being more of a liberal arts college or a party school. Admission requirements are down, and so is the average IQ of incoming students. The campus is flooded with mediocre, repressed Midwestern bros and their ilk. They eat from the interdisciplinary trough, become fat with BS and rote memorization, and then go off to spout such aphorisms as ?cognition is what you make of it?. They lead unremarkable lives, think unremarkable thoughts, and take unremarkable jobs. They dilute any clarity from the school's departments until all that's left are some embittered, cold-hearted, tenured professors siloed away in corners, the rest a bunch of middling, cargo-culting, vapid trash.

Everything I am today I am in spite of my time at Case. The only dubious benefit I've derived from this school is fortitude of character from battling through the inanity.

If you're smart?not, like, book smart, but if you've really got a brain in there somewhere?then don't go here, man. It ain't worth it. This school doesn't want you any more than you want it.