St Lawrence University

Date: Nov 22 2010
Major: Perfomance Arts (This Major's Salary over time)
Very few people at St. Lawrence are glad they went there. It is mind boggling to me that such a prestigious school can have such a universally unhappy student body, but it doesn't take long at St. Lawrence to realize that this is the case. You will often hear 'Sounds like SLU to me!' when people are discussing terrible, bizarre or absurd things that have happened to them at this school.

So many people at SLU seem desperate to get away, either by transferring out, graduating early or applying for study abroad programs. I can almost guarantee you will be unhappy if you come here. I was lucky enough to find a small group of friends that kept me sane. Most aren't. The town is terrible and the campus is completely isolated. You will not be going to events off campus very often, if at all. On campus events are almost comically half-hearted and half-assed. One example was our senior week, during which the cafeterias were closed so often that students actually went hungry. Another example was when a professional playwright was somehow persuaded to come to campus and give a workshop on writing. I was the only student who showed up, so the workshop was cancelled and the writer went home. Such occurrences are sadly regular. Girl Talk was scheduled to play here, but campus security was so bad that within minutes people rushed the stage and the performer was forced to leave. Around a dozen people were sent to the hospital from the concert due to alcohol poisoning and trampling.

It may be like this at other schools, but both faculty and administrative staff will actually go out of their way to condescend toward you and treat you badly. On my second to last day a member of the staff lectured me for ordering a senior week bracelet a day late. Moments later she declared to some 30 students that she had ran out of t-shirts commemorating our senior week and no one else would be receiving one.

My department was performance and communication arts. My junior year the department decided to require all juniors to take a new class they had created their second semester, forcing many students to have to cancel study abroad plans they had already made and applied to. The class was such a failure that the professors changed the syllabus halfway through, cancelling most of the course work. This left some 36 students stuck with a non-existent class that they had been forced to take in lieu of other classes. The next year the class was cancelled entirely after 2 botched attempts and almost 100 students had been inconvenienced in the same way.

Attempts to complain or speak against professors in any way are met with what I can only call hostility. I was called into a professor's office my senior year with threats of blocking my graduation, even though I was weeks away from fulfilling the requirements. The professor was one of the people that had developed the previously mentioned botched class. During the meeting she called me mean for my earlier complaints about the class, which she described as a 'fucking trainwreck'. She yelled at me for not being 'compassionate' about the issue and asked how I would feel if she said my schoolwork was bad. Then the meeting ended. It served no other purpose.

Only once in my 4 years did I complain about a grade I'd received. It was my 3rd class with the professor in question, who had directed me in a play as well. She was also my advisor. I complained about a grade on a single essay. She listened to what I said and then flatly refused to change the grade, saying a '2.5 out of 4.0' was the grade I deserved. I reminded her that she had in fact given me a 1.5. She said 'oh' and again refused to change it. Months later when I asked her for a recommendation she snidely remarked 'Oh, so now I'm good enough to give you a rating?'

That my department was terrible is clear. That is only one department. I know that there are good aspects to the campus. The Math department is amazing, and has been said to rival the one at Williams. If you know you want to do math then consider that. Still, I want to re-emphasize that student like is spectacularly bad here, and even if you are in one of the few good departments here you will still, in all likelihood, be bored and unhappy. Reconsider your application to SLU.