Stony Brook University

Date: Dec 22 2010
Major: Computer Science (This Major's Salary over time)
Ups and downs. For science and engineering, Stony Brook is pretty highly regarded, so it's worth considering just for that. Faculty are across the board - most of them are nice enough actually, if you go to office hours, but a lot are just not good teachers. I had one instructor this past semester who spent as much time going off about Pink Floyd and random stuff he liked as he did talking about the class material, so much that about 3 weeks of lecture subjects were taken off the syllabus and it was still one of the hardest classes I ever had.

Socially it's got a LOT of room for improvement. The campus is pretty diverse, but everyone keeps to their own groups - one guy in my apartment last year was Chinese and absolutely refused to speak to the other white and black guys in the apartment. People stick to their own groups and to themselves for the most part, and like 55% of students are commuters, and most of the rest live somewhere on Long Island or in NYC, so it's not a very active campus, since most of the residents who live in the area have learned this already and just go home weekends. Other students in my department are hostile and arrogant too, but this might just be a Computer Science thing.

It's good education-wise, but otherwise I'd look elsewhere.