(ASU-Tempe) ASU has multiple personality disorder

How this student rated the school

Educational Quality	A	Faculty Accessibility	A+
Useful Schoolwork	B+	Excess Competition	A
Academic Success	B+	Creativity/ Innovation	B+
Individual Value	A-	University Resource Use	B+
Campus Aesthetics/ Beauty	A-	Friendliness	A-
Campus Maintenance	B+	Social Life	B
Surrounding City	A+	Extra Curriculars	C+
Safety	A

Describes the student body as: Friendly, Approachable Describes the faculty as: Friendly, Helpful, Arrogant, Condescending, Unhelpful, Self Absorbed

Male

Quite Bright

Lowest Rating Extra Curriculars	C+

Highest Rating Faculty Accessibility	A+

He cares more about Extra Curriculars than the average student.

Date: Dec 28 2010
Major: Psychology (This Major's Salary over time)
ASU has multiple personality disorder…

If you are taking 100-200 level classes at the Tempe campus, it's a rat race and lecture halls with 100+ students aren't unusual. If you continue taking the "easy" classes in your major, it's almost the same.

However, if you go to the other campuses for some of your core courses (I bounced back and forth between ASU West and ASU Tempe), you can get smaller classes in your core and take advantage of greater access to instructors as well as a larger selection of instructors.

Additionally, if you are willing to take some of the more challenging upper division courses and express interest, you see an entirely different side of ASU. Personally, I am a psychology major, but have serious amounts of credits in anthropology and biological sciences and the same tendency goes across all three subject areas (and two campuses for psychology). If you make an effort, get out of the big classes, and challenge yourself, you will get a hell of a lot out of your courses.

Additionally, get engaged in research if you are a science major. What they don't tell you is that ASU is a huge research school and—if you get involved in the research—it gets you involved in networks of scientists getting you into graduate school easier. And—unlike business or English—many graduate programs at ASU and other research universities are essentially tuition-free as you work on research grants through grad school.

However, if you just go for the piece of paper… …it's all lost on you.

Good luck, eh?

Responses

This guy is wrong about graduate programs at ASU being "essentially tuition free." Departments hire RAs and waive their out-of-state tuition as part of their compensation (the rest being hourly wage up to the level of funding), but these students usually still have to pay tuition at the in-state level. If you were in-state to begin with, you get nothing additional. At other universities the funding picture is often brighter as most U.S. campuses did NOT embark on massive, unsustainable building projects over the last decade in partisan attempts to bankrupt their state economies. Also, beware of "color coding" by lab - a significant issue in at least one engineering department.

(Original Poster) Like I said, in the science areas (Bio, Psych, Anthro, e.g.), not necessarily other areas can get their tuition covered. I know half a dozen or more grad students in those areas whose funding packages not only cover all of their tuitions but pay on the side as well…

Maybe things changed between them being accepted and the last year or so or maybe Engineering just handles their RA's differently.

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