The Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania

Date: Mar 18 2011
Major: Biology (This Major's Salary over time)
I went to a high school that was very cut-throat competition-wise. To give you an idea, I graduated 5th in my class with a 104% GPA overall. It was that competititve. I thought I wanted a school where I could relax a bit more and people didn't care so much about being number one, but at Slippery Rock, it just seems like people live for the weekend and don't care whatsoever about grades. There are some people in my building that I've never even seen with a textbook, in or out of class.

I originally chose Slippery Rock because I wanted to go far away from home and I really likedtheir PT program, but I realize now I made a huge mistake in picking here. Yeah, the PT program is great but it's not worth it to put yourself through an extra 3-4 years of boredom during your undergrad years if you can avoid it. My advice is if you want to come here, really do your research. Being from MD, I can't go home on the weekends like everyone else around here. Slippery Rock does not offer a lot of things for people who are from far away to do on the weekends, and they charge you extra money to stay a few extra hours here on breaks if your parents can't pick you up right away, even though us out-of-staters pay more for tuition anyways. Don't even think about coming here without a car either. Trust me, you NEED a car.

As far as academics, this place is not challenging in the least bit. You have to take a ton of liberal arts classes that are cakewalks (i.e. College Writing, Human Diversity, etc.) and where the professors don't care. I have one class where 150 people are registered and only about 40 of us show up to every class. I also got screwed over and had to take a lot of my AP classes over again or they didn't count (even though I got 5's on all of them) because Slippery Rock has a terrible AP Policy. We're reading stuff in my sophomore level lit class that I read in 9th grade…I think that sums up how academically challenging SRU is.

If I could do it over again, I would pick somewhere else to do my undergrad for PT school and then maybe consider coming to SRU. I've been so discouraged by the overall morale here and lack of things to do that I'm transferring closer to home next year and going to be a nurse practitioner instead.

On an end note, don't fall for the way admissions makes this place seem to be. Remember, they all go home on the weekends, and I guarantee they don't live in the town of Slippery Rock either. The nice pictures of people playing frisbee in the quad were probably taken on of the 3 days this spring it won't be raining or snowing.