The University of Colorado - Boulder

Date: Aug 04 2011
Major: Mechanical Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
I absolutely loved my first year at CU. I felt like I had a great balance of school, social life and activities. Reading through these reviews I felt like I should give my experience with a few things.

1. Although my basic science and math classes were huge (300+) I felt like my professors were almost always available to help. If I couldn't make office hours they would always try and find another time to meet with me or someone else to help me out. Also out of my 5 classes each semester two were huge, one had about 80 and the other two had 28 and 15. It really wasn't bad.

2. I lived in the engineering dorms and I found that there was a strong sense of community and a great support system with the freshman engineers. If you are an engineer I would strongly recommend these dorms because engineering really does have more work than other majors and it's nice to be around people with similar workloads and classes.

3. The people who I met and hung out with the first couple weeks of school did fit the stereotype of obnoxious rich kids, mostly from CA, who only want to party. I am not the kind of person who wants to do this all the time so I kept meeting new people and joining a lot of activities (club sports, engineering organizations, research job and student ambassadors) until I found people who I fit better with. Some drink, some don't but they all want to have a good time and in Boulder there is plenty to do that we were rarely ever bored (and most of the time it's because we were too lazy to figure something out)

So that being said this is my advice part: Overall I understand how people have the problems mentioned in a lot of the posts BUT you are paying a lot for this school so *don't settle for a lifestyle that doesn't make you happy*. If you put the effort in with your professors almost all of them will put the effort in to help you. They want you to do well. With a student body of about 30,000 not everyone is a crazy party animal so if you aren't find others who share a similar lifestyle.

Like I said at the beginning I absolutely love CU and I am so happy with my choice to come here!