Augustana College

Date: Jun 07 2012
Major: Other (This Major's Salary over time)
I am going into my junior year at Augustana, have almost a 4.0, am in a fraternity, have met some great people, and highly recommend not going to Augustana. At Augustana it is hard to meet people unless you are in a NCAA sport or Greek life. The overall social environment is very clicky and immature. A lot of people who go to Augustana don't seem to be concerned with much besides when the next party is (where you will undoubtedly run across a myriad of people high on EX, pot, shrooms). Most students don't seem to have much ambition to do anything interesting with their lives after college. Diversity at Augustana is a joke. I never thought I would care about (or thought about) diversity before I came here, but it is really bad at Augustana. It is hard to meet anyone that is not from Chicago (rather a suburb of Chicago). This might not mean much, but you soon come to realize that most people at Augustana are only going to Augie to have a good time taking the easiest possible classes, partying as hard as possible, and bullshitting their way into a job after college. It shouldn't be hard at college to find people (normal people-not socially awkward outcasts) to have intellectually stimulating conversations with about politics, religion, philosophy, the world, etc. but surprisingly at Augustana it is. I have seen Augustana suck the soul out of some of the smarter people I know who simply give up and stop caring. This probably comes from the fact that Augustana doesn't help you grow as a person; I have not felt challenged academically or otherwise at Augustana (coming from a B and C student in high school who decided to start working at College). Augustana has not really challenged any of my worldviews. The food SUCKS here. The housing is expensive and not that great. There is not much to do if you are not in Greek life. On tours you will hear all about the great student groups on campus, but most are just started by people so they can put it on their resume that they started a student group and don't really do anything interesting. Rock Island is not a fun college town because it is not safe enough to have a fun-small town feel and doesn't have good enough local food/arts/entertainment scene to be a fun city college. I have met very few people working at Augustana (registrars, etc) who are helpful or nice. Along the same lines, advising at Augustana sucks. Most students I talk to don't even trust their professors to help them figure out how to graduate on time much less give any kind of helpful advice or mentoring about where to take their lives. The tenured professors are mostly good at teaching, although I have not been challenged very much. The college also likes to save money by hiring new professors for a year who suck at teaching. The overall feel of Augustana is not that great either. The campus might look "pretty" when you visit but it is really small so the buildings all start to look like familiar prisons after a while and by the end of most terms I am dying to get away from campus. Even though a lot of the professors at Augustana are good, the general education curriculum is not that great. The college will do anything to screw you over financially and operates more like a corporation than a liberal arts college (e.g. you have to pay full tuition to audit or sit in on a class even though professors get paid on contract. e.g. they charge you 10 bucks (disguised 3.35 "augie points" for a lunch consisting of a Cesar salad, a slice of shitty pizza, and a milk). Trimesters are terrible-they make your life extremely stressful, don't allow you to go in depth in any class, and make it impossible to ever write a good paper (because you never have time so you turn in a piece of shit paper at the last minute-which will probably be rewarded with an A+). The best thing about Augustana college is it's admissions office who are clearly good at their job because they manage to make Augie look attractive despite being a terrible place to spend four years of your life. The only reason I have not transferred is because of my fraternity, because it would be suck a pain in the ass because Augie is on Trimesters, and because I plan on traveling abroad and spending as little time at Augie as possible.