Mary Baldwin College

Date: Sep 04 2012
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
Unless you are vegetarian or vegan, you won't find much to eat on campus. If you have Irritable Bowel Syndrome, you will suffer, like me. The cooks put spices in EVERYTHING, and it really messed up my stomach.

If you are really out of shape, you might want to reconsider—the walking here is up hills and down hills and it's very difficult to get from one place to another unless you are an upperclassmen. Even then, the bookstore is all the way towards the campus entrance and no where near the class buildings or the dorms for transfers or freshmen.

The faculty seem nice, but if you have a problem you have to beg them and beg them and keep contacting them to get answers. The residence halls for freshmen and transfers aren't good. The kitchenette for the fresh transfers was pathetic. The freshman's Woodson dorm has cockroaches. The Spencer dorm is hot all the time. No A/C whatsoever, and even though there is a "quiet time" on campus, people still run by the window at midnight laughing and screaming sometimes.

I didn't make much friends, granted—I didn't come out of my room a lot. I missed my boyfriend too much and I didn't feel like I could connect with the people here, anyway. I was a transfer from a very good community college, full of poor people like me who don't really have much in life and are just grateful to be in school to get a better job. But Mary Baldwin is full of rich girls who can afford to be stupid about their education because they don't know what they want to do yet and it's more like high school than college to them.

The cell phone service is horrible in the Spencer dorm. When I scheduled a tour of the campus, as a transfer, I was told I would be considered an upperclassman and shown this beautiful dorm that I was assured would be mine. Then I found out that because I was a transfer I was considered just as unimportant as freshmen and stuck in an old dorm that looks like it's falling apart. That big beautiful closet I thought I was getting turned into the same sliding-door closet crap my mom's trailer had. Oh, but you get tons of storage space! It's big square cabinets above the closet—and who can reach that, I may ask, except for somebody six feet tall? Uselessly, basically.

My advice for people considering coming to Mary Baldwin is, do all of your research. If you don't mind spicy food, or walking a lot, or hot dorms and enjoy free laundry and some free events, then by all means make Mary Baldwin your choice. I don't mean that in a sarcastic way, either, because there are a few free things here that were a little fun.

But don't expect a party school or a nightlife. I didn't care for any of that, anyway. I just decided to go back to my community college for my associate's because I didn't want to spend two extra years on an English BA that I might not even use.