Benedictine University

Date: Apr 12 2013
Major: Biology (This Major's Salary over time)
DO NOT GO TO BENEDICTINE UNIVERSITY! IT IS THE BIGGEST MISTAKE I HAVE MADE IN MY LIFE!

Benedictine University is a "Catholic" school with a Muslim/Hindu majority.

The school is like a factory for producing doctors. You would think that at a small school, you would be treated like a person rather than as a number. WRONG! The do-it-yourself attitude of advisors and the overwhelmingly huge lack of academic diversity make the school feel a lot less like a college. The amount of cheating is incredible, and the administration does nothing to stop it because they just care about having people get high grades in their classes. Those are the science classes. Classes that are not science-based are so easy, they are a joke. My speech professor offered 20 points of extra credit for voting, but then she forgot who in her class voted, so everybody got 20 points of extra credit.

The campus life is terrible!!! Benedictine is more like a high school than like a college or university. The school is run by commuters, who are actually the people who spend the least amount of time on campus. They show up for classes and then immediately leave, making the campus a ghost town (especially on weekends because even residents go home). Because the commuters run everything, student organizations and extracurriculars SUCK. The dorms are complete filth. The male residence hall, Ondrak Hall, is constantly littered with garbage and the bathrooms smell like urine and vomit. The floor is sticky because so many people urinate on the floor. The furniture in the rooms is falling apart and vandalized by previous residents. When I moved in, there was dried blood underneath my mattress, and part of it was eaten away by bugs. Bed bugs are a huge problem, along with cleanliness. The building itself smells no matter how much you try to clean it; it looks, feels, and smells like a prison. Living on campus has literally made me depressed because the atmosphere here is the worst possible college experience one could imagine. And just when you hope you could become friends with your dorm mates..guess again. The athletes take up the vast majority of the residence halls, and they do not associate with non-athletes. If you go to Benedictine and you are not an athlete, you are nobody, and you are treated like you are worthless. The head of Residence Life lives in Ondrak (the freshman male dorm) and he gives the athletes preferential treatment while the other residents are treated like they are invisible.

I have a 4.0 GPA through two semesters, but I feel like I got an okay education. If you are smart, go elsewhere; the school is largely a B/C student school even though admissions tries to brag about the science program and the pre-med/pre-dental students.

I would not go back to Benedictine even if it were free. I attended freshman year for pretty much only the cost of room and board, but I still feel ripped off. You do not get what you pay for. I have also found many dorms that are 100X nicer for the same price or CHEAPER than Benedictine's price. I can't believe I chose this sorry excuse for a university; Loyola, DePaul, Northwestern, and Lake Forest are all WAY better choices. I would rather take on $200k in loans than go back to Benedictine.

If you want to re-live high school in a clique, or if you want to stay close to home because you are afraid of leaving your little bubble in suburbia, then I guess this is for you. For anyone else, AVOID BENEDICTINE AT ALL COSTS! NO MATTER HOW CHEAP IT IS, IT WILL NOT BE WORTH IT! THIS IS A WARNING!

Oh, and by the way, I am transferring, along with all of my friends and most of the freshmen who live on campus.