Rocky Mountain College

Date: Apr 18 2014
Major: Communications (This Major's Salary over time)
I was beyond excited to spend my first year of college at Rocky Mountain College and it ended being a HUGE disappointment. I'm from NY &I would be far from home.I thought it would be worth the experience, due to the fact that I visited Montana in the past and thought it was beautiful. I did not get to visit the school beforehand, but made the mistake of believing all of the "information" that my advisor gave me. For one, she told me on more than one occasion that there were many things in walking distance from the campus and there would also be a bus near the school. Therefore, I would not need my car. The moment I got to the school to move in, I found that there was absolutely nothing in walking distance whatsoever and no bus! Therefore, I was basically stranded on the campus the entire year without a way to even get to a grocery store or pharmacy. It got to be extremely depressing.

The first weekend of freshman orientation, they barely gave us anytime to say goodbye to our families and they had us running around to all different events like crazy in the 95 degree weather. Then after freshman orientation, they barely had any events the rest of the year! The lack of events made it really difficult to meet people because mostly everyone went home on the weekends of sat in their dorms. Basically, if you're not a party person, your social life will be close to nonexistent. The one good thing was that the few people I did get to meet were quite friendly and nice. The school is very small, so it resembled a high school. There were plenty of cliques, but also some pretty cool people if your were lucky enough to find them.

The first semester, I was happy with my education at RMC. However, my first semester of classes were fairly easy and weren't necessarily difficult concepts to grasp. However, the second semester was quite disappointing. My psychology teacher was probably the worst teacher I have ever had. He barely taught us a thing and was disorganized. He refused to give us our class averages when we'd ask for them and did not even bother reviewing any material with us for the final. One time I asked him if he would have a review session before a test, and he looked at me like I had five heads and asked me what I had meant by that. On the brighter side, my math professor was nice and helpful, and my other teachers were nice and about average.

The dorms are definitely nicer than some of the other colleges that I have visited. However, almost all of the RA's got fired for drinking with underclassmen. For almost the entire year, my neighbors screamed and blasted music during the week every night past midnight, and the Ra's did not do anything about it. To be fair though, most dorms at colleges are probably similar to that. It was unpleasant though.

The cafeteria was awful. At times the food was alright, but most of the time it was pretty gross and there were not many healthy options or vegetarian options for people. I'm on a full meal plan which is expensive, and the workers in the cafeteria would give you a really hard time if your wanted to take any food outside of the cafeteria. There were big bins of fruit, but they would yell at you if you took more than one piece. (For instance, if you took one apple and one banana.) At lunch a lot of people would have classes that they had to get to, and the workers would flip out if your tried to leave the cafeteria with a sandwich. The portions were also really small. If you wanted something like stuffed shells, they would only serve you one shell at a time. For the amount of money I paid, I shouldn't have felt so restricted.

There are not many clubs at this school. On the website there's an entire list of clubs that seemed really interesting, but most of them don't actually exist. I really wanted to get involved on campus when I came here, but the one club I joined never actually did anything. I tried to go to another club and no one showed up.

Last but not least, most of the office workers are disorganized and do not know what they're doing. I can't tell you how many times I had a question about something on campus (Like getting information about a work study job for instance) and was sent running back and fourth to multiple buildings because no one knew how to help me. It took nearly an hour to get one question answered.

Unless you live close to the school or in equestrian or aviation, I would NOT recommend this school! For such an expensive tuition, the quality of education is not that great and neither is the social life. Transferring from this school was the best decision I have ever made! If you want both a quality education and a fun college experience, this is not the school for you. I would never dream of coming back to a school that had to lie in order to get me here. After the first semester, a ton of people transferred and almost half of the people I knew transferred after the second semester. This school has an extremely low retention rate and there's a reason for that. I'd highly recommend that you save yourself the stress and apply to a real university.