The University of Wyoming

Date: May 09 2014
Major: Mechanical Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)

You get what you pay for.

There are a lot of people on campus, professors, staff, etc, who put their all into everything they do. I think many of them are "stuck" and feel they can't move elsewhere, but they still work very hard and accomplish a lot.

Having said that, I can't recommend this university.

The whole is less than the sum of the parts.

If you are not physically robust, this campus is not for you. Due to a couple of badly placed greenbelts, you have to walk a long way, in really bad weather, to get from place to place. The cafeteria is 3/4 mile from the main classroom building, so you can't get there, eat, and get to your next class on time. The new visual arts building is so far from the rest of campus that nobody can major in art, as a practical matter, because it would take you 30 minutes to get from the art building to the building where you would, say, have English class. Microbiology building is almost as far.

The mechanical engineering program is too much work for the credential you are getting. The program is intense, and not justified by the quality of job you can get when you get out. Most students just end up in the oilfield.

The campus has some really beautiful areas, dedicated to rich people, whose names are on everything. The areas where you actually exist day to day may not even have regular janitorial service.

There are practically no jobs to be had in Laramie. There's no industry, and there is no big government entity that could hire people either. It's literally just the university. So while students at other universities are working part time in their field during the school year, you can't do that at UW. You can get a summer internship, but you have to break the lease on your apartment and move house, then move back in the fall.

The university has a slogan

some things can't be bought,

and they don't seem to realize how ironic it is. Oil and gas companies have their names on everything, and they dominate the jobs available through campus placement. There's no effort to increase the variety of employers who recruit at the university.

Grime builds up on the computer keyboards in labs as much as a millimeter thick, and I take a bottle of cleaner and a rag that I purchased and clean them. They don't have enough janitors or handymen.

The university sees students as a demographic to market to, not as people. Your university email account is 95% spam, and all the spam comes from inside the university. For example, they send a report daily on the construction on campus, which tells you in which buildings they are installing drywall at this very moment. They just inundate you with spam, because you are just a number to them.

The sports programs bring the university down instead of building school spirit. The old coach Christensen was a sensation when he cussed out another coach after a game. One of the basketball players got drunk downtown, and kicked another drunk in the head, making him mentally disabled. Yet the administration and the state legislature and governor don't truly take any strong action against the people who undermine our state and school.