The State University of New York - Albany

Date: May 27 2014
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
This would be a great school if it wasn't for the faculty, campus, police, constant construction, bureaucracy, and surrounding city.

First, a quote from the first day of an upper level physics course-after a full hour of the professor talking about his own life and qualifications:

You know, I could teach the course, but honestly everything you need to know is in the textbook, so if you don't mind I'm just going to bullshit around for the semester.

That pretty much sums up my four years of experience at SUNY Albany. There were some very good classes, though I could be biased toward them based on how many bad classes I had. Many of the professors took themselves and their own opinions far too seriously to pay attention to what the students were actually saying. I once had a professor shut the door on any student who was more than three minutes late to class. Most of her students were commuters.

The police are hyper-aggressive and don't follow procedure. I had a friend kicked out of school for multiple months without trial. He was later found innocent on an overwhelming amount of evidence, and a total lack of evidence by the accuser. He left the school. More than once during finals week my sleep has been interrupted by police officers in the parking lot keeping their lights, and in one instance, sirens on for the full duration of a traffic stop. In a parking lot. A parking lot that they routinely hit 40 in. You can tell when they pass cars driving on the adjacent road.

On the same token as losing sleep during finals week, sophomore year someone decided it would be a good idea to hire a crew to use a jackhammer outside my window for two hours straight starting at six in the morning.

Going back a paragraph to speak on parking lots, myself and a friend got a ticket on the same day, for the same reason. We both appealed. We both used the same argument, with the same people. One of us got off, one of us did not.

Did I mention the construction? It's everywhere, and it's constant. It's supposed to help the campus look better, but by the time they've finished one project, they've started two more. I went my entire college career minus the first couple months of attendance without the central fountain being open.

Also they couldn't figure out how to squeeze a degree out of almost two hundred credits. You pretty much have to pigeonhole yourself into one or two areas of study if you want to graduate.

This is one of the statements to rate before writing this:

This University is beautifully planned with abounding trees and flowers—not haphazardly placed concrete.

The University is concrete, and they keep cutting down the remaining trees. So that's a D-.

Then there's Kegs N Eggs. I don't know if you've heard this one. On St. Patrick's day 2011, there were riots in mid to downtown Albany. Almost everyone that was arrested was a St. Rose student. SUNY Albany took the blame for it without a fight. Because of this lack of defense for their students, every graduate's degree is now worth less by reputation.

Maybe I was just unlucky, but UAlbany definitely didn't make it any easier on me. Sure, good things happened too, just not good things related to the ~20,000 dollars a year that were spent here.