Georgia State University

Date: Feb 04 2016
Major: Linguistics (This Major's Salary over time)
While professors and course work were satisfactory, the administrative system is complete crap. For the entire time I attended I never knew when registration deadlines were, only to find out they had the incorrect email address for me, but were sending other emails to the correct one. Also the online portal requires you to change your password almost every 2 weeks which is just incredibly annoying.

This past Fall Semester I went to the bookstore to buy books and explicitly told them I did not want to rent, I walked away with what I assumed were books I bought, then 2 months after the semester was over I was charged for those books as though I had rented them. Turns out whoever completed my purchase in store screwed up royally and rang me up as renting, without putting stickers in the books to tell me the date they were due back, or letting me know in anyway that the books were not bought and paid for.

The Academic Advisement department was the absolute worst. I could not make decisions on my own in the system, I had to meet with an advisor and have them do it for me, but literally every time I called to set an appointment with who I was told my advisor would be, I was redirected to a new one. After it happened twice I avoided going to see the Academic Advisors as much as possible but I still managed to go through 8 different advisors during my time at GSU. The most frustrating thing about many of these interactions was that I was often not notified of the change in who my advisor was until I was already at the office and waiting for the now wrong advisor. For some reason the advisor's offices were spread out on campus, and their schedules were incredibly difficult to match with my own. I was not incredibly busy, but for some reason every advisor I had to meet with only had a few inconvenient time block available a week, which made no sense to me considering the vast amount of advisors there were.

When registering for classes, the online system would never recognize my applicable prerequisites for higher level classes. Every time a class required previous courses that I already had taken I would have to specifically email the professor and ask for their permission to join their class. This meant that I often couldn't get my full schedule set until the absolute last second and put the pressure on my professors, instead of just acknowledging my past credits and allowing me to join the class online.

Last thing is I got married right before starting at GSU, and the university has absolutely no benefits for spouses. My wife would often want to participate in on campus events with me, get my same discounts for local hot spots, or get access to the university gym, but the University doesn't seem to acknowledge that spouses are an integral part of a student's life, and don't allow them the same simple benefits that most universities do. While getting these things for free might be a stretch for smaller Universities, most still allow discounted rates for spouses to benefit from the same things universities provide their students. It prevented me from wanting to participate in Campus activities because my wife couldn't join me without paying, and we would often opt to find off campus things to enjoy together.