Allegheny College

Date: Feb 05 2017
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
College is supposed to be the best 4 years of your life. My two years at Allegheny have been 2 of the worst.

By no means do I blame this on the faculty. I am an English major and the English department has contained some of the most amazing people I have ever met. The only professor in this department who has been disappointing is David Miller, and even he is a great human being outside of class, just a sub-par professor.

My issue with this college lies in its awful atmosphere and stuck-up student body. At the end of every year, an inordinate number of students transfer out. I heard this from an upperclassman when I first came here, and I wasn't sure why, but now, after being here for a year and a half, I understand exactly why and I, too, am beginning the process of transferring. This school is not diverse at all, in multiple ways. Most of the students are rich, preppy white kids who are stuck in a high school mindset. People are incredibly arrogant and judgmental, and if you do not fit in perfectly to any of the major social groups on campus you become a pariah, genuinely disliked by the other people on campus. Students are extremely exclusive with who they talk to as well. Greek life is huge here, and each of the frats and sororities are full of people who are basically clones of each other. People not in frats are heavily judged, and there is a general tone of exclusivity among all students here.

When students here aren't slaving away at the inordinate amount of busywork assigned to them, they are drinking their sorrows away in disgusting frat house basements and hooking up with anything that moves. I have no moral problem or anything with such activities, but it is literally all there is to do. Extracurricular activities are nonexistent, so the only thing that people do at all is smoke weed, drink, and party. There really isn't much of a "college experience" here, unless you consider drinking jungle juice spiked with cough syrup in the dilapidated Phi Psi house the "college experience". Oh yeah, about that, the college also has a huge problem with sexual assault that nobody really wants to talk about since the school tends to cover up anything that happens in an attempt to make it look like we don't have a problem. We also have a safety problem (the campus is so dark at night that someone died last year by getting hit by a car), and the school refuses to do anything about it.

The surrounding town is no better. Meadville is a miserable little husk of a town that is falling apart by the day. The people who live there are racist rednecks who despise the college students without bothering to get to know them, setting an extremely unfriendly environment, and there is absolutely nothing to do in town besides drink at the bars.

Overall, unless your only hope for college is to get blackout drunk every Friday and Saturday, I don't really know who to suggest this school to. I'd say English majors, since the exceptional English department is the only reason I've stayed this long, but my 2 years here have been some of the worst of my life. Unless you're rich, preppy, and someone who wants a campus almost completely full of like-minded people, I cannot honestly recommend this school to you.