Stony Brook University

Date: Oct 19 2018
Major: PreMed and Medical (This Major's Salary over time)
I would never recommend anyone to attend this university for pre-med. The science department is horrendous, and you are pretty much teaching yourself EVERYTHING. If you do not have a VERY strong background in science, you will not do well. The ONLY way to survive is to form study groups early on or to get outside tutoring, as the tutoring center is booked the first week of school, all the way through to the end of the semester. The T.A's that monitor the labs are very unhelpful and expect you to know everything, which is impossible to know something you've never done before. The amount of busywork they give you takes away from the actual time that could be spent studying, and it's very counter-productive to your grades. There is an online assessment called ALEKS that's due every week, it's the biggest waste of time and sometimes it takes upwards of 6 hrs just to finish. The homework is pilled on you back to back to the point you aren't doing homework for comprehension purposes, you're doing it just to meet a deadline. If they got rid of all the busywork and allowed you time to study, the course wouldn't be so hard. The first day of chem. class we were assigned 4 assignments that took most of the class 17 hrs to do, bare in mind none of us had the textbook just yet (that was fun, scrambling for the book). The average for most of the exams are a "D" but they curve the exams so much that a "D" can become a "B" and they do this so it won't look so bad that the professor has 250 out of 300 students failing their exams. The review for the exam consists of the professor reading the slides he read the previous class that are full of errors and incorrect answers, so be very careful when studying from the slides, because they most often have inaccurate information on them. Oh and each class has a sub-class called recitation. for example, i registered for calc. and chem. ONLY and I have a total of 6 classes and I get homework from 5 of them that's graded and averaged in with my chem. and math grade. So chem. actually comes with 4 classes that cannot be broken up -_-, because you have to take the lab with chem. and math comes with an additional class. I have never been to such a poorly organized institution in my life. This school has made me feel inadequate and incompetent at times and I have to step back and remind myself that I've obtained a four year degree within two years and managed to graduate with honors. So it's not me, its's this school. It'does not set you up for success at all. I'm not sure about the other majors, but please do yourself a favor and look into another school for pre-med. You will save yourself time, money, and mental fatigue. TRUST ME.