Clark College

Date: Dec 22 2019
Major: Engineering Department (This Major's Salary over time)
I would only suggest going to this college if you already know the content of the classes you're taking, or you are incredibly motivated/excited about something they offer. Classes don't meet long in person and often times in-class lectures/assignments require you to know the material before attempting to understand or complete it, you can work ahead on text/assignments and you'll still feel like you're behind.

You absolutely must teach yourself or you will fail your classes. Depending on major/class/instructor they might cover about 10-30% in-class and the rest is up to you.

Lower serie classes (anything under class 201+ options) were often easy enough, but some later classes had fewer instructors offering it and could get exponentially worse with class-material involvement.

I can say with confidence that I've learned more from youtube than all of my instructors from my last 39 classes combined. At this point I feel like the only purpose they served was to get paid to write on a piece of paper as proof that I spent a lot of time studying from youtube to answer test questions.

I felt so burnt out after finishing here. It took me a long time to recover from it, and I still feel like I'm dreding on a bit from it as I continue on university.

But honestly the biggest upside they offered here, which is why I stuck around so long, was all their funded clubs and programs. They paid for all involved activities and had a lot of interesting tools/resources available, as well as going to (and paying) for events/activities. I met a lot of great people through that, and I can say that it is the only major overall positive experience I've had at this college. I'd only really suggest going here for a little while, then transferring somewhere more preferably to take later class series (for Class201+ options).

CONS:

Lack of teachers in major departments.

Some majors do not have advisers, they instead required a couple of the instructors to do it (Which they didn't exactly specialize in—they were often misinformed or uninformed, and generally less useful than using google.)

Many teachers are overworked and underpaid (they even did walkout protests and cancelled classes over it!) and it shows in their teaching.

Some classes don't have more than one teacher offering it, ever. It is difficult getting help for those courses and you don't have any other options if the schedule won't work for you.

Massive differences between grading options depending on instructor (technically still a thing in uni, but there were a weird number of teachers that put 70-100% of the final grade on exams and never had homework, while some other teachers would put 70% of the grade on assignments+homework and 30% on exams)

Some instructors do very little to prepare you for your exams. They often only have enough time during class to go through one or two things, and cannot explain (or show) multiple ways even if there are many methods available. You have to self-teach.

Some departments attempt to give different exams to each class, they end up being so vastly different that some exams end up being significantly easier than the other "equivalent" exam of the class before or after it. There are no retakes for them, even if the instructor(s) admit the exam was more difficult than intended.

Grading on a curve is becoming more rare, sometimes it requires you to gather up multiple students to file a group complaint to have it approved by the dean to have a steeper adjustment curve. Sometimes it was entirely denied all because a single student (always someone retaking the class) did much better than the others, so they argue the material must be as masterable in that time.

The college is weirdly disorganized in random pockets of itself, which has caused a number of complications such as; delayed financial aid (had to pay out of pocket or drop the class), staff giving uninformed/misinformed information that students are acting on, and many numerous problems with attempting to communicate between departments.

Lack of general advertisement of events/options/etc. They do get interesting events, but often forget to advertise or put minimal effort into it.

Food options on campus are depressingly low quality, small, and expensive. Like day old gas station food refrozen and reheated to be sold for 5x the cost. The coffee is ok. Sometimes they randomly get paid catering for their events to get more decent food.

I've seen so many people drop out and never return, even when they had a lot of promise and enjoyed learning the material. The grading is very unforgiving, and their disorganized financial aid fiasco often force people to drop classes or pay large amounts up front and uneasily wait for their return.

PROS: + Friendly staff/students (even if staff is generally underpaid and overworked too much to help you with class material, at least they're nice!) + Lots of funded clubs and extracurriculars (including some with with access to interesting/useful tools and materials, and some are involved in university-level competitions) + Fair number of class and "technical degree" options + Near public transportation, fast food, and a grocery store