The Edinboro University of Pennsylvania

Date: Sep 15 2014
Major: Political Science (This Major's Salary over time)
As with every institution, your enjoyment of EUP is dependent on what you desire from your education. Despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews here, most students seem to enjoy Edinboro, even if most admit that their "education" has gone to waste. The atmosphere is friendly, the professors are very communicative, and the location is good—you can easily drive to New York, Ohio, or any New England state, and even if you don't have the capacity to drive, there's busing.

There's free flowing communication and sense of togetherness, yes, but I have no idea where it comes from. Edinboro University has, on almost every level, failed to reach my expectations, which were already staggeringly low do to my unimpressive qualifications and lack of money. While I don't think my experience here has been an total waste of time it is brutally apparent that I could be much better qualified for a career if I went to just about any other institution.

The campus, is, as you've probably heard, really damn cold. There is typically snow for 6 out of the 9 months the core semesters are scheduled. Growing up near Buffalo, this wouldn't be a problem for me if the walks to classes weren't so needlessly long. There are 11 different dorm halls and only three of them are even remotely close to any buildings at all—only Dearborn is close to the core area of campus where most of the classes are. You are typically walking for 10 to 15 minutes on a good day, and god forbid if you scheduled two classes right after each other because there's only a 10 minute gap in between them. Edinboro is entirely handicap accessible, which is good for obvious reasons, but can also be bad if you're not handicaped, as much of the outdoor campus has mindbogglingly ridiculous architectural flaws. The only thing "linking" the east end of campus to the west or the north to the south is a long, thin, weirdly curved sidewalk that becomes difficult to walk on due to the hilly area. There are absolutely no stairs outside of buildings—there aren't even traditional slopes in any sense, just narrow stretches of sidewalk that go all over campus including the uncut grass.

You could say this gave me a lot of exercise, and it probably did, except I'm sure it was all for naught because the campus food is terrible in every sense of the word. Unhealthy, foul-tasting, fattening filth. Most other reviews seem to chalk this up to being an unfortunate part of any campus—maybe it's just because my sister goes to Kent State and I've seen how much better the food is on visiting days, but I can barely see how people even survive off of this. You certainly can't without going out for groceries frequently, that's for sure. My old room mate and I used to joke about how everyone's attractive when they come to Edinboro, which is true—most of the freshman I see around campus are conventionally good looking, whereas most of the upperclassmen are hard to look in the eye. Either everyone attractive is leaving, or the food's getting to their bodies. Either one has unpleasant implications.

I haven't even mentioned the academics yet. I've said that most of the professors are communicative, which is true, but despite never meeting a professor here I didn't like, I can only count maybe three of them that actually taught me anything useful. The poor education quality seems to stem not from any sort of inability of the professors, but the complete incompetence of the administration to manage them. On top of the frequent, unannounced moves to buildings that are falling apart, they seem to drastically change the requirements of every department every other year in spite of some department's frequent objections. And since this is a state school in Pennsylvania, they of course aren't getting paid well Personally, if I was working under such terrible conditions, I wouldn't want to teach kids either. Still, it gets a bit ridiculous at times—I passed German with an A, something which I found mathematically impossible according to the grades I had been given. The fact that the administrators care so little about the actions of the professors that they can't even do some minor fact checking on grades is no doubt one of the worst aspects of the institution.

Going back to the availability of useful information for career-level work, if your idea of challenging coursework is

a little harder than high school

, then the Nursing, Computer Science, and Pre-Med programs are up there. Most social sciences end up teaching you at least a little, but you have to take nothing but high level courses and actually go back and understand the material yourself, because there's no way the simple act of passing is good enough to certify you in those fields. Anything else seems to be a total joke, worse than High School even. I've never taken an art class but as the reviews have mentioned, the people who tend to really enjoy EUP are almost always art students, which is weird because I've never seem anything from any of them that looks better than what my completely untrained girlfriend sketches for fun.

This isn't even mentioning the unlivable conditions that make up student life. If you commute, I would probably call Edinboro a C school, just barely. If you live on campus the environment is completely unacceptable, an utter nightmare. There are 11 dorms, 8 of which are "highland suites", very expensive buildings with basic commodities like (bad) air conditioning and walls with some degree of sound dampening. I'm pretty sure the name of the game is to force you into these expensive buildings, because the other 3 buildings are practically third world living conditions, with paper thin walls, zero security, and only a small number of completely public restrooms. I could deal with this if the Highlands were good living areas, but they're not. The walls are falling apart, the pluming sucks, and depending on where you are, the elevators are either unresponsive or completely broken.

Probably the worst thing about Edinboro in general is the wifi. I knew full well coming here that campus internet is nothing great, and I probably wouldn't be able to do lucrative things like download torrents or play online games. What I wasn't prepared for was "service" that works maybe 60% of the time, and the 40% of the time that it does work, takes over 30 seconds to load something as basic as a text-only webpage. I'm amazed I even managed to submit this.

The frustration of the fisher price internet only gets worse when Edinboro's schizophrenic identity comes into play. Despite being a school that absolutely demands the use of the internet and a computer or laptop to graduate (the vast majority of classes have some form of online submission for assignments and no other submission options), things that would be much easier online than on paper are done the old fashion way, such as scheduling classes, managing financial aid, and applying for housing. Even fucking SUNY schools are more techno-savvy than this, and yet I'm expected to work with a dial-up style internet connection for classes.

Many people have said, both to me and to others, that they wouldn't have survived Edinboro without friends, and you don't know how literal this is. I consider myself an extremely independent person, and yet despite my self-sufficiency, I can honestly say I would have done something stupid like self-harm or endangering myself even worse than that if it weren't for things like finding a wonderful girlfriend and learning to love the feeling of alchohol in my system. If you are a person that is either not good at or doesn't have the desire to socialize, DON'T go here. It will probably kill you.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend EUP unless it's your very last option, and if you do go, at least commute. God knows I feel bad for international students.