The University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Campus

Date: Mar 19 2007
Major: Communications (This Major's Salary over time)
If you are not a premed or engineering or business major, do not go to pittsburgh. I was in the communications department and was bored out of my mind. I wanted to do journalism and was forced into 2 years of learning about nothing. Every class seemed to have the same curriculum, and the same teacher who didnt care about what they were teaching. Most of the classes were lecture style, and that made the teachers incapable of forming any kind of relationship with their students at all.

Besides the communication department, my biggest complaint against pitt was the living situation. If you dont live on lower campus (which happens when you are an unlucky freshman, and if you get screwed with a low lottery number the next year) you pretty much are forced to walk every time you want to go anywhere. Sure, they have a "bus system", but the bus comes every 15 minutes, is always late, and is a 20 minute ride to whereever you want to go. Anytime i wanted to go to eckerd, it would be an hour long adventure. There is no grocery store on campus, so unless you are rich and have 800$ to spend on a parking spot (which they fail to mention you arent allowed to park in during their precious basketball games) you are going to have to spend 2 hours of your day taking the city bus to squirrel hill.

And speaking of groceries, it is something you are forced to buy even though you have what pitt likes to call a "meal plan". their meal plan consists of a certain number of blocks per week. if you run out of blocks, and have no dining dollars (and you probably dont because they charge 7 dollars for a box of pop tarts) than it pretty much sucks to be you. the food is disgusting. each time i spend 6 dollars on a slab of meat and some brocoli, i want to throw it back at them and ask them if they would feed it to their own children. their stir fry orange chicken are chicken tenders with orange sauce poured on. thanks. i could have created that by myself from the frozen food aisle of giant eagle.

aside from the 5 dollar fruit cup, pitt also has a ridiculous visitor situation. first of all you need to sign in every single visitor, regardless of if they are a pitt student or not. you also need to sign out every visitor, and if you dont then you will be hit with a 20 dollar charge. also, if you forget your id at all, dont expect the front desk person to just let you in. you have to mkae a phone call, confirm you are indeed the person you say you are, and be given an access code. they claim the visitor sign in is to be safe, but it is completely unnecesary and a waste of time.

the party scene at pitt is fun at first, but then it gets boring. people are not that cool and the parties tend to get too big too fast. if you are not at a party by 1030 at the latest, you will not get in, and even if you get lucky and do get in, you wont be able to walk or get a drink. pittsburgh was not a good expereince for me. i found many of the "ways of the city" to be illogical. it seemed like no one cared about you, and nothing was done for the students convience.