The University of Rhode Island

Date: Mar 10 2014
Major: Mechanical Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
I never visited URI before attending the school so I was not very sure of what to expect. I choose it because I received a giant out of state merit scholarship. This school has many issues when it comes to their educating of students. What I mean is that it is too easy to work the system. For example, in engineering we are required to take a sequence of Elementary Physics courses. In these courses we are allowed a full sheet of paper with anything we want on it. You can pass classes like physics with little to no knowledge of what is actually going on. In majors like engineering this is an extremely poor way to teach, its like they just want to push engineers through which just is not good. Professors at this school are extremely hard to get in touch with and have like 2 office hours a week, so in the engineering department you have to be a very independent student, which works for some students but for others it can be a disaster.

Now lets get into URI's student body and the social aspects of the school. URI is not a very diverse school, although they want you to think that. Mostly full of In-state students who stay with there old highschool friends and treat college like high school all over again. In fact, i have found that most rhode islanders in general are not very approachable and are highly judgmental of out of state students and my best friend at school who happens to be a Rhode islander agrees with me. Dorm's at this school are shit to be honest, very poor maintenance. For example, there are rooms in some of the residence halls that are closed to occupancy because of bee infestation. The food in our dining halls is above average though and is not a negative for the school. Administration and financial services is. They are so full of themselves and highly disregard the financial problems suffered by many out of state students. They lost multiple of my loan checks and never even bothered to contact me so I could contact the loan company, thats not doing the right thing and extremely frustrating.

This school also has a massive drug problem and before you say that every school has a drug problem you have not witnessed one like URI's. Ive talked about this with friends that go to other schools and they where shocked by some of the things I told them. If you like to smoke pot this is the school for you because almost everyone here smokes everyday. But bigger drug problems are at large here. We recently had to end a fraternity here because someone in it got fronted thousands of dollars of drugs and got robbed and they gang that fronted him the money threatened to shoot up the frat house. The school tried to sweep it under the rug but it was obviously leaked around campus when we began to notice state troopers around.
To conclude, beware of URI it is a fun school in which you will make a lot of friends, but there are many downsides that will make life hard especially for an out of state student who is trying to find their way in a new place.