Bentley University

Date: Aug 06 2014
Major: Accounting (This Major's Salary over time)
The accounting classes at Bentley were great, and I had tons of interviews for internships (all in Boston) in between my junior and senior year and offers before I graduated. I graduated with great grades, started a job at a prestigious firm, passed my CPA exam, and later moved outside New England back home out West. The coursework at Bentley was great, but I credit getting my CPA passed to the excellent CPA prep courses (Becker) my employer paid for and not so much any particular courses I took at Bentley. Having intelligent classmates very much into finance and accounting was a plus. Some of the accounting professors were unhelpful and often intimidating to go up and ask questions to or to try to meet during office hours.

Bentley is great overall as a business specialty school, but I feel sometimes that its students and fellow New Englanders think too highly of the school. Even today with a new president and state of the art facilities and top rankings, no one has heard of Bentley outside of New England, so as an alumnus it's a challenge to launch a career outside of the Boston/NYC area. The lack of name recognition makes it tough for those who are not from New England and choose to move home after Bentley to begin careers. Hopefully the name recognition issue is getting better and Bentley will get ?on the map,? but it seems we are still a long way from that. In NYC the alums and alum networking events are increasing, but out West, Bentley is a just a fancy automobile, and a mediocre regional state university out West is seen as more prestigious.

Students are friendly, but because the school is extremely career-oriented, they can seem self-absorbed. You?re not going to find anyone here into politics or social change or experimenting with a unique hairstyle or lifestyle. The student body is dressed preppy, with a ton of MA natives, or, if not from MA, from southern ME/southern NH/CT/NY/NJ, along with a disproportionate number (even considering the school is in MA) of Patriots fans and Red Sox fans who dress the same way (usually North face fleece jackets, Bentley school hoodies or Bentley athletic team hoodies of athletes, button down shirts and khaki cargo pants). The winters in New England are rough and depressing. I have a feeling a number of the students get depressed because students seem open and fun to be around the first two weeks or so of a semester, but then get irritable and super busy as soon as the mid-terms or the first set of exams are coming. Then, by the time the weather gets nice in Waltham, finals are already here and it?s time to leave Bentley for internships in the city or to go move back home with the parents. On weekends during the semester, students seem to just stay on the campus and play beer pong or go home to parents for a long 3 day weekend. It?s not uncommon to wake up on a Fri/Sat/Sun morning to get some breakfast and find that the dining hall isn?t open yet (caters to the drinking crowd I guess) and that the outside campus is mostly empty, and roam your floor?s dorm hallways and find that someone got super drunk and decided to drop a deuce on the floor or rip the exit sign out of the ceiling (probably thought it was a basketball rim) or that someone vomited in the washer and left it in there (I remember I once paid 5 quarters the next morning in the laundry room to run the washer and dumped a lot of my detergent in there to at least rid the vomit smell). Students form cliques and often do everything together and do not interact much with other groups. Even though I was a student-athlete at Bentley, I always tried to make friends and hang out with others not on the team and sit with them at lunch, etc., but this was more the exception than the norm as most of my teammates did everything together (rooming, sleeping, eating together for meals, team practices, eating, job hunting…everything). Students are very focused on bettering career-prep and/or current financial situation. It's as though they are in a rush to climb the corporate ladder immediately after college. I guess this is what to expect though at a very serious business school. Few students seem to be able to look outside of themselves at what is actually going on in the world or to have some creative interests they want to pursue after college, and if they are into a particular cause (such as poverty or helping the environment), it seems as though it is only for their own career aspirations on the resume and not because it is something they genuinely care about.

Bentley's website has advertised for years that they are just "minutes west of Boston," but keep in mind ?minutes? is a bit misleading as it is ~20-30 mins in a suburb near Brandeis. The dating scene at Bentley is particularly bad. It?s not just the 60-40 male to female ratio of the student body, but the business nature of the school attracts women who are boring and unadventurous. There were definitely some attractive girls at Bentley, but most of them were daddy?s girl and felt they were too good for anyone there and so the mostly unattractive women were the only ones available. It wasn't until I moved to the city junior year for a summer internship that I got laid, and it took until graduating and moving to the city to catch up to my male peers at state universities in terms of social maturity.