The University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Date: Nov 03 2016
Major: Economics (This Major's Salary over time)
Welcome to UMass Amherst, where bureaucracy is king. Just like in the real world, you exist as a number in a system. Nobody will care about you, nobody will look out for you, and nobody will help you unless you absolutely hound them. Getting any kind of staff/faculty assistance is an absolute chore. I was required to meet with an advisor every semester prior to registering for my classes, but appointments fill up weeks before registration opens. Upon getting a meeting (if you are so lucky), you're likely to get a completely unhelpful summation of what you need to take. Do not expect helpful answers to any actual questions like "will X fulfill Y requirement". The answer you receive will be along the lines of "talk to X person" who will, in all likelihood, tell you to talk to another Y person. Professors, advisors, and other staff members are some of the least communicative I've ever encountered. If you do receive a response, it will likely not be for several days (even for time-sensitive issues), and it often took me two or three emails (sometimes to people over the head of the person I was trying to contact) to get a response. You literally have to raise hell to get any help.

Add to this the rigidity that comes with a bureaucracy-driven college, and you have a recipe for madness. Do you want a double major? I'll answer that for you - no, you don't. Your secondary major will treat you like a second class citizen, and will outright refuse you entry into classes that you need to graduate, with the excuse that "preference is given to primary majors" or "this is class is for primary majors ONLY". I'm a senior. I was still not given priority for several upper level classes that I needed to complete my secondary major (which I had already invested 3 years in).

Res-Life is a complete joke, and I say this as a former-RA. Their so caught up with their political-correctness nonsense (we actually got a handout with an entire page of non-standard pronouns. AN. ENTIRE. PAGE. Ridiculous stuff like xhe and xi that reads like satire rather than an actual attempt to be inclusive) that they don't actually give a damn about student happiness or well-being (unless you're a flight/suicide risk, of course).

It just seems like every single thing at this university is horribly mismanaged, to the point of it being a common joke among the students. Administration acts like they want to cut down on drinking culture, going so far as to ban pong of any form (whether or not alcohol is involved, and yes, you can get written up for it), yet they completely section off the entire parking lot for tailgating before football games (forcing those who pay for parking to park elsewhere), which becomes an unsupervised underage drinking fest. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but completely hypocritical and absurd.