I had virtually no guidance when it came to picking classes and majors.  I did not know which departments were excellent, and which ones were disorganized messes.  I picked English, and it turned out that the English Department was a disorganized mess.  I did not learn anything in any of my English classes.  I read, and I learned a bit through that, but the lectures and assignments were pointless.  They rarely challenged me or made me think. 

The grade inflation was out of control.  I got A-'s when I wrote my papers hours before they were due and failed to proofread them.  I got A's when I proofread.  I love a challenge.  I like to work hard, especially on my writing, and I like my hard work to be rewarded.  But there was no reward for a really good paper in the English department.  There were A's ... but they were, ironically, cheap. 

The lack of social life I found at NYU was thoroughly depressing.  I am a quiet person, but also a smart, kind, and creative one.  Everywhere I have lived, worked, or studied, with the exception of NYU, I have found plenty of friends.  I met plenty of people I liked at NYU, but did not make the cut for any of the cliques that I wanted to join, which I blame on the fact that I was a few years older than most of my peers, and ended up with very, very few NYU friends.

The facilities were awful, especially the library.  It was the singular in its poor construction—it's loud, heavy furniture and doors, it's carpet-less, echoing prison-like walls and floors, it's lack of any of the books I needed, it's loud, cell-phone-talking, crunchy-snack-eating students, and it's terrible lack of seating.  The dorms were dingy and tiny with paper-thin walls, and the form to find a compatible roommate was optional and hard to find on the housing website.

Nothing, however, tops the rudeness of the administrators, their unwillingness to discuss student problems in a direct manner, and their viciously defensive attitudes.  The worst interaction I had with one of their hired idiots came at the end of my junior year when I found an internship through their website that turned out to be a complete violation of labor laws.  The employer was depending on my, profiting from my long days sweating over her phones and files, not paying me, and not allowing me to take lunch breaks.  Now, federal minimum wage laws (including FSLA) do not allow for-profit companies to depend on or profit from unpaid interns, and obviously being denied a lunch break is not allowed.  So after I quit, I thought, “Gee, why don't I let NYU know that this person who is adverting through their career center is breaking labor laws with her interns?” The first person I spoke with chastised me for “unprofessional behavior” because I had quit.  When I told her about FSLA she laughed and said, “Well, that's a federal law, not our law.” When I went to higher-level career center administrators, they dodged all my questions, defended the first person I had talked to, and told me not too politely that they were not legally responsible for the content on their career center website.  When I brought the issue to the attention of the deans of my college, all they did was reiterate the fact that the university's policy of posting known FLSA violators on their website had been vetted by their legal committee.  A month or two later they came out with this statement saying that backing out on a position obtained through the career center would be grounds for loss of all career center services.