<p>I need the inside scoop on this school. I am hearing "everyone with a pulse" gets in, but once you are there, is it a decent school or not?</p>
<p>I have no idea, but I would just like to throw out there: oh my gosh, how many schools with the initials USC are there anyway? Seriously…like 3 that I can think of…</p>
<p>Crazy.</p>
<p>…raelah…?
University of Souther Maine would be USM</p>
<p>According to Collegeboard they accept 81% of the applications and the average SAT is 1020.
Based off of that alone I would say that it is an average Public school. Your experience there will be how you make it. Im sure that you could get involved with lots of research and stuff and really make it a wonderful college experience if you chose to do so.
Portland is a really cool city too</p>
<p>USM is facing pretty significant budget cuts. So are other Maine publics, but there are more programs at UMaine-Orono which are not getting cut. Also, USM doesn’t really have graduate programs and doesn’t have faculty who are all that involved in research, at least in the sciences.</p>
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<p>Wow, I feel stupid now. Just ignore me.</p>
<p>xD</p>
<p>Portland is a great little city. That’s the best thing about USM. USM has two campuses: one in Portland, one in Gorham, about 10 miles west.</p>
<p>The music department has some very nice and very talented professors. I can’t speak for the rest of the school, except to say that they were unresponsive and a royal pain to deal with when my HS kid was trying to work with them on a science research project one year, and trying to get into a class in another department the following year. (In fact, they totally screwed him on the science project, in great contrast to the University of Maine in Orono people who could not have been more helpful. The professor whose permission he needed to get into the class NEVER TO THIS DAY responded in any way to any of the emails or phone messages left by my kid and by me. That’s two separate departments.) Recently, they have dropped majors including Chemistry, Economics, and Physics, just to name a few. They apparently see their role as serving the “non-traditional” student.</p>
<p>To be brutally frank, for people I know, it’s a place where kids “take some courses” when they have had to drop out of other schools for personal or academic reasons.</p>
<p>I went to the University of Southern Maine for a semester and wasn’t impressed. I ended up transferring to Southern New Hampshire University. The living conditions were awful although they have built new dorms since I have left, only available to upperclassmen. I found that there wasn’t too much to do in Gorham where most of the housing is located. The back and forth between campus’ was extremely annoying to me. I would definitely suggest you bring a car on campus if you decide you want to go there. Waiting for the bus is frustrating and running on there schedule is a pain. For such a small school the professors were impersonal. I feel like I am getting a much better education at the school I am attending now. I only had a short experience with the school so it may be different for others. I just wouldn’t have too high of expectations.</p>