@bklyn99 Hi! Personally, since you are premed, I would recommend looking at Brooklyn, Queens, and Hunter more than looking at FCLC because premed is much more strong at those school. I have a lot of friends at those schools and I would 100% recommend looking at those schools over FCLC. I know that Hunter bio is very hard but still doable. I know Hunter has a strong nursing program because of its ties with Bellevue, but it also has a very robust premed community. Many of my friends who are premed there are learning a lot better than I am here simply because the professors are better than the ones at LC. QC has a strong premed community and good professors. Not sure if you will take this into account at all, but QC also has a really pretty campus. It has a real campus feel to it (I took a collegenow class there in HS so I spent quite some time at the campus.) Brooklyn College has a great relationship with SUNY Downstate Medical School, so that’s definitely a benefit. If you haven’t already looked at it, Brooklyn has a BS/MD program with Downstate that looks extremely promising. Premed advising at FCLC is pretty bad. Our premed advisor doesn’t life holds for registration, isn’t available for mandatory advising meetings 99% of the time, and she doesn’t actually advise anything. There’s a minority premed club called MAPS but it’s really inactive, it hasn’t met all semester and I think it met about 2-3 times last semester. There is a general science club though that has guest speakers sometimes, but that’s about it.
@JoCor I really think that Hunter would probably be better if you’re willing to sacrifice the really big college experience. I personally don’t feel like the cost justifies the college experience because the debt is pretty significant and the campus experience is still lacking. As a commuter, it’s harder to get as integrated into the RH and LC social cultures. And thanks for the well wishes, I thankfully got into my first choice and I’m happy to be transferring! I really hope you’re able to choose the right school right off the bat so you don’t have to go through the entire process of transferring halfway through your college years. Worrying about credit evaluations and which classes will be transferred over is stressful and can get in the way of graduating on time, so I genuinely hope that the choice you make leads you to being happy and successful.
I also thought I’d address a complaint that’s usually found at CUNYs, which is that administration there is rude and unhelpful. This can be true for a lot of people’s experiences there, but it’s also very true at Fordham. It’s actually disappointing to see deans and advisors who are demeaning and unhelpful in stressful situations, especially when we pay so much to go to this school. There’s a lot of frustration within groups of the student body right now (registration period) because the advisors and deans are simply not helping people out. The freshman and junior deans are extremely nice, but they do not have the power to fix a lot of the problems unless you’re within those two class years. I think the freshman and junior deans are two of the best people that work at LC, honestly, but again they can’t help with everything. The sophomore dean is really not helpful or kind at all. There’s a lot of issues going on with this and it’s very frustrating to see some of my classmates who are doing amazingly grade-wise suffer because of the negligence of their advisors and our class dean.
As for both your question and @bklyn99’s questions about the incidents on campus, there’s been a lot since my freshman year up to now. It started off with hate speech and slurs being found on campus, which was addressed by the school. However, the same semester (if i recall the timeline correctly) there was an incident with RH students where there was a video of a group of students chanting “white power” and though the school claimed that it was investigated, it has been widely known amongst the student body that the punishment did not go beyond a slap on the wrist and it was brushed under the rug. Last fall there were fliers found at RH that are associated with a white supremacist group and even though it was brought to the school’s attention, they did not say a single word about it. It was really as if though it didn’t ever happen as far as admin was concerned. The flier was in a busy academic building (Dealy Hall I believe? Not entirely sure of the RH building names) so it was meant to make an obvious statement by reaching a large population of the student body. There’s also been problems with the way Fordham tries to downplay incidents of very obvious racism, it’s really like gas-lighting those of us who feel unwelcome by the multiple problems we’ve had. I can only really scratch the surface of the events that have happened because I don’t want to violate the privacy of the people on the receiving end of discrimination in these events just out of courtesy, but there’s so much more that happens here regarding this, even within the classroom setting. It’s very disappointing and unwelcoming.
