<p>I’m not the one who made the generalization, I heard it from students at three other nearby schools. </p>
<p>My coach was not lying to me either, I was told by athletes on the team that the coach yells at them all the time and athletes on teams that compete against AU frequently said the coach is scary.</p>
<p>sic,</p>
<p>Good luck at Loyola. Sounds from your posts like AU was not a good fit for you more for the athletics than anything else. </p>
<p>Regarding IR, AU, GWU and GT graduates are all equally valued by the State Department, CIA, etc., and to a lesser degree Catholic and Loyola grads.</p>
<p>If I had completely disregarded athletics in my college decision I probably would have ended up at Providence(too good) or Fordham(would have killed my athletic career). Being an athletic recruit allowed me to gain much better perspective on many of the schools I applied to than a normal applicant would. AU was not a good fit for me because of the student body and the campus. I’m not 100% sure with what I want to do career-wise yet so I picked my school based more on feel than anything.</p>
<p>I just graduated from SIS with a minor in Chinese and I would like to vouch for the quality of the language program here. AU has an agreement with Beijing Language & Culture University, the premier language school in the country, to have three teachers per year from China. They stay here for a year, and then go back. In addition, we have three permanent professors here at AU, who are DC residents. One of the professors that I had also teaches at Georgetown, the State Department, and the World Bank. </p>
<p>Essentially, I had the same teachers from the time I was a sophomore in Elementary Chinese I to the my senior year when I was in Independent Study Chinese. My teachers here went back to Beijing when I studied abroad my Junior year and some of them were at AU my junior year and senior year too. </p>
<p>We have a high-quality, established Chinese department here at AU and I think that it has definitely developed and grown in the recent years. AU has a language immersion program in China as well as the abroad programs in Beijing and Hong Kong. If your son or daughter is interested in taking Chinese, I would definitely recommend it and you will find the program to be of very high caliber.</p>