<p>12/29/08</p>
<p>I am here today to write about my experience in Stony Brook. I have no one to blame but myself for going to this dreadful place in the first place due to my lack of research during high school. When they say visit the campus to see if you really want to go to the school, people should take the advice. I blindly applied to this school and did not take into consideration whether or not I’ll be truly happy here. After the first month in my stay in SBU, I decided I wanted to transfer out the following semester. There are so many things wrong with the school that I simply have to tell everyone out there. </p>
<p>Let’s start with the admissions process. Applying to SBU was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Unlike the other colleges I applied to, SBU did not require me to give them any supplement application. What exactly did I have to fill out or hand in? I applied on the SUNY online website and put down Binghamton, Fredonia, and SBU. Fredonia and Binghamton both needed me to fill out a supplement application with recommendations from my high school teachers. The supplement app wanted to know what clubs I was in, what my work experiences are, what volunteer work I participated in, and likewise. However, SBU simply looked at my grades, deemed them excellent, and quickly sent me their acceptance letter. I wondered how they selected their students, what did they base it on? It certainly had nothing to do with leadership qualities, community involvement, or anything that other colleges take into consideration. This leads to my rant of the students in the school, but let’s get to that later.</p>
<pre><code>Let’s talk about the cost of going to SBU. The tuition comes out to be more than $17,000 a year. As a student that comes from a low income family, I expected to receive a plentiful amount of financial aid to cover my tuition. However, the more I stare at the numbers, the more it seems unreasonable. Let’s look at my tuition cost for Fall’08. The total comes out to be $7,561.75. What did SBU financial aid decide to give me? The Federal Pell Grant (FPG) covered $2,366.00. TAP covered $2,187.50. ACG grant covered $375. I had to take out the Subsidized Stafford Loan ($1715). This still doesn’t add up to the tuition cost. Basically, the fall term adds up to something like 1700 for the loan plus the 1k I had to dish out of my own pocket, as well as other expenses I did not count in, such as the textbooks, transportation, and outside food. This comes out to be roughly $3k per semester, or $6k per year. I ask myself, “why?” SUNY Fredonia’s financial aid package covered the whole tuition. I know of a lot of people who were better off than I am in financial status and still received the same amount of financial aid. I conclude that SBU does not care about how much your family income is. They give everyone the same amount of aid; not enough to cover the entire bill. You also have to know that I graduated HS ranked 38th in my grade, with a 4.0 GPA. Yet I received no scholarships whatsoever from SBU. I looked on with envy on my friends who went to other schools that gave them full rides to college with poorer grades.
Let’s move onto the campus. The campus is structured in a fairly odd way. There are six quads on campus; Kelly, Roth, Roosevelt, Tabler, H, and Mendelson. The quads are scattered around campus in pairs of two. I lived in Kelly Quad, a suite style dorm. When I first saw our quad during orientation, I thought to myself; “This is what I am paying 6k/year for?” The building looked run down on the outside and gave a really bad first impression.
The quads are paired up for a reason. Each quad is paired up with another so they can share a common food court. Kelly Quad is special because it has its own Kelly Dining Hall. Our neighbors, students from Roosevelt Quad, have to walk across two or three blocks in order to get food. As for the other Quads, their accessibility to food courts were really poor. Roth and Tabler didn’t have a food court until this November, when Roth Dining opened. I don’t know anything about H/Mendelson quad because they are all the way on the other side of campus and I hardly go there. The interaction between Kelly Quad and H-Quad is almost nonexistent because of the distance.
One of the most outrageous things on campus is the food. All residents on campus are required to have a meal plan unless their building has a kitchen. There are only three buildings on campus that have built in kitchens. Basically everyone on campus has to enroll in a meal plan. The meal plan is the biggest rip off I’ve ever seen. There are four meal plans available for you to choose. The plans are as follow:
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<p>BRONZE PLAN (Meal Plan 1) * $1,557 – for 1239 meal points
SILVER PLAN (Meal Plan 2) * $1,664 – for 1346 meal points
GOLD PLAN (Meal Plan 3) * $1,878 – for 1560 meal points
PLATINUM (Meal Plan 4) * $2,412 – for 2094 meal points</p>
<p>Now where did the other $318 go? They say it goes to the maintenance fee, such as the utensils, cleaning, preparing, etc. I don’t know if $318 is a reasonable amount but their scheme to get our money is really something. A “meal point” is just another way of saying a dollar. So when your lunch cost you 10 meal points, you think to yourself; “Okay it’s only 10 meal points no big deal” and you swipe your ID card like it’s nothing. However, you don’t realize that you wasted ten bucks on lunch. That’s right. And what’s worse is that if you don’t spend your meal points, they take it off your account. They don’t refund your money if you don’t spend it. They are forcing you to spend $1.5k on food in three months. I don’t know how I can possibly spend that much money on food when I’m back at home. It’s such a waste.</p>
<pre><code>What’s worse than the meal plan system is the food itself. Everything on campus is overpriced. When I say everything, I mean everything with only one exception. A single piece of fruit costs $0.90. A single banana costs $0.90. Back in the city, a pound of bananas are just 33 cents. I did not eat a single piece of fruit during my stay in SBU unless it was the weekend, when they had the morning buffet. Everything that is healthy for you on campus is overpriced. The stuff in the salad bar is charged 44 cents per ounce. The plastic container itself is already two ounces. One time I filled my plastic container up with salad and fruit and the bill came out to be $7 something. The fruit juice there is $2.25 for an 8 fluid ounce bottle. The protein cans are $5 each. The energy drinks are $4 each. There is no way anyone can spend less than $6 per meal on campus, except for breakfast.
I had the silver plan and wasn’t looking at how I was spending the first week. I was already way below the recommended amount of meal points left. I had to limit myself to spending only 13-14 meal points a day in order to not run out. That was a really difficult task. Breakfast was 3 points, lunch was at least 6, and dinner was always above 7. I found myself skipping meals here and there and it was really an unhealthy habit to do. My friends and I were always complaining about how expensive the food was and we were always hungry. The portion size of each food is really small and not filling at all…
The only exception to the expensive food was the newly opened Wendy’s fast food restaurant in Roth Dining. When it opened in November, the line was so long, people had to wait at least two hours on line in order to get fast food. People loved to go there because the food was cheaper than the rest of the campus. It was following the Wal-Mart effect. Since Wendy’s pricing are stabilized, they aren’t allowed to raise it to the unreasonable price like the rest of the campus. Kids from all over campus flooded to Wendy’s. Kelly Dining was empty all the time. It served them right… overpricing everything and ripping us off like that. For the final month of school I went to Wendy’s practically everyday in order to save meal points. It’s ironic how they tell us we should eat healthy and yet the only thing that is reasonable for its price is Wendy’s. The point is, unless you are filthy rich, which I am not, it’s impossible to eat healthy on campus. If you want to eat healthy everyday, you are bound to spend at least 30 “points” a day minimum.
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<p>According to Princeton Review:</p>
<p>Stony Brook's Best 368 College Rankings</p>
<h1>19 Least Beautiful Campus</h1>
<h1>8 Diverse Student Population</h1>
<p>*#3 Least Happy Students *</p>
<h1>12 Long Lines and Red Tape</h1>
<h1>12 Professors Get Low Marks</h1>
<h1>10 Least Accessible Professors</h1>
<h1>5 Class Discussions Rare</h1>
<p>Stony Brook is ranked 3rd in least happy students. That is SAD. Rank 1 is some naval military academy but still, why is SBU so low in the hearts of the student body?</p>
<pre><code> I’ll tell you why. The school is made of 30% commuters and 70% residents. On the weekends, all the residents hop on the LIRR (Long Island Railroad) and head back home (NYC). The weekends are dead. Saturday is the worse day of the week because the campus becomes a ghost town. The weekends are dreadful because nothing happens and most people simply go home. Freshmen and sophomores are not allowed to have cars on campus so we have no choice but to stay on campus. If you do park on campus, they will find you and give you a parking ticket. So if you want to own a car on campus during your first two years, you should plan where you want to park your car… maybe half a mile away is enough. It’s really difficult for drivers to find a parking spot. I heard they raised the price of parking tickets too. It’s Long Island though, there are no roads for pedestrians. It’s impossible to walk to anywhere because the campus is surrounded by highways. Without a car… it feels like I’m trapped in a prison. I don’t want to waste $20 every week to go home. But I know plenty of friends who go home every weekend because they can’t stand the weekend atmosphere.
The fact of the matter is: everyone leaves on the weekends. The faculty knows it too. The services on the weekends are pathetic. Kelly Dining only opens one food station because they know that no one is around anyway. In the SAC, they only have the grill open. The employees all go home on the weekends so it leaves the part time students to cook our food. These people work so slow I wanted to shout at them to hurry up. For example, the omelet station in Kelly Dining. Normally it takes the usual cooks like 30 seconds to make breakfast for a customer. On the weekend, the student employee takes twenty minutes to serve four people. I literally waited on the omelet line for 30 minutes because it was the only station that was open and since they cooked so slow, the line just got longer and longer. The problem is that the people who work in SBU know that the students go home on the weekends, so they cut back on all the services. The gym is open at night from Monday to Friday. But on Saturday, they close it early because they know that no one is around. I went to the gym every Saturday and it felt awful because I was the only one who was there working out. On Sunday night, it returns to normal because people usually return on Sunday nights. No wonder SBU is ranked 12th for long lines. The services are really poor and the people work too slowly. I cannot stress enough how bad the weekends are.
The dorms are horrible. All the incoming freshmen are forced to live in extremely poor conditions. Due to the “large number of applicants”, SBU makes all the new residents live in triples. What this means is that three people live in a room designed for two. The room itself was small enough, but the whole sharing the desk, sharing internet, sharing closets and everything got to me. I had no space of my own. I had to share a desk. How am I supposed to study when half the time my roommate is hogging the desk for his own leisure time?
Secondly, I first applied to room with two of my friends from high school. Oddly enough, I didn’t get them as my roommates, I wonder why? I was assigned with two random roommates. Kelly quad is a suite style kind of dorm. What this means is that we get a living room and share a bathroom with the suitemates. Seven people live in a suite (2 pairs of upperclassmen with a triple). My building was the only building in the quad that was supposed to be 24-hour-quiet. The 24-hour-quiet building doesn’t exist. The RAs go off duty at 11 PM. No one enforces the rule. My suitemates blast their music next door and I can’t sleep at night. They dribble the basketball, they blast music, they scream at each other in the living room… All of these things go on and yet it is supposed to be a building that enforces 24-hour-silence. That was all pure bull. All of my suitemate’s friends applied for my building so they can hang out without traveling across buildings. It’s so ironic that I applied for a peaceful place to live only to experience the opposite.
According to the website, freshmen are expected to get de-tripled within the first month if there is space available. Unfortunately for me, it never happened. I even asked my hall director if I can get a room change. He said I could but I should wait for de-tripling instead. And so I waited and waited and there goes the entire semester. The bathrooms are so poorly constructed. The shower stall is build so that the water doesn’t flow down the drain. Instead, the water becomes stagnant in the middle of the shower floor. There is always a nasty puddle in the middle and it is disgusting (at least for my bathroom). Another problem with our rundown dorms was that there was no heat in our building for the longest time. I was practically freezing inside and outside because SBU is located in Long island. I filed several complaints and finally got heat during December. If anything, Roth Quad is the best because they had air conditioners and they can adjust the amount of heat in the room.
Now let’s get to the staff. Here’s a direct quote from someone; “The people in registrar and housing are bitter, rude, and generally annoyed to just be speaking to you; forget about any care or willingness to help you with anything.” This is very true. When I was trying to check out on the last day of school, I couldn’t find my RA. The RA office on my building was closed so I assumed that I can just mail back the key to them and it would be the end of that. That was not the case. When I called them this morning the lady on the phone was really nasty. I asked them why I needed to do since I’m not returning next semester but she kept lecturing me about how I “stole” their key and that if I didn’t get the key back to them by next week they would charge me $150 for making them install new locks. On top of that, they are forcing me to pay $25 for “improper checkout.” How is it my fault that when I had to leave no RA was available to check me out of their garbage dormitory? The lady’s tone was harsh and treated me like I’m some sort of punk teenager. I received zero respect from this ***** on the phone.
One of my friends got screwed over big time by the writing department. My friend’s writing/reading score on the SAT was so high that he was exempt from taking the writing placement exam. He was automatically placed into Writing 102 class. But since there was no more space available for the fall term, he left it for the spring term. In the middle of the fall semester, they told him he cannot take WRT 102 and was placed into ESL class. Their reasoning was that because he put Chinese as his first language, he belonged in ESL. Their logic was flawed because they said that since he didn’t take the writing placement, he couldn’t get out of ESL. But the thing is, my friend’s SAT score was too high for him to even be allowed to take the placement test. It became a loophole that he couldn’t get out of. He called the writing department and they told him that he had to take ESL. When we were applying for SBU, there was this section that asked us the question “is English your first language?” He and I both immigrated to the USA at the age of seven. We both answered “No” in that section. The writing department said that since he put ‘No’, he belonged in ESL. I put the very same thing on my application but I’m in WRT101. It simply doesn’t make any sense at all because even in my writing 101 class, there are international students that can’t even use grammar correctly. The writing department is forcing him to take ESL and both Writing classes that follow ESL or else he can’t graduate. I really don’t see the logic here. His score was too high so he couldn’t possibly take the writing placement test. They put him in ESL because he didn’t take the writing placement test, while there are plenty of students on campus who can’t even speak the language correctly and are in writing 101. He called every department he can reach, he tried brining his family into the situation, he tried to threaten to leave the school, and they still wouldn’t change their decision. From what I can see, SBU is trying to rip him off… make him take extra courses so he has to stay in the school longer and thus get more money out of his pocket.
The faculty and staff, even the students are really discouraging. The professors don’t really give a rat’s ass about what you do. Not only are the professors/TA’s lazy, the students are as well. A majority of the people come to SBU to party/have fun/get laid/get drunk. SBU is known as a party school. I’m not saying everyone is like that but a majority of them are. I lost a lot of motivation since I got to SBU. Let’s look at each one of my classes this fall:
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<p>MAT 131 – Calculus I – This is a lecture class along with recitations. I estimate about roughly 200 people in the beginning of the term. In the middle of the term, less and less people showed up. Eventually, during the final days, only about 30% of the total class actually went to class. That is really pathetic. It’s even worse in my recitation class because people didn’t even bother to show up and hand in their homework assignments anymore. The class was curved based on the normal distribution. I didn’t even need to work hard to get my A in the class. I knew that with so many people who cut all the time, the curve was going to be tremendous and I was right. </p>
<p>ECO 108 – Introduction to Economics – This class started out with 130 people. Pretty much the entire classroom was present on the first day. The professor was horrible. He spoke broken English and his accent was difficult to understand. People stopped showing up for class. Out of 130 students, on the last week of school only 12 came to class. That is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. No body cares enough to give an effort. It was the same deal with math, I got an A probably because the class brought the average down. It’s important to note that I never showed up with books to class. It wasn’t even necessary, the professor ranted on and on about things that didn’t relate to the tests at all. I had to get all my material straight from the book. Eventually, even I started skipping the class. I attended it once a week and still did well. What kind of college is this?</p>
<p>PSY 103 – Intro to Psychology – This class was another lecture class. It’s the same deal, I didn’t bring any writing utensils to class, and had to study on my own. I have to mention that the lecture in class were horrible. The PowerPoint slides were the worse notes I’ve ever seen. I can create a better PowerPoint slide in two minutes. </p>
<p>WRT 101 – This was the only class I had that was small and the professor took attendance. However, I didn’t learn much of anything in this class. The goal of the class is to help college students write better. But the professor didn’t teach us anything. All we did was write four research papers. I guess practice makes perfect but I didn’t see much improvement in my writing. A good advice is to not buy the writing book they ask you to buy. The SBU bookstore is the only place where you can get their writing books… plus they are always overpriced and to make matters worse, I’ve only used the $40 book once.</p>
<pre><code>The ranking about #12 for bad professors, I can agree with that. My professor is a graduate student and I think he cares more about his research than he does about the class. Another funny thing is that nobody goes to the TAs during their office hours so the TAs don’t even go to their own office hours anymore. I emailed my TA the day after I took my final and wanted to ask him if I can see my test when he gets a hold of it. I got a response a week after… when school is already over. I don’t understand why I am paying $6k a year to teach myself. Why am I wasting my money to go somewhere to buy my own textbooks to learn the material on my own?
Diversity… no the school is not diverse. The school is half Asian… how is that really diverse? You can easily spot the invisible walls everywhere around campus. Koreans speaking Korean to their Korean friends. Chinese people speaking Mandarin to their Chinese friends. There is a under representation of the Latino and Black ethnic group in my opinion. Everywhere as far as the eye can see, you don’t see many interracial groups hanging out together. So the diversity part is definitely wrong.
The sports complex was the biggest disappointment. “The existing gymnasium (Pritchard Gymnasium), now the east wing of the Indoor Sports Complex, opened in 1964. The gymnasium has three multi-purpose courts suitable for basketball, volleyball, badminton and indoor soccer. The facility also houses a six-lane, 25-yard swimming pool, eight racquetball courts, a varsity free weight room, a nautilus weight room, a dance studio and an exercise room. The gymnasium, along with the new structure, provides an expansive, self-contained athletic complex, constituting Long Island's premier college sports facility, second in size only to Nassau Coliseum.” This is taken straight from the recreation website.
However, when I tried to play indoor volleyball with my friends, there was nowhere for us to play. We were in the volleyball intramurals so we wanted to practice some more before our games. I asked the staff in the sports complex if they can set up the nets. The answer was no, the nets are strictly put up for intramural games only, with no exceptions. The basketball courts were always open and available for anyone to walk in and shoot around. I thought the website says that volleyball is included in the general description for open recreation? No… it is not. When I tried to persuade them to see it my way, they simply told me to use the H-Quad tennis court. There was no way we can play outside, especially during the harsh winter. The sports complex was such a big letdown and the school policies are terrible.
The clubs in the school are not very involved. I think I signed up for three different clubs when the club fair advertised all of their “diverse” clubs. I received email notifications for one of them, the other one I never heard from again and the emails don’t come very often. I went to the culinary club once. I tried to find out what time the club meets but they said it was random and they didn’t have a set one. As for the table tennis club (ping pong), there were too many people and not enough tables. I hardly got enough playtime because of the long queue. Eventually I just gave up on the clubs. Intramural volleyball could have been better. For an entire season, we only got to play three teams. The amount of playtime was a bare minimum (3 hours for 3 games?).
The weather can be really nasty in Long Island. When it rains, it almost always floods. There is no sewage system. I only noticed maybe three manholes on the entire campus. When it snows, things get really bad. The roads clog up and traveling to get food becomes very tedious. If you think the summer is inactive, the winter weekend is your definition of a ghost town.
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<p>Here’s an interesting blog post I found online.</p>
<p>“I attend SUNY Stony Brook — apparently one of the top public universities in the nation (you could have fooled me). The Princeton Review put out their huge college report and out of the 300-some-odd colleges they bothered to cover, Stony Brook has the unhappiest students. Awesome.</p>
<p>It’s pretty funny, as only a week ago, a few buddies and I were standing around, observing the people around us, saying that on any given day, you can tell that 30% of the kids are miserable. They have the “what the hell am I doing here?” look on their faces. One of my friends said he saw a kid just sitting against a wall with his head in his hands. Stony Brook had obviously broken him.</p>
<p>The high percentage of commuters no doubt has a large effect. Driving on Long Island is sometimes the very definition of Pain City. And I bet many of the students are just unhappy with their overall lives — living at home and knowing deep down that getting a bachelor’s degree froma public university means next to jack **** nowadays. I know how that feels.”</p>
<p>The second part of the paragraph is very funny yet I fit into the statement perfectly. I asked myself what the hell was I doing here anyway? </p>
<pre><code>My final thoughts: This school is not my thing, nor do I recommend it. I am paying $6k a year to teach myself, the environment is lacking, the campus spirit is low, the faculty has poor attitude; the list goes on. It seems to me that they try every way possible to get our money. SBU accepts far too many applicants every year. This overcrowding is the reason why the freshmen have to triple up in the first place. SBU knows that a majority of the students get so fed up with the school that they leave soon enough so then they will have space for next year. They accept a bulk of students for the fall term, get their tuition money’s worth, and hope for the best. I think they actually are hoping that people leave after the first term, why else would they call the tripling “temporary?” What if no one decided to leave? We would end up with everyone tripling up. Luckily for them that is not the case. Just enough people see the flaws and decide to not return to this place called SBU. I feel very strongly about SBU, thats why I took the time to write this seven page essay.
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