<p>My parents have already paid my admissions deposit, housing deposit and paid for orientation for June 6 and if you guys could please help me and help others here as to the following questions, I would sincerely appreciate any help.</p>
<ol>
<li> During orientation, will I be able to meet with an actual counselor to help me choose my exact classes and can I register at that time?</li>
<li> Will Cawthon or Broward be a good choice for a freshman nerdy male math major?</li>
<li> Is there good reception @ FSU with T-Mobile ?</li>
<li> Can I bike ( no car ) to a near-by grocery store for food ?</li>
<li> How is the food @ FSU and is the unlimited plan good ?</li>
<li> Any safety concerns ?</li>
<li> Is there a list of things I should bring with me ?</li>
<li> Any other suggestions appreciated !</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li>Yes</li>
<li>Yes</li>
<li>Don’t know</li>
<li>Great bus system will take you right to Publix</li>
<li>Not bad, gets old quick</li>
<li>No more than anywhere else</li>
</ol>
<p>Our family has been subscribed to and extensively used these cellular networks in and around FSU and Tallahassee, to include travel all around Tallahassee and Florida:</p>
<p>AT&T
Nextel (now part of Sprint)
Sprint
Verizon</p>
<p>I’d rank them like this:</p>
<p>AT&T = Verizon (surprising - I thought Verizon would be unbeatable until we had to migrate to AT&T)
Sprint (very poor coverage in rural Georgia unless you have a multi-band CDMA phone)</p>
<p>All are workable in Tallahassee. You note the coverage differences out in the rural areas. </p>
<p>I am pretty sure AT&T is the current official cellular system of Florida State. It was Verizon previously. All these networks have difficulty in the stadium when there are 80,000+ people and many are using cell phones.</p>
If you mean an academic advisor, then yes. You will get to meet with the advisors for your intended major (on the last day, you are split up based on your major, and then your orientation leaders take you to the advisors) and they will help you pick the classes you should take your first semester. Keep in mind though that what they list on the paper for you to register for isn’t the end all for what you should take; you can take other classes (as long as you meet the pre-reqs for those classes, of course). The advisors will highly advise you stick with what they recommend, of course, but it isn’t a requirement (in fact, I think the only “requirement” is that unless you have credit for those classes, you have to take English Comp 1 and 2 when you start. I’m pretty sure completing English Comp 1 your first semester is almost a campus-wide requirement, since every major I’ve looked at lists it as one).</p>
<p>
It’s no better or worse than any other dorm really. A plus for Cawthon is that it houses the WIMSE (Women in Math, Science, and Engineering) Living Learning Community ;).</p>
<p>
This is going to vary across the campus (as with Sprint, I get amazingly good coverage in the NW corner of campus, but near Wildwood/Ragans it drops down significantly), but in Wildwood my roommate freshman year had rather hit and miss reception with T-Mobile. If I had to rank it campus wide, I would say Verizon is easily #1, followed by AT&T at #2, with Sprint and T-Mobile close for third. It’s really tough for me to put either one third, since Sprint has terrible reception in many of the buildings (it’s due to the frequency that Sprint uses) and T-Mobile has, from what I can tell, somewhat spotty reception throughout a good portion of campus. All 4 of the carriers though offer decent service, so no matter what company you are with, you will probably be satisfied for the most part.
If you are talking about anything specific (4G, etc) then I can help there too. Just a heads up if you have a 4G phone- unless something has recently changed, I do not believe that any of the 4 major carriers offers 4G service in Tallahassee. I know for a fact though that T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T do not offer 4G service, although I am not 100% positive about Verizon.</p>
<p>Long story short, as long as you have one of the 4 main characters and not MetroPCS, you will be fine with coverage.</p>
<p>
The closest grocery store isn’t exactly in biking distance, but it is on the bus route. It’s a Publix and they typically aren’t too stellar price-wise. There’s also a Winn-Dixie on a different bus route. You can probably bike to CVS which is close to the campus (not the east side though) but they aren’t a grocery store.</p>
<p>
The food gets boring pretty quick, because it seems like the all you can eat locations fail to get creative in their offerings. However, if you live in one of the dorms that require a meal plan, you’re not going to get much choice, sadly. You’ll either have to get a meal plan and use it, or waste the money.
In my experience, the unlimited plan was ultimately a waste. Not just cost wise, but because the unlimited plan is difficult to take true advantage of compared to other meal plans.
Of course, the way that the meal plans have changed this year, who knows what plans will be offered next year (or how much they will cost).</p>
<p>
No more so than any other location really. There’s the occasional robbery on campus. Tallahassee has some above-average crime rates. The campus itself is pretty safe though. Either I’m not longer receiving all of the emails they send out about campus crime, or the amount of crime being reported on campus seems really low this year.</p>
<p>
If you are living on campus, the FSU Housing website actually has a list of things you should probably bring. That forms a good starting point, although it’s not exactly complete and will vary by person.</p>
<p>
I don’t know if you will get a chance, but I highly recommend attending an FSU Preview if you can. I did back when I was considering FSU, and I felt like it was an amazing experience that reassured me that FSU was the right choice for me. I still enjoy looking back to things like Preview and Orientation and thinking back about how lost I was trying to find stuff on campus, and think about how I feel like a campus expert now. </p>
<p>P2N: I may be wrong, but I think that Verizon is still the official wireless provider for FSU, going by [this</a> page](<a href=“http://its.fsu.edu/Communications/Cellular]this”>http://its.fsu.edu/Communications/Cellular). It doesn’t really matter though, since I’m pretty sure that all of the Big 4 providers provide discounts to FSU students- I think it’s pretty much 15% for all of them, although I haven’t really looked into any of them in 2 years so things have probably changed.</p>