after having googled recent news about william and mary and having found loads of scandals surrounding this uni, i came across a link to this site which was written by a fellow student that reads: ‘do not go to william and mary’. oh hold-on, before your ask: yes, i attended w&m.
it’s worth noting: you can tell when a school employed moderator/poser steps-in to drop a settle reply. it goes something like this: ‘well, the OP is entitled to his/her opinion (acknowledgement) and I am sorry to hear that (empathy)…, but this is your personal experience reflecting your problems, as you brought this onto yourself because… (classic w&m double faced hypocrisy)… blah, blah, blah’ - so my responses to all future ‘moderator/poser replies’ can be summed up in two words. in turn below are a few items i would like to share with everyone else:
0.0 w&m has one of the highest student suicide rates. It’s.a.fact. is this because the academics are so rigorous? NO! NO! and NO! if that was the case a large per cent of yale, mit, harvard and other top-10 universities’ students would be ‘dropping dead like flies’ on a yearly-basis… so why is w&m suicide rate is so high?
0.1 just to preface: publicly known w&m suicide cases are only a ‘tip of the iceberg’, in my opinion! Now stop and think about that… Here is what I remember: there were many students on-and-off campus who entered w&m healthy but began suffering from a depression shortly thereafter. no-one keep track of that. of course not, its bad stats!
0.2 so the answer to why: it’s the environment.
0.3 here is one part of a problem: early on in the class professors select a few as ‘an elite’ and label a few as ‘black sheep’. you guessed it: i was one of the black sheep. takes one, to know about it. in turn, no matter how good your work is, if you are ‘labeled’, your grade has always a limit. this means your future has a limit and the professors know that. added this ‘label’ outlines social dynamics between students as well.
NOW! just to fast forward as a side-bar for all of you judgmental humans: i ended up transferring from w&m and i’m finishing my 5th and final surgical residency year. and NOPE, I’m not showing off, just case in point about the ‘environment’.
0.4 in principal there are two types of lecturers: professors that ‘teach to teach’ and those that showcase how clever they are! take a guess which is the w&m dominant type?
0.5 racism? exists, politically correct one, yes, settle one, yes, without being able to prove type of one… you get the point
0.5 reading between the lines
while the environment is nothing less but high acid, the university could not and can not afford to take a ‘rip into their reputation’! so what do they do? simple: w&m made a special effort to remove any possible depressed ‘future suspect culprit’ out of the ‘system’. as you can imagine, this creates paranoia even for ones that are not depressed. sadly but true. a dab of fake-empathy following by effective strategy to label the student, followed by eventually ‘pushing-the-student-out’. the co-operation between academic staff is at the highest levels. all of this happens while collecting the tuition fee in advance and not refunding your student loan back to the lender when/if you suspend your attendance…
0.6 campus psychology council is a joke. humiliating personal experience to say the least.
The above is my personal opinion and in terms of which university is better or worst: I have no ‘dog in that fight’. however I will note that most academic staff that I met in w&m, to me, were and are a bunch of provincial old folks pretending to be high society not worthy to educate. It’s a public school, clean the theatre!