Boston University

Date: Sep 07 2011
Major: Economics (This Major's Salary over time)
After reading all of the negative posts done by freshmen who cannot get used to the idea of not attending a state school with a football team and frat row I felt the need to stand up for BU a little. No, we do not have football and frats and if this is shocking to you one must wonder how you were admitted in the first place. BU is a place where you go to get a great education and learn who you are as a person. Nothing will be handed to you here and personally until I started taking higher level classes I was not very happy. It is very easy to get into a rut and it is true, at BU you are a number, but that's what happens at a school with nearly 16,000 undergrads. That said, it is on you, the student, to make yourself known and it is on you to take advantage of BU. Don't blame the school if you don't have friends, don't blame the students (4,000 in a class = lots of good and bad people) for why you're unhappy, and don't blame grade deflation for your grades. Take challenging classes with some amazing professors (Professor Lukes is the best teacher I've ever had), start talking in class, find a good friend or two and do what you're supposed to do at a university. Learn.

And regarding grade deflation, it doesn't exist. What happens is BU makes it very hard to get A's, hard to get B's, relatively easy to get C's, and they're not afraid to fail a student who does not show up. This is not Harvard where A's are the norm and B's are atrocious. Other schools realize that BU grades hard and guess what, it makes your A/B that much more valuable especially if they see that you've been challenging yourself as opposed to taking geology 101 your senior year.

Also BU in my opinion is a model for the future of schools in its campus and student body. People frequently rip on the international student population but their fully paid tuitions are helping BU build skyskrapers for dorms, steal teachers from Harvard, and overall improve the school. BU is certainly on its way up and all the naysayers will brag about their diploma twenty years down the road when it's that much more valuable. CGS is a joke though, shit needs to go.