The Georgia Institute of Technology

1st Year Female -- Class 1923

Tech is a great place to go if you want to land a lucrative engineering job after graduation--and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to challenge yourself and learn to think more clearly, you'll find that Tech's academic environment obstructs intellectual growth.

It doesn't matter if you learn at Tech or not; your degree reflects your ability to put up with crap and cut through red tape. Bad teaching is used deliberately--it's supposed to help students learn how to teach themselves. Tests are used not as a tool to gauge your academic progress, but as a gauntlet to weed out the weak. Students treat their schoolwork and their professors like enemies to be conquered, not resources for personal growth. There are small pockets of intellectually curious students, but too much interest in your schoolwork will get you weird looks from most of the student body. Seriously... it's like high school all over again. Maybe that's not unique to Tech; maybe college in general is less intellectual than I thought. I dunno.

Anyway, a bit about non-academic life at Tech: campus is prettier than people give it credit for, and Atlanta is okay, I guess. You should probably visit and see for yourself. People complain about the lack of a party scene, but I'm not sure what more you could ask for: you can find booze, you can find hookah, you can find pot, you can find hard drugs. Or you can forgo all of those entirely; a lot of people do.

The student body is mostly white, suburban, middle-class. Most students are Christians and most are conservative. I've heard some pretty hateful things directed at women, racial minorities, and LGBT people. There's a fairly large international population, but after being stuck with unaccommodating, xenophobic roommates freshman year, they tend to stick to themselves. But despite their closed-mindedness, the majority of the students are genuinely friendly and good-natured.Ultimately, the biggest problem with Tech is that you're paying for name recognition alone. With a few exceptions, the professors are inept at teaching. Even in my upper-level math classes, I prefer to learn from the textbook. Why am I paying money for that? I've had some good times at Tech, but I've stagnated intellectually. My time here hasn't made me any smarter than I would have been on my own.

3rd Year Male -- Class 2012

Campus Maintenance: A, Useful Schoolwork: F

1st Year Male -- Class 2014

Education Quality: A+, Innovation: C+