Marist College

I only spent one semester at Marist because I was so upset over a number of things about the college. That being said, for all the bad things I had to put up with, the good things were considerable enough to help balance them.

Negatives:
-The Financial Aid and Admissions departmenst were very misleading as to the amount of aid and grant money I could expect to receive. This was just my experience with them, so you may have better luck but they pretty much completely lied to me and I ended up having to take out a $10K loan to pay for one semester.

-Some of the teachers design their classes around the idea that the students have a large disposable income. I had a teacher tell me that I needed to buy a Blackberry or Smart Phone and a laptop if I wanted to pass her class.

-The BUS group projects often require spending a good amount of additional money in order to complete them. For one class my group had to develop a business plan for an existing restaurant. Part of our assignment was to eat out each week at the surrounding competition. This became very expensive very quickly. For another class, my teacher required the groups to invest in a specific presenting software just for the one project.

-A lot of the teachers and students are not overly friendly towards commuters.
-Club events and meetings are usually held within the dorms and around 9pm (which can be difficult for commuters to attend or find out about)

-School clubs/activities/and events are primarily only advertised within dorm buildings (which are not freely open to commuters)

-Parking is very difficult. All students are assigned a lot to park in and most of them are quite a distance from the academic buildings. They also do not take into account which dorm you may be living in or buildings you'll be taking classes in when assigning students a lot. This can be a great hassle during the winter months when NY gets a small ton of snow.

-They do not have any computer labs in which classes are not being held throughout the day. This can be a great source of frustration since the library computers are almost always being used.

-Half of the computer labs don't have printers. You pretty much have to go to the library or writing center if you need to print anything and hope they'll have a computer free.

-Many of the Marist credits are not transferable or applicable to the business degrees at other schools.

-They have a large number of teachers not originally from the United States-- who while being very nice people, are not always terribly easy to understand. My microeconomics teacher had a VERY thick accent and was nearly unintelligible. He also could not spell and had terrible penmanship, so what he wrote on the board was difficult to understand as well. Another of my teachers was from India and while she was much easier to understand verbally, her written directions/questions on assignments tended to be very confusing.

-Some of the campus buildings are hard to navigate.
-Partying is a big part of the on-campus life. This could be a positive thing depending on what your interests are but campus resident students are ALWAYS talking about some party that happened the night before and often come into morning classes hung over or still drunk-- even in the middle of the week.

-The student body is made up of a lot of "older" freshmen who are not very friendly to actual teenage students. My brother used to tag along with me to some of the school events (he was 17 at the time) and he was always getting looks from the other (primarily older) students.

-The Hudson can smell TERRIBLE during summer months (in part due to families and businesses using fertilizers along the water front-- which helps cause a build up of this extremely bad smelling muck in the water.)

-Over the past few years NY has been experiencing increasingly bad winters. Expect a lot of snow, sleet and ice if you are not used to the area.

-Also, because of the layout of the buildings and the fact that Marist is right on the water, it creates a wind tunnel effect at the heart of the campus and temperatures can easily be ~10 degrees lower than in town. Although you'd swear it feels more like 20 degrees lower while you're walking through it.

-All bills/class scheduling/ and pertinent department information is found/done strictly online and many of the departments do not seem to know or understand how the website and computer systems work. This can be very frustrating if you encounter an error or need help. Also, many departments DO NOT tell you that everything is done only online- so it is easy to miss scheduling dates or bill due dates and incur additional charges.

Positives:
-The school requires all students to meet with their councilor and to become fully aware of what they need to do in order to graduate on time on starting their first semester and again before being allowed to schedule classes for the next semester.

-For every bad teacher there seems to be a good one. My English teacher was completely disgusted with the excess expenses some of my other teachers required me to lay out and designed her assignments around making her students think outside of the box. My philosophy teacher (Peter Raoul-Mar) was beyond incredible. It was like having Harriet Tubman for a teacher- and I can easily say that her class completely transformed how I view the world and my own role within it. Honestly, she is such a fantastic teacher and human being that I would recommend going to Marist if only to take her class.

-The campus is beautiful and well maintained.
-Your degree will matter to the outside world.
-The student body is made up of kids from all over the country. This gives you the chance to get to know a lot of different kinds of people.

For me, the negatives outweighed the good the school had to offer.

1st Year Female -- Class 2011

Education Quality: A+, Collaboration/Competitive: C-

While Marist College is visually attractive and academically adequate the student body itself leaves much to be desired. The majority of students attending Marist are very one dimensional, materialistic, and extremely self-serving. The only popular social activity at Marist is drinking and some drug use to a lesser degree. The Marist women enjoy getting trashed on what for some is a nightly basis and very easily losing their dignity and morals along the way (to put it bluntly, there is a good reason Marist is known for it's STD rates and easy women in the surrounding local community). Marist men drink to the same excess and then stumble around like drunken idiots who think that the alcohol in their veins makes walking through gang infested Poughkeepsie neighborhoods a good idea. In terms of the college administration it too leaves some to be desired. Having held a student position in Housing and Residence Life for a few years I was able to witness some of the many problems that plague the administration first hand. The college's judicial system is a joke and students can pretty much get away with anything they want as long as they are willing to sacrifice their on campus housing (and let's face it, if they lose it mommy and daddy will most likely flip the bill for an apartment). The administration in the housing office is unorganized and in desperate need of new leadership, the housing process is itself a nightmare to deal with. The student counseling center is understaffed and as a result has often neglected to provide the proper treatment to students who have legitimate problems (and while I'm on the subject, they need to remove the Catholic Marist Brother, Bro. John from the counseling center, why they thought a member of the Catholic clergy could provide sound, unbiased counseling is beyond me but the man does more harm than good). Basically, Marist needs to rethink a lot of their policies and procedures, and reaching out to different demographics of students would be refreshing too, and might help to breathe new life into the student culture on campus (i. e. right now walking around Marist is at times like a live reenactment of the show Jersey Shore).

5th Year Male -- Class 2010

Campus Aesthetics: A, University Resource Use/ spending: D

Don't let a pretty campus fool you, Admissions just shows you the nice parts. Tuition keeps rising to ridiculous rates yet the mediocre professors get more jaded and bored every year. Marist only cares about enticing future students while current ones (especially commuters!) are ignored, e.g.: parking gets more strict every year to accommodate new buildings. They keep accepting more freshmen, downplaying the fact that housing is NOT guaranteed after the second year. Administrative offices are slow, bloated, and bureaucratic. Some buildings (Gartland, Donnelly, Dyson) badly show their age. Sodexo food is very hit-or-miss and badly overpriced ($9 lunches are common), but of course, they bring out the good stuff on parents' weekend. Poughkeepsie is a miserable, crime-ridden "city." Most students go out to bars, school clubs stink because people are only there to get housing "priority points."

4th Year Male -- Class 2015

Perceived Campus Safety: A+, Useful Schoolwork: F