The University of Texas - Austin

Austin's a great city, and the atmosphere of the university is nice, but the administration...it's obviously a state university. No private institution could be this disorganized and get away with it. Once you enter this campus, you are nothing but a number (at least you get to choose it since the University abandoned the routine use of social security numbers for ID last year), and you're extraordinarily lucky if you can find a person anywhere in the administrative domain to help you with anything. In some colleges (especially engineering) you enter with all of your courses pre-scheduled, with no opportunity to take anything that truly interests you, and the worst part is the automatons that run the advising offices are incapable of understanding that someone might actually want to take a class not in their major. The administrative rules of the university could have been written by Joseph Heller (example: right now I'm trying to get money to pay for summer school, but I'm not eligible to since I'm not registered for enough hours, since I'm waitlisted (first on the list) for a class that I'll get into if I stay on the list, but since I'm not in it I can't get money so I can't pay to stay on the list and thus get into it). All in all, I've had some good professors, in fact, extraordinarily good professors, but I've also had professors who hold one office hour a week and rarely even show up for that.Final words: If you don't care about school and want an excuse to move to Austin, come to UT. If you didn't get into your first choice Ivy school or whatnot, come to UT, you'll get a good education. If you DID get into your first choice Ivy school, go there! DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE I DID!

2nd Year Male -- Class 2005

Social Life: A+, Individual Value: F