NU lack of communication to accepted students

thearts · 06-21-2007, 06:18 PM

I am very surprised how little we get in the mail from NU. They seem to be on delay and depend a great deal on the email address given to my son or other sources. For the cost of this school, I find this very cheap and a way to save a great deal of money. Before my son accepted NU, he received lots of valuable information in the mail from his accepted schools. We were not web-site dependent. Fortunately, he wants to go to NU but schools of equal, better or even lesser status were much more informative through the mail. It is so much easier to have the material in hand than to wade through NU's very convoluted web pages. Does anyone else feel this way? We certainly received a lot more mail from them before we sent our deposit.

arbiter213 · 06-21-2007, 06:53 PM

Eh, its spare but it's fairly straightforward. Any questions I've had have been answered by information I got prior to my deposit or from the few communications they have sent out. I'll yield that their site is terrible, but so it goes. Any important information has been delivered redundantly, so I definitely haven't missed anything. And though the communiques they've sent recently have basically said "we'll be in touch", it's good form they're keeping us abreast of that.

premature_gray · 06-21-2007, 07:38 PM

I agree that communications are lacking and the website is difficult to navigate...

elsijfdl · 06-21-2007, 08:12 PM

the website is sub-par, you're right.

when i was accepted i got a large envelope and in it was a folder with basically all the paperwork i needed to enroll, however i did notice that after that big envelope arrived communication was... near nonexistant.

as far as this continuing into the school year (once you arrive on campus)... i'm currently undecided on how helpful i find northwestern's advising system/availability of supportive resources.

i can tell you for one that advising for WCAS is pretty terrible. There are no dedicated advisors in WCAS. The other schools are supposedly MUCH better, however i can't attest to that since i haven't experienced it.

i can also tell you that the career office, while knowledgable and helpful, is somewhat stress-inducing and rapid-fire, i wasn't able to really have a sit-down talk and get a lot of my questions answered without feeling rushed. However my emails to the counselor i talked to (after leaving her office and remembering all the concerns i had that i was too flustered from feeling rushed at the time to ask) were returned IMMEDIATELY, which was very nice.

illinois_kid · 06-21-2007, 10:49 PM

I am a mere Class of 2011 as well, but I took 2 classes at NU last summer and I'm currently enrolled in another 2 classes this summer (I live close by, I've got some free time and I want to knock out a few distros). And I agree that NU's administration can at times be a bit uncommunicative. They didn't give me my classroom numbers for the stuff I took last summer until the first day of class, and I had to call the office which handled summer classes for high schoolers to get my room numbers. I agree that NU isn't communicating with it's incoming freshman that much. I think on the whole I'll say that I think Arbiter is right, that the information we've been given is "spare but straightforward". It doesn't seem all that bad, but I think it could be better.

Run_4_Fun · 06-21-2007, 11:56 PM

I like how they don't send a bunch of stuff in the mail. I view that as a waste of precious paper. (it is shocking how many trees we could save if we did not receive junk mail..www.greendimes.com/)

And I don't understand why it would be necessary for them to communicate. What does one need to know?

The website seems fine to me.

Sam Lee · 06-22-2007, 12:11 AM

NU website may be not the best but I find Harvard's website a lot worse.

arbiter213 · 06-22-2007, 12:18 AM

Harvard's is bad because the massive integration of flash elements, but the navigation and archiving functions are much, much better. NU's site goes for spartan simplicity and functionality but in the end it's just ugly, labyrinthine and poorly archived.

(And for the record, I interned with a leading web consulting firm last summer and this summer I'm teaching web design at a computer camp. So yah, I'm qualified to pass judgment :P )

APOL · 06-22-2007, 12:26 AM

My D is an incoming freshman-class of 2011. She wanted to do an internship this summer in SF. She contacted the admissions office, who in turn contacted the department head for her major. She emailed my D some forms/application for internship. My D filled them out-faxed them back. The department reviewed them, and accepted her. They remitted the necessary letter to the employer. All of this was done in 3 days. I was very impressed with the turn around time.