Info About Life at Case

Nitric63
Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:23:01 +0000

As far as academics go, after one semester here(after spending my last year of highschool at Clarkson University so my first semester at Case was my 3rd total in college) I know a lot who got 3.8’s but only one who got a 4.0(that’d be me). A lot of other people were overwhelmed by the freshman engineering curriculum and dropped to easier majors. When it comes down to it, I’d say that Case is a challenging school as a result of being academically quite good. One thing that is very bad about the academics is this whole SAGES curriculum they’ve been going on about. Basically the SAGES classes are writing classes which are boring as hell because they have no substance to them. The classes have topics to them but the goal is not to teach about the topics. The one I had last semester was horribly boring. The two professors(a main professor and a writing instructor) even had some trouble keeping awake during class discussions. A large majority of people I’ve talked to in other SAGES classes had similar experiences. This semester is better because the professor I have for my SAGES class seems more intent on the class actually learning things. Fortunately, due to the impressive failure of the program they might scale it back. Still though, academics are Cases high point and it is possible to do well here. I had a schedule that many would consider quite difficult(Organic Chem for Chemistry BS majors, O-chem lab, Calc III, Modern Physics along with a SAGES class and intro to philosophy which required a lot of writing) and I did well.

Pretty much everything else about this university sucks.

Housing is terrible for first year students. The rooms are tiny(which is to be expected for freshman though) and they don’t even have carpets. The freshman class is split between two residential areas on campus(the main residential village on the north end and the south residential village which is a good 20+ minute walk from the north). Case had wanted to have all students living on northside and put in a very very nice apartment complex for upperclassmen but then the freshman class was too big and they had to put some freshman on the southside. Next year, they’re planning on sticking most of the class of 09 on the southside in dorms that suck worse than the northside freshman dorms. However, if you can deal with this sort of crap for two years then you’ll get to live in the rather nice upperclassmen apartments.

The food is aweful and supposedly they made improvements on it over the past few years so I can’t even imagine how bad it used to be. They can’t even manage to cook rice correctly let alone anything else. The northside dining hall cannot handle the number of students living on the northside so expect to wait in long lines for crappy food in an overcrowded dining hall. Half the time, I can’t even have a bowl of cereal because they’re perpetually out of clean bowls.

Administratively it’s hopelessly slow. They took months before notifying me of whether my transfer credits would be accepted or not. Also, the administration is full of crap. They sit there and say things like “SAGES is a great success” even though 80% of students in the classes felt they had learned nothing, frequently skipped the classes, and fell asleep when they did show up.

There is some partying on campus. It’s just usually not in the form of large coherent parties. A lot of people do drink and smoke marijuana on the weekends…in fact, it’s about all there is to do on the weekends besides playing video games and sleeping. People just generally do it in small groups in their rooms.

The students are mostly really boring and nerdy but there are some decent people. Also, the average students here are really quite ugly.

Do not turn down an Ivy League school or any school of similar academic quality for Case unless you absolutely need the scholarship money Case offers. Being here is horrible. I don’t think the university actually cares about students at all.