• How does American college work?
    14 replies, posted
For years, in movies and series, I've seen people going to college, which means I've a basic "understanding" of it. But, simply put, it is still quite confusing to me, especially because it seems to be 100% different from the way university works here in Italy. Here in Italy, Universities only include classrooms and laboratories (along with other bureaucratic facilities like professor offices and stuff). The only thing you have to do really is actually take your exams, which you can do from January-March and June-September. During the other months of the year, there are courses going on. You don't need to follow these courses and you can just study by yourself if you feel capable, as long as the Professor is actually satisfied with your preparation at the actual exam anything goes. The course schedule can also vary greatly, with people having to go 4 or 5 days of the week but only doing 2-4 hours or only going to uni two days of the week but with 6 hours of courses every day. Lessons can take place at any time and any place. I have friends who have a single lesson in a particular faculty during the morning, then move to a different building (using the bus or train) for another lesson during the evening. To contrast, american university\college seems to work more like a normal school. You need to follow courses and do homework, and stuff, rather than a single written-and-spoken exam after the courses end. Also, do you HAVE to live on campus, or is that the norm because it's more convenient? How many days of the week are there courses on? How long do lessons last?
It's different for each and every college and university, and it differs by the course you're looking at. Some classes require you to follow a strict schedule with coursework, projects, etc., while others are much more "relaxed" and don't really require much attention. There are finals in almost every class (end-of-the-year exams where your knowledge of that course is tested), and sometimes also midterms (another big exam/essay/project to check in on your knowledge within the mid-year). Lesson and course duration matters on a case-by-case basis. You don't have to live on-campus, and there's quite a bit of people that just live in apartments nearby. People just tend to favor dormitories because it's easier to be sociable with your peers that way.
American College is shit. It's money-grabbing shit. You pay for every little thing, and if you fail to gather any scholarships then you're putting yourself in massive debt. Classes will require that you have the "latest and greatest" textbook version even though last year's will do just fine. You are required to attend most of them unless stated otherwise, or if you're going to online. I'm doing online after getting fed up with on campus, and it has its own problems. I seriously feel like I learn nothing in these classes and breeze by without studying. It's not challenging, interesting, or worth it in the slightest. They also love to set up road blocks, like my current College won't let me take a necessary course until I take a pre-requisite - which they don't offer by the way. So I need to go to another College, pay out of pocket, and get charged potentially more for it. All this for a piece of paper that states I know something, when I'm already doing the job the paper will help me get.
It varies greatly by university and by individual professors. The school I attend has a student population of 35,000 with a large portion of them commuting to campus from home every day. That wouldn't be very feasible for me because I live 80 km from the school, so for 8 months out of the year, I live in an apartment that the school owns on campus. At my university, all in-person courses have a lecture which can vary in length between 45 minutes to 2 and a half hours depending on the course. Classes typically meet Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday. Some in-person courses have either a lab for science courses or a recitation for mathematics courses. These are generally on Fridays but more popular courses are offered every day of the week. A student is considered full time if they attend courses for 12 hours a week and my university caps students at 16 hours a week. Schedule building is very flexible. Some courses, the professor will require your attendance and for you to purchase a textbook. Some professors won't. My university's campus is extremely compact so only a handful of students in specific majors need to use the shuttle to get to our other campus but the main campus is spread out over 817 acres so it's not like all the courses on the main campus are in the same building.
If there's one thing Hollywood gets right, it's the parties. I've been to some frat parties that put (insert iconic party scene) to shame
Im living on campus of a 40000 student, scientific research state college in New York, while being on a partial scholarship, so keep that in mind. For my freshman year (college here tends to run for 4 years, more on this in a bit), they made anyone who does not live near enough the campus to commute, to live in the campus dorms. We are a big college so we have a lot of dorm buildings around our large campus (so large we even have our own bus system here, its sort of like a little town). The dorms themselves follow either 2 different styles, depending on the building. 1. Corridor style: this is the style you will often see in movies and is in fact common. Each floor of the dorm is separated by gender and 2 people share a room that is around the size of a hotel room. there are like ~10-15 rooms in each floor, and everyone in that floor shares a single large bathroom, with 4-5 bathroom stalls, a few showers, and sinks (since there is a single gender per floor, there is only the bathroom of that gender in that floor). 2. Suite style: a little less common and I havent seen it in movies much. everyone is divided into suites, which are basically small "apartments" with 3 smaller bedrooms (which each hold 2 people), a shared "common" room (which is essentially a living room for the 6 people to share), and a bathroom with a single toilet, shower, and stall, again shared amoungst only the suite. Usually each suite has only a single gender (6 boys, or 6 girls), but occasionally there is mixing of the genders even within the suite (so one of the bedrooms may have 2 girls while the other 2 bedrooms have 2 boys each, usually this is done in the case of someone is trans or something like that). If you are commuting, you arrive to campus by city/town bus or by driving from home. With either dorming style, since you live on campus, you have the essentials like your own (small) fridge, bed, desk, and drawers (my college does not allow bringing furniture from home in the name of fire prevention). Also, in either Corridor or Suite, The whole dorm building has a room fulling of washing/drying machines for washing our clothes, and 1 or 2 Kitchens with ovens, sinks, and microwaves in them. The exception is that some suite buildings come with an oven and microwave in each suite instead of a big shared kitchen. But speaking of food, most of us are not expected to make our own food. There are cafeterias around campus in which we can purchase food, in a similar fashion as most cafeterias in big company buildings. Its similar to higher/middle/elementary school, but we have a [I]lot[/I] more choice in what food we want to get. Alternatively, you can buy food off campus and cook it yourself, which is considerably cheaper. Personally, I do this to some extend (I keep my fridge stocked with dozens of drinks and snacks), but I usually depend on the on campus food. Some school campuses are open, which means they are mixed with unaffiliated businesses and buildings (this is common in cities). My college is closed campus, which means that it owns all the land is on, and thus operates kind of like a small town (we even have our own police force and ambulance team). Sine the campus is pretty damn big (it takes me a good 20-30 minutes to walk across it), there are buses and shared bike services here, but I just walk to my classes most of the time. As for the actual classes and workload, it depends on a lot of factors, most important being what major you are. I am taking biomedical engineering whilst being on the medical track, something that only ~50 students on campus are doing, and is probably the hardest workload you can subject yourself to. In other words, I have considerably more work than someone majoring in theatrics. Workload also depends on your college itself and its policies, and on your individual professor (who may decide to assign tons of homework, take attendance, give midterms or projects, or absolutely none of that and just lecture). I have found for certain classes, if there is no attendance taking and if the professor is useless at teaching, I can just skip class and study a textbook instead (the students here worked together to make a website with the PDFs of many of the textbooks used here, so I often dont even have to pay for that and just read off my laptop). Now, to graduate college, you need 120 credits in a variety of subjects determined by what major you chose. I can schedule myself to have all my classes for 8 hours on 3 days a week, or more spread out over 5 days a week. Each major has a "track" that is suggested for students to take, but you may deviate from it a bit and take other, even completely irrelevant courses as long as you fulfill your majors requirements by the end. As for social life, particularly for those on campus, it varies. I have a large workload so I cant party every day (unlike the english majors). We usually get along with our roomates, and make friends around campus. There are a lot of clubs and activities on campus to partake in throughout the year, or you can join a research team with the professors (my school is a research school, so thats pretty big here, it varies depending on campus). Frats and sororities are a thing, and yeah they just exist to get people drunk and party. Thats just a short idea of what its like. If you want to know anything else, feel free to PM me
it doesnt
hollywood doesn't depict colleges that accurately for your first year you probably do have 5 day classes but generally those are the gen-eds like english or math, after that you basically have a mix between 2 day a week classes and 3 day a week classes. college kind of transitions you from a highschool routine to a periodic routine but you'll still have to work your ass off
You learn the Greek alphabet.
This is going to be somewhat off-topic, but it reminds me of how I'm in my fifth and final year of undergrad university study, [i]yet I haven't ever sat on a lawn at the uni, smiling with my multicultural group of friends[/i]. They sold me a bloody lie, the fuckers.
[QUOTE=BF;52468168]This is going to be somewhat off-topic, but it reminds me of how I'm in my fifth and final year of undergrad university study, [i]yet I haven't ever sat on a lawn at the uni, smiling with my multicultural group of friends[/i]. They sold me a bloody lie, the fuckers.[/QUOTE] same here, I would go scurry outside for food after being sequestered in my department's computer room for hours doing HW and see people sitting on the grass and think "what the hell are they doing?" and they'd look at me funny for wearing two sweatshirts and long pants on a 80° day
[QUOTE=Sableye;52467704]hollywood doesn't depict colleges that accurately for your first year you probably do have 5 day classes but generally those are the gen-eds like english or math, after that you basically have a mix between 2 day a week classes and 3 day a week classes. college kind of transitions you from a highschool routine to a periodic routine but you'll still have to work your ass off[/QUOTE] I'm going into freshman year to a public university (of 9000 students) and I only have 12.5 hrs of classes every week; but 5 days a week (different classes on different days). That's like 40% of the time I spent in highschool every week (8am to 2:40pm every day), but I reckon I'll spend more time studying than in class so it probably evens out (for generals, anyways) or goes high above 100% of highschool hours. Then again, I studied in highschool, too, but not intensely at all. [editline]14th July 2017[/editline] [QUOTE=Nookyava;52465488]American College is shit. It's money-grabbing shit. You pay for every little thing, and if you fail to gather any scholarships then you're putting yourself in massive debt. Classes will require that you have the "latest and greatest" textbook version even though last year's will do just fine. You are required to attend most of them unless stated otherwise, or if you're going to online. I'm doing online after getting fed up with on campus, and it has its own problems. I seriously feel like I learn nothing in these classes and breeze by without studying. It's not challenging, interesting, or worth it in the slightest. They also love to set up road blocks, like my current College won't let me take a necessary course until I take a pre-requisite - which they don't offer by the way. So I need to go to another College, pay out of pocket, and get charged potentially more for it. All this for a piece of paper that states I know something, when I'm already doing the job the paper will help me get.[/QUOTE] I'll be going to a small uni and I have a full pell grant and a 3.2 gpa scholarship and based on talks I've had with financial aide advisors and stuff (I like to be overprepared) I won't have any problems with debt, so it's not always crushingly expensive.
Okay? But you just answered yourself there - you have full Pell Grant AND scholarships. Not all of us are offered the same time
[QUOTE=BF;52468168]This is going to be somewhat off-topic, but it reminds me of how I'm in my fifth and final year of undergrad university study, [i]yet I haven't ever sat on a lawn at the uni, smiling with my multicultural group of friends[/i]. They sold me a bloody lie, the fuckers.[/QUOTE] i went through uni only learning about 6 people's names, including teachers.
[QUOTE=kharkovus;52469067]I'll be going to a small uni and I have a full pell grant and a 3.2 gpa scholarship and based on talks I've had with financial aide advisors and stuff (I like to be overprepared) I won't have any problems with debt, so it's not always crushingly expensive.[/QUOTE] This kind of info is case-by-case though. If you're lucky enough to get grants and scholarships, yeah you'll be safe money-wise, but most students nowadays aren't that lucky. My high school could've cared less about helping to find you scholarships, so I had to do it on my own, and struck out every time. I eventually was forced to go to a community college for an Associates in Nursing instead of a uni to get a Bachelors in nursing cause I just couldn't afford it. And shit, even with my two scholarships, state assistance grant, and FAFSA I still had to take out loans. And that's not even covering the textbooks, equipment, food, etc. Basically, unless you get lucky or were smart as hell in high school, you're SOL on paying for college in America.
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