Professors: Ready and Willing

Introduction
It always depends on the professor, but from my experience it’s been absolutely accessible. The English department is pretty small and the professors have always been willing to talk.

Well just the size of the English department really makes it easy for a student like just a normal student like me to go and see a professor about anything I need. But I’m assuming that with the other dept.’s that are larger, it becomes a lot more difficult.

I’ve heard stories of students being really intimidated by their professors but that’s—I expected that with any school I was applying to. I didn’t really consider that when I was thinking of what school to go to.

Through the honors program, I’ve been able to come across an opportunity where I would be an Undergraduate Associate which is an undergraduate student who is not really commissioned, but he applies, he or she applies to be kind of a just like an assistant to a professor just leading a couple of class discussions, helping grade just as an extra resource for the students in the class. And I’ll be doing it for an introductory course in the English Major.

And it’s available in all programs from what I understand. It’s a really great idea. The reason I did it was to—I hope to become a professor and get my doctorate in teaching and teach at a University so I thought that this is a good first step and experiencing the classroom from a diff perspective other than the student perspective.

Campus Life and Social Life
The Miami Plan is certainly valuable in that it offers a wide variety of different types of learning. But it’s very problematic in that it can create kind of obstacles for student who—Like I’m not Math oriented, luckily I didn’t have to take a math class, but if I had, my GPA would probably be suffering. I know plenty of people whose GPA’s have dropped considerable because of one Miami Plan course. So it’s definitely an issue that needs to be reconsidered by Miami.

As far as Class size goes, my Miami Plan courses have certainly been a lot larger than my Major courses. And I mean, with those classes I didn’t really have, I didn’t have any relationship with the professors there. And one of them was a religion class, which I was considering adding as a major. But I didn’t really get a chance to experience the course as I had hoped because of the size. It was about 200 people.

Miami kind of advertises the fact that they have smaller class sizes, which is true in some respects, but everyone goes through classes which are enormous and very intimidating and most of them are freshmen when they go through those classes and they can be discouraging. Academics
I see a lot of people on Cooke Field playing Frisbee or softball. We have the Princess movie theatres, kind of small and quaint but I’ve grown to like it. You get so used to this town after awhile it’s become my home, really.

There’s really not much else to do. You can drive down the road for about 25 minutes and you’ll hit, I mean, you’ll hit “civilization” There are two malls within a half and hour from here. A lot of people do that.

There are a lot of people at Uptown Park. There are frequently bands that are playing, which is nice. There’s a lot of opportunity to get outside and walk around uptown. It’s an active town even, not so much in the summer, but really during the school year. You see everyone all the time.

I haven’t heard many stories of people getting in trouble for having fake IDs. Mainly what I hear people using fakes for is just going to a liquor store and buying, rather than trying to get into a bar with their fake. I’ve never known anyone to try to do that.

I haven’t heard of much heavy drug use. Mainly weed is what goes around here and there’s plenty of it.

Mainly in the Freshmen dorms, there’s a lot more coherency and unity in your particular hallway. I really missed that this past year when I was living in suite dorm with 4 people per room and then you have your own bathroom and there wasn’t quite the same community. I didn’t even know my neighbors.

It was definitely a good transition my freshman year when there were 30 other guys who were going through the same thing I was just right down the hall or right next door. And most of my friends that I had freshman year were definitely from my corridor.

I think there’s an aspect of independence that comes with living off campus. I mean, I’m going to have to learn to take care of myself eventually and not have a maid come and clean my bathroom every week—I’ll just have my roommate do it, next year.

Student Body
The phrase “First in 2009”- it’ll be our bicentennial and they want to be ranked 1st, but the problem is, I don’t know what the school wants to be ranked 1st in and I don’t know if they’ve clarified that. But they’re doing a lot of remodeling and construction around campus lately and it’s been pretty ugly around here, the past year. A lot of mud, a lot of construction fences.

They seem to be focusing on the future more than the present and I think that’s kind of a problem in that. I mean most students from what I understand, feel like they’re getting the shaft with a lot of—like we’re not going to be around when these renovations are finished.

I mean I know last year they were doing construction on Duffy Hall and people living right next to it couldn’t sleep at night.

In Closing...
The food is awesome. It’s just really expensive and I’ve never noticed because it’s all paid for upfront before the semester starts. I’m really going to notice next year when I don’t get the diplomat discount, but as far as quality goes, it’s certainly up there. It all tastes great from what I’ve eaten. It’s bound to be pricey just because I mean Miami has a monopoly basically in this little on-campus because it’s the only one running all the food places.