The Truth About Stony Brook

Introduction
I chose to go to Stony Brook because tuition is low and job placement rates are good. I think it's a good school for people who are passionate about learning or those who like to get involved with their campus community with sports and clubs. Reading the rest should give you a good feel of who fits in here.

Campus Life and Social Life
It's hard to make friends in Stony Brook. Most students who live on Long Island commute to campus and back home everyday and aren't involved in campus life. If you're not in a fraternity, sorority, or on a sports team, chances are you won't go to alot of parties. About half the school takes the train home every Friday so its close to impossible to find people to hang out with on the weekends.

Theres no security in the dorm buildings and people get robbed from time to time. If you live by the sports complex there are always parties to be found but people generally hang out behind closed doors everywhere else. i would say the best part of living on campus is having DC++ connected to everyone on campus (a free, safe file-sharing program) so you will always be able to get a lot of movies and music for free.

The food here is edible (for the most part, stay away from the Roth food court), but its very heard to eat healthy as theres not alot of selection. One good thing is that the Kelly dining hall stays open untill 3am every night so if you live on that side of campus you'll never be hungry.

The campus is very big, for those who like to walk alot and during the spring and early fall is pretty nice. However the streets and sidewalks and disigned terribly and dont drain. So when it rains or snows the walking areas are always flooded for days, making it Seattle-esqu at times.

There is no real town within walking distance, but if you have a car there is a mall, movie theatres, restaraunts, etc withing a 20 minutes drive. There is also a train station on campus so you can ride into New Tork City or other parts of Long Island. Advertisement
Academics
I decided to go to Stony Brook coming out of high school because its a good engineering, math and sciences school, and being a state university its relatively cheap. I'm a sophmore here now and I'm satisfied with the academic aspect of life here. The work-load is heavy (for science students), so if you're not really interested in what your learning and just want to be living college life, Stony Brook is not for you. Life here is very academically oriented. If your interested in computers and physics this is a good school, but if you want to go to school for english, art, or non-classical music I would suggest staying away. The school has a good name but it wont have much to offer you in many departments.

Professors are all very knowledgable, but hard to find a lot of the time as most of them are involved in their own personal work (research usually).

Student Body
Stony Brook preaches diversity but the truth is that it's segregated. (Generally speaking its like high school where groups of people dont mix). You can break the student body into 3 groups: greeks/athletes, hardcore students (who spend nearly all of there time studying in the library or playing videogames), and those stuck somewhere in the middle (most of which are scenesters/hipsters/emo kids and stoners).

If you feel like you didn't belong in high school and one of those groups fits your needs you'll probably enjoy coming here. However, most people who don't fit those molds have really bad social experiences here. In other words if you dont like football, final fantasy or being emo, and don't want to be bored to the point of developing an every-day smoking habit DONT GO HERE.

Being single at Stony Brook gets rough at times, depending on who your looking for. If you like minorities (especially african-americans and asians of any kind) you should be able to find one for you. The only downside is that because most people are so involved with schoolwork they're not very outgoing.

In Closing...
Stony Brook is not for everybody. Its kind of a hit or miss school, people either love it or hate it. Before deciding on coming here you should talk to some students about campus life and a professor in the area of your major.