Lots of Frats - No Sororities!

Introduction
I actually transferred here from the Ivy Leagues. I went to U Penn for a year and a half and I didn’t like it. I thought it was too much B.S. and too much pomp. So I came here where people are more chill and laid back. It’s a really friendly-type community. This is definitely NOT a party school.

Campus Life and Social Life
It’s a pretty livable city. Getting across it is relatively easy. Once the metro link is up and working, which they’re doing work on right now, the transportation should be really great and the city will just hopefully continue developing, because it’s pretty nice I mean there’s not that much stuff to do, but it’s just kind of a nice city. Highlight is the arch. And that’s not amazing, but it’s kind of cool. But besides that, there’s not a ton of amazing stuff. Academics
Just right across campus is Forest Park, which is I believe the nation’s biggest urban park. I think it’s bigger than Central Park and they have bike paths, they have museums. They have like two or three. They have an art museum, a history museum. It’s really cool they have tennis courts. They have this really beautiful basin—water basin—which these fountains. The best place on campus to see the arch is from the top floor of the college office, which is right in the quad and you can see the Arch as well as the St. Louis skyline. It’s pretty beautiful and it’s kind of cool because the only thing really separating downtown St. Louis from Wash U is the park…I could like ride my bike from Wash U to the arch. It’s just a straight shoot through the park and basically you’re there and you can do it all in one day.

Student Body
It is not a Dry campus. They have a policy where they kind of like to treat their students as adults so if the students can drink responsibly, they’re for it, but since irresponsible drinking has occurred lately and especially in the fraternities, there have been a lot of Greek scandals as of late. But recently they’ve become more strict. There was like a moratorium on alcohol in the fraternities…In fraternity parties and they’re kind of upping the anti they’re becoming tougher, but still drinking is pretty widespread on campus. Not everyone drinks.

In Closing...
They try to make the student-faculty ratio, you know, pretty competitive with the top schools and like to keep the classes under an average of 20. I don’t know what the exact number is but it’s something like 1:12 student-faculty ratio.

The discussion classes I’ve take here are definitely better. You know you get to hear what other students think and it’s not so structured. I really like my discussion-based classes. I’m in argumentation now and that’s a lot of fun. Some lectures are good. Some lecture classes are good. It really depends. Science classes, the big science classes like ChemBio and the big intro classes like Anthro and Psych are going to be big lecture-type classes and then you get into some upper level classes or even like a freshman seminar and you get some of that discussion and even one on one work with professors. And that’s what I tend to like is the one on one work with professors.
And it’s nice because this school isn’t so big where you can’t really talk to the professor, you get a fair amount of one on one time if you want it you have to go after it and I really recommend you do because I think some of the best experiences for actually growing and figuring out what I like to do academically has come from one on one meetings with professors.

The work here is pretty intense. There are a lot of people working a lot of the times. Some people barely ever leave the library. I personally work—some weeks I like to take it easy, other weeks I work the entire week and you can basically work any spare moment and still not being guaranteed good grades. So they’re pretty tough with the grading here. Some classes they even require. Like a certain percentage of the class gets A’s and B’s and C’s and D’s and obviously some people who fail the class.

It’s really hard to get an A in some classes, but I feel like you have to work pretty hard to get a C especially in classes with subjective grading. If it’s like multiple choice exams they can be like bottom of the class you get a D and C, but when you’re writing Essays I think it’s rare for professors to give C’s and D’s on essays. Anthro is a really easy major so those are ways to get by without doing that much work, but especially if you’re in the sciences. Even if you’re in Psych, if you’re in even econ.

If you want to get good grades, you’re going to have to work a lot.