University of Minnesota

I am a Sophomore right now at the U, and I can easily say the campus is phenomenal! I visited over 30 campuses all around the US, and honestly the U of M was the only one that got to my heart! I absolutely love walking around the East Bank and just enjoying my eyes with the architecture of the building and the beauty of the well-​maintained flowers and green areas all around the place! :D

U of M along with Ohio State has the lowest entrance standards of any of the Big Ten schools. I’m not counting the ones who joined starting with Penn State, they are just refugees from other conferences, not real Big Ten schools. But U of M gets my coveted zero-​star rating for harboring that incubator of misandrist bigotry known as the «women’s studies program». Everyone I’ve met from that program is a self-​absorbed diva of average or less intelligence, no humility whatsoever, and (not surprisingly) an incredibly shitty job. A lot of the self-​loving natives are enamored with this place as it brings back memories of their youth and they have no other university experience to compare it to, but viewed from the outside it is little more than a hulking congested mass of bureaucratic nonsense lacking many of the things normally taken for granted at a major university, such as green spaces and a basketball arena built some time after the Hoover administration… this is not a serious academic institution along the lines of Harvard or even the University of Illinois, it is a place where spoiled Minnesota rich kids go to run from their parents and party and spending (on average) the next 7 or 8 years pursuing or half-​pursuing a degree they may or may not ever finish, oftentimes in classes with several hundred students and almost no interaction between students and instructors. Many of the smaller local private universities offer a far superior education and do not have this corporate factory approach to education that U of M has, but of course they are generally infinitely more expensive.

I really enjoyed my time at the University of Minnesota. This may have been helped by the fact that I a) Didn’t have to pay much, thanks to scholarships and grants and b) was in a really great department.
Your experience at the U will differ wildly with what department you are in. I was a double major in Political Science and American Indian Studies. Poli sci is huge department. Most upper-​division classes have 80 or more students. American Indian studies on the other hand, has very few students, and some UD classes have only 4 – 5 or maybe 30 students at the most.
I’ve never had a problem reaching my advisor in either of my majors, or dealing with the bureaucracy.
My favorite things? The giant bookstore, the student cultural centers in Coffman, the giant array of classes on any topic you could choose, the campus, the rec… There are so many.
If you don’t find your place here, I can see how it would feel giant and overwhelming. But when you do, it feels like a very small school.

The U of M is a magnificant school!
My daughter is just beginning her 2^nd year and I have been down (actually I think it is over when traveling from Chicago). The campuses are all maintained supurbly. The flowers and landscaping, the buildings, the curriculum and the educators — all A plus!
Chicago has some excellent universities; however, this school ranks up there with the best of them and, in some very personal ways, even displays superiority.
Keep it up Gophers! Universities like this will help America maintain it’s educational prominance!