Boston College | Student Reviews | Best College

Student Profile

Mike

Class: Senior
Major: Other
Gender: M

High School: Archbishop Spalding High School
Transfer Student: N

Big Picture

Chestnut Hill is not a college town at all. Almost all students live off campus junior year, and almost all of them get in severe trouble with the police. It is impossible to have a party without the cops/off campus RA coming, this is especially true because most of them are under 21. BC wants to expand its campus, but to do so, it must have the support of the neighbors. Therefore, they want to stop all off campus partying, so that the neighbors are happy and will let BC grow. Thus the student body suffers. College students drink a lot, there's nothing that you can do about that, but BC tries to get us in unnecessary amounts of trouble. The Mods are the greatest part of BC. I live in the Mods as a senior, and I could not be happier with them. They are a small townhouse community on campus made up of 78 townhouses, with six seniors in each. They are great for throwing parties and especially great for tailgating before football games. The Mods are one of the most important part's of BC campus. Almost all seniors move back on campus senior year, and I think that is one of the things that makes BC so special. As I mentioned earlier, it is very hard to have fun living off campus because the cops break up almost every party. Thus, spending senior year on campus is great because it allows all of the seniors to enjoy their last year in college without any threats of getting in trouble with the law. It's also nice because all of your friends live relatively close to one another, making it easier to stay in touch with all of the friends you've made over the last four years. I think BC is just the right size, at about 2,000 per grade. One thing that was very difficult about my adjustment to college was living on the Newton Campus freshman year. The Newton Campus houses approximately half of the freshman class and is located a little over a mile from campus. Students must take a bus to and from campus for classes and any other events. Making the adjustment to college was very hard to begin with, but having to wake up extra earlier and wait in the freezing cold for a bus every morning, made it even more difficult. Needless to say, my attendance in class and my GPA suffered freshman year as a result. Looking back as a senior, I have a tremendous amount of "Newton Pride." However, I was not nearly as happy to be there when I was a freshman. Living so far away from the rest of BC made it very hard to have a social life (aka go to parties, make friends with upper classmen, make friends with the other half of the freshman class, etc). I joined the frisbee team my junior year, and that was probably the best decision I made in college. I became friends with a bunch of BC student's with the same fun loving sense of humor that I have. It has been a great opportunity for me to get into the best shape of my life, all the while playing a game that I absolutely love. The friends I have made from the frisbee team are some of my best friends in college and will definitely stay with me for years to come. I think it is very important for students to get involved in college in order to make friends who have similar interests. BC does not have any greek life, so it is hard for a lot of students to find a good group of friends. The frisbee team has been that group for me. Not to mention, we're absolutely nasty at frisbee and finished 18th out of 80 teams at a national tournament in Las Vegas last month.

Academic Life

BC has a very small computer science department. As a result, the professors know almost all of the students, and you will frequently have the same professor more than once in your college career. I think this is a great feature because it allows the students to form a much stronger relationship with their professors. I'm taking five classes as a senior, and I have had all of the professors at least once before. I spend most of my time in the computer lab in the basement of Fulton Hall. It is designed for the computer science majors, and there are always at least a few CS kids in the lab. This is great for working on homeworks or projects because your classmates are always there to help you if you have a question. It is also very similar to a lot of computer labs in the real world where we might end up working one day. CS majors, like most college students, have a tendency to procrastinate and leave large programming assignments until the night before. It is great to have the computer lab because everyone will be there working together and helping each other out when one of us hits a bump in the road. You can't learn computer science just by reading text books (I never even open mine), so it's great to have a place where you and your peers can learn together from one another. My only regret is that I did not discover this computer lab until the end of my sophomore year. It would have been great to know about this useful resource as a freshman. I took a year of physics as part of my "hard science" requirement for my CS major. This was the only "pre-med" class that I took at BC, and I really did not like the format of the class. It is my understanding that all pre-med classes are set up in the same way. No one actually gets As or Bs on the tests and it is all based on a curve. Thus, all of the students are competing against one another and hoping that their peers do poorly on the exams. I do not think that this is very conducive to learning. I prefer to have all of the students working together to help one another learn the material and to succeed.

Student Body

There are a lot of rich white kids. A lot of them are really stuck up and care way too much about material things. They are also very quick to judge people based on appearance. I got very caught up in this as well freshman/sophomore year. However, I have now realized how stupid that and base my opinions of others on their actions and not their appearance. I think it is important for students coming into BC to not get caught up in this sort of thing. My roommate is the president of SASA (South Asian Student Association) and also a homosexual. He's a great kid and one of my best friends at school. There is plenty of diversity on BC's campus; you just have to find it. I know at a lot of schools, most students just wear sweats to class everyday. This is not the case at BC. A lot of athletes wear their team sweats to class, but besides that, most students wear jeans and a clean t-shirt to class. Many also throw on a shirt with collar in the morning as well. BC students come from all over the country because it is such a well respected school. Of my six roommates, 2 are from MD (didn't know each other before college), 1 from MA, 1 from CT, 1 from NH, and 1 from TX. Different types of students really don't interact that much. The Asians tend to hang out with the Asians; the blacks hang out with the blacks, and the whites with the whites. There is no dislike or anything between these groups. It's just kind of the way things work out. I have couple of Asian friends and a couple of black friends, but for the most part, each race tends to hang out predominately with members of the same race. The majority of students in CSOM (Carroll School of Management) are very, very interested in money and making lots of it after graduation. Most CSOM seniors know how much each of the "Big Four" firms' has as a starting salary and signing bonus. Before this year, I thought signing bonuses were just for professional athletes...