Marquette University | Student Reviews | Best College

Student Profile

Josh

Class: Senior
Major: History
Gender: M

High School: Marian Catholic High School
Transfer Student: Y

Big Picture

Marquette is a great place to get your education. The professors are generally great scholars who can also make their classes extremely interesting. The quality of student is also generally quite high, with almost everyone capable of engaging in genuine academic discussion. The best thing about Marquette is the size of its community. While it's not large to the point where you're considered a statistic, it's still large enough to meet a wide array of people. The city of Milwaukee is a great place to live, with not only plenty of places to go and see, but plenty of service opportunities as well. Marquette's emphasis on service and ethics is at the core of its philosophy, and is one of the most positive aspects of being a student here. Marquette, as a Jesuit university, has the Jesuits at the core of its administration, and as such has been having a bit of an identity crisis. The question of whether Catholic teaching should trump academic and/or personal freedom is at the heart of many student and faculty disagreements with the administration. There have been questions of why students of opposite genders can't stay the night together, why condoms can't be given out in the student health services office, and whether or not it's right for some professors to question Catholic social teaching in an academic setting. A benefit of the disagreements is a view into the complex interactions of the Church with the modern world as it changes going into this new century.

Academic Life

Professors definitely know your name at Marquette. Building good relationships with professors is nowhere near as difficult as it is at a large university. Participation in class is often encouraged, and sometimes required by professors. Studying is a necessity for many classes, as most of the university's programs are a challenge, but I find that I appreciate the classes in which I have to study much more than the ones in which I don't. Students in the honors program have a tendency to be competitive and overly fastidious, but the majority of the students are not competitive amongst themselves. The academic requirements are geared towards learning for its own sake, rather than job preparation. Theology and philosophy classes are required for every student, and competency in a foreign language is also required for many majors. I think these requirements are a good thing, because they teach students about parts of our world that lie at the very heart of our civilization. Having the broad education that Marquette offers helps you to know how to think about complex issues that affect the world today, from a variety of perspectives.

Student Body

Most students are average midwesterners. Most of them come from either Milwaukee, the surrounding areas of Wisconsin, or Chicagoland. While all economic groups are represented to some degree, most people are either middle class or upper middle class. I've always been fine with interacting with most people, whoever looks friendly. Generally, there aren't very many people who are openly exclusionary. Most students have political opinions, and here there are a mix of ideologies. Liberalism is probably most common, but conservatism also has a strong base, particularly among those in the ROTC program. Not many people focus on their future salary, which is a strong contrast to our neighbor down the street, the Milwaukee School of Engineering.