Purdue University--West Lafayette | Student Reviews | Best College

Student Profile

AeroBoiler007

Class: Junior
Major: Other
Gender: M

High School:
Transfer Student: N

Big Picture

Purdue is a place of tradition and innovation. A place where not only are books read and papers written, but where lifelong friendships form and character is molded. An institution rooted with the likes of Emilia Earheart and Neil Armstrong, Purdue is the type of school that inspires excellence from those that associate themselves with it. The administration is strict. Purdue has a reputation to uphold and therefor they don't bend much for academic dishonesty or breaking laws. They are pretty lenient on one thing though - drinking. Even in the dorms if you are caught drinking underage they will rarely get the police involved. The preferred method of punishment is to be "written up" and have to chat with the resident life manager. You get an almost unlimited number of chances so long as it was just alcohol and not drugs involved, with the worst i'd ever heard anyone having to do was go to an alcohol awareness class. Purdue IS West Lafayette. Everything here is designed to facilitate the campus and students. Purdue is unique however, in that the campus is just the campus. With the exception of a few restaraunts in the student union, there are no diners, no bars, no gas stations, no stores of any kind on campus. In fact, there are no buildings not owned by purdue on the purdue campus (cept a few apartments i think). Because of this, you can walk pretty much from one end of campus to the other in 20 minutes no problem. The CityBus system shuttles students around for free during school days and at night and is a LOT of fun if you catch the drunk bus. We had one bus driver let us sing using the mic and bus speakers so we had the whole bus singing to journey. Purdue is awesome

Academic Life

Granted, im from a small, rural community up in Michigan, but when people found out I was going to Purdue I may as well have said stanford. Purdue is well respected around the country for many reasons. First, more astronauts have attended Purdue than any other school in the nation, including the military academies. Several of our programs rank in the top 25 in the nation, with a few ranking in the top 10 continuously. The classes are tough, but not unfair. My physics exam last week for example, i got a 60%. But because half the class did worse than I did, the teacher curved it so that a 60 ended up being a B. Also, like anything, you get out what you put in. I am on a first name basis with a few professors and most of my other professors know who I am. The ones who don't, I personally have no desire to talk to. Students are competative here, but in a way that we help each other out. My friends and I are all competing for the top position in our class obviously, but we also send each other our study guides so if someone caught something that the others didnt, we would all have it. We have study groups and quiz each other. We remind each other of upcoming tests and quizzes so that were all prepared... We help each other out.

Student Body

Its a school of roughly 40,000 relatively diverse undergrads. We have a large number of foreign exchange students, especially in our engineering program, but apart from that its mostly white hoosiers. Despite the large number of students, purdue is a very tight-knit group. As you matriculate through the programs, your classes narrow from the large (500+) gen-ed lectures to groups of 30 or less, and your last two years you are with mostly the same people. If you are active in the widely networked greek life here, you can walk pretty much anywhere on campus and see someone you know. Honestly, I would't change anything about the people or the number of people that go here.