Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
What sheena said. Went there in '72. Graduate Physics. Great school with famous science and math professors. Very Competitive, which might explain the "not much of a campus life" comment. I thought people went there for the education, and not the campus life.
That's why the kids coming out of school today are so unprepared for work - they just "party all the time'.
I got admission for graduate program for MS in electrical engineering at SUNY stonybrook?
Can anyone tell the pros and cons of this school??
Pros:
Top rated science school thats nationally recognized for a very modest tuition.
Lots of diversity.
Campus has undergone some nice beautification projects.
Cons:
Its a commuter school mostly. Not much social things going on unless you have a group you hang with regularly.
Lots of diversity in teachers (can you speak Mandarin? Lots of teachers are very hard to understand)
Its HUGE! The core curriculum classes are like 500 students, very easy to get lost int he shuffle.
Campus has a dozen different architectural designs, makes it very hodge-podge looking.
If your doing a specific small-class specialized field once your out of the core classes your OK.
My knock on it is the commuter school aspect. It's not just that half the students are kids from LI who drive there, either. Many of the people who live on campus are NYC residents, and go home on weekends, not just holidays, leaving a school with 14,000 undergrads having what seems like about 1,000 left on campus on weekends. Nice and quiet time to study, but if you're interested in anything else, it can be a bit boring and lonely.
USB has been building new dorms over the past several years as the entering classes have grown in size. While seeking to create a diverse student body more reflective of our society as a whole, the admissions office has also been actively engaging in bringing in more students from out-of-state.
The result is that more students are on campus on the weekends. There will always be the ebb and flow of local & NYC students who go home on weekends, though.
Grad students, however, are a different type of animal. I can't say whether they will fall into the same routines as underclassmen.
Overall, it's a great school. Former President Shirley Strum Kenny did quite a lot to advance the school and bring it to the level of recognition it has achieved. One of my friends was responsible, under Kenny's tenure, for bringing Richard Leakey on board as a professor in the Dept of Anthropology, as well as establishing the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya -- an offshoot of SBU. Yet another friend is in charge of the creation of the SBU satellite campus in South Korea. This is a fledgling project facing financial hurdles, so we have to wait and see. Exciting nonetheless in the global arena.
Yes, there is diversity on campus. Yes, it can be frustrating when you have a foreign born teacher with a heavy accent. The real world is not without it's challenges; too bad all of our challenges can't be this insignificant.
USB has been building new dorms over the past several years as the entering classes have grown in size. While seeking to create a diverse student body more reflective of our society as a whole, the admissions office has also been actively engaging in bringing in more students from out-of-state.
The result is that more students are on campus on the weekends. There will always be the ebb and flow of local & NYC students who go home on weekends, though.
Grad students, however, are a different type of animal. I can't say whether they will fall into the same routines as underclassmen.
Overall, it's a great school. Former President Shirley Strum Kenny did quite a lot to advance the school and bring it to the level of recognition it has achieved. One of my friends was responsible, under Kenny's tenure, for bringing Richard Leakey on board as a professor in the Dept of Anthropology, as well as establishing the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya -- an offshoot of SBU. Yet another friend is in charge of the creation of the SBU satellite campus in South Korea. This is a fledgling project facing financial hurdles, so we have to wait and see. Exciting nonetheless in the global arena.
Yes, there is diversity on campus. Yes, it can be frustrating when you have a foreign born teacher with a heavy accent. The real world is not without it's challenges; too bad all of our challenges can't be this insignificant.
The real world should not apply here - when you have students paying a fee for a service, they should get that service. It is not proper to have instructors teaching course matter to a population, if they are unable to converse in a legible and coherent manner. It reminds me of a chemistry class I had in college, instructor was an Asian grad student who had to repeat the word "F L A S K" twenty times, before everyone got it. It is quite "significant" when students have a hard time digesting course matter, it could be the difference between passing and failing.
I graduated from Stony Brook in 04 (undergrad), while I was in a different field, as others have said its an excellent school for Science and research.
As far as the campus life it really depended on your friends as well as the particular weekend. As others have said about 1/2 commute, and most of those who dorm are either from Nassau or NYC, and quite a few do go home on weekends. Some weekends you will find quite a bit to do on campus, other weekends you won't. The school is also fairly politically active (which is something I personally wish I could more involved with when I was there).
As far as the heavy accents with some of the professors, that is true to a point. You will certainly find some, freshman year my first class was a Calculus Recitation class (you have the lecture 2 or 3 times a week, and a recitation once) and the Professor had an extremely strong accent which was very hard to understand. Kind of interesting to have that be your introduction to college classes, but all in all most professors are easy to understand, and the ones who are more difficult to understand tend to be in the more lower level courses.
The real world should not apply here - when you have students paying a fee for a service, they should get that service. It is not proper to have instructors teaching course matter to a population, if they are unable to converse in a legible and coherent manner. It reminds me of a chemistry class I had in college, instructor was an Asian grad student who had to repeat the word "F L A S K" twenty times, before everyone got it. It is quite "significant" when students have a hard time digesting course matter, it could be the difference between passing and failing.
When does the real world kick in, then?
If a hire is qualified and the only reason not to hire him is his accent, doesn't that pose some sort of legal problem?
If a student is having a 'significant' problem understanding the instructor, they should consider switching the class when it is possible. Maybe I am a little hard on people, but I have had to deal with a lot of Asian people over the years and perhaps I find it easy to understand them.
On a side note: I did have one chem professor in a 100's level course who pronounced oxygen as ah-he-jen.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
