Stony Brook Top of its Class... In Unhappiness
By Meagan O'Connell Stony Brook is rated number one for the most unhappy students in the Princeton Review’s “Best 366 Colleges: 2008 Edition.” Students on campus have mixed feelings, citing many factors that go into determining happiness on campus. The guidebook aims to provide students with an overview of the schools it has determined to be the best according to various criteria like academics, and feedback from parents, advisers and students. It includes public and private, small and large schools. Joyce Abdul, a senior biology major, said she likes how the school cares about the environment and she enjoys the extensive access to technology. However, she said she wonders if the school really cares about the students. “I feel like they keep you here to get more money out of you,” she said. Some students feel that administration and faculty don’t care about them . “I feel that the student-teacher relationships are not close enough,” said Kelly Ung, a freshman international student and business management major. The Princeton Review asked students, “Overall, are you happy?” Pat Calabria, the university’s media relations officer, said the university disregards the findings because they are not based on scientifically collected data. “Our student retention rate is 90 percent,” he said, “which again suggests that Princeton Review’s information is faulty and that our students are, in fact, quite satisfied.” An average of 120,000 students participate in the surveys each year, which amount to about 325 students per school that the Princeton Review bases its rankings on. Students are informed of the survey and can choose to fill it out if they want. 90% of the surveys are done online while 10 percent are done on campus. The survey asks questions about different aspects of their school including the quality of the food, dorms, libraries and student life that results in 62 different rankings. Princeton Review then reports those colleges that were ranked in the top 20 for each category. Adrinda Kelly, senior editor of “Best 366 Colleges” said, “We still think that question has value because it does reflect the sentimental value of happiness of overall experiences.” However, there is a larger category called “Best Quality of Life,” which ranks colleges based on the answers to several questions about the dorms, food, campus beauty and safety, interaction with administration and includes the question of overall happiness. Freshman Chengzhi Zhang who is a business major and international student from China, said people are friendlier here, but he said it’s still too early to decide how he feels about Stony Brook. Joanna Hong, a sophomore biology major, attributes the unhappiness rating to campus living conditions. The campus was better last year because it was quieter and less crowded, Hong said. She said that the dorms do not have enough light and have a depressing atmosphere. “The dorms look like a prison, especially in Roosevelt Quad,” said Daniel Pepper, a graduate student who also spent three years at Stony Brook as an undergraduate. In the 2006 and 2007 editions of “Best 366 Colleges” Stony Brook was ranked number four. Kristin Schoner, a senior genetics and psychology major said, “I have not met a single person who likes going here.” |
I'm happy. But I live at home. I can leave stony brook any time I like and retreat to a big, wood framed, comfortable room.
I couldn't imagine living in the all-inclusive dorm setting. College is not Disney World.
I think the issue is quite complicated, and both of the above comments touch upon part of it.
Certainly, students leaving on the weekends is a problem, but what does Stony Brook do to get them to stay? It really seems that student activities, in many ways, are planned from the top down, without much student input. They're more of a take it or leave it proposition...the few students that finds the events that the university puts on to be appealing, stay, while the rest will leave anyway. The student government also shares the blame, as successive administrations don't seem to have put much effort into sponsoring any real initiatives as far as student life goes. If anything, they've made it even easier to flee: discounted LIRR tickets are available at the SAC box office each week.
Dorming doesn't seem to help either. Many of the most involved students I got to know were commuters, and some of the laziest and most apathetic were residents, some of whom wouldn't even leave on weekends. The dorms are far apart (purposely built that way in the 60s to make it hard for students to congregate), they are depressing, and they're run by an inept, incompetent bureaucratic morass known as Campus Residences, which has student quality of life somewhere around dead last on its list of priorities.
And as far as those student organizations go, I found that it seemed to be the same students who were involved, over and over again, in many different organizations, quite simply because they were among the few that seemed to care enough to get involved in the first place. The opportunities are there, but where are the takers? And what accounts for that level of apathy, even when the opportunities are presented to the students? Many commuters I knew were involved, but just as many had the opposite mentality: come to school, park the car, get on the bus from South P, go to class, leave class, get on the bus to South P, leave. One student once told me "the only things I've ever used at Stony Brook were the table and chair I've sat at in class." But again, there's residents with that very same mentality.
Maybe there's just something about the place that attracts the apathetic student...the semi-isolated suburban campus, the ugly buildings, the distance from one place to another. Maybe there's just too many New Yorkers, and especially people from the city and LI on campus rather than a broader cross-section of students from everywhere, and the feeling of being home is just too tempting to resist each weekend, or maybe it's just in the personality of hardened New Yorkers to be somewhat distant and disengaged. Stony Brook has diversity in terms of ethnicity and race, but perhaps not from background, with over 90%, I believe, coming from NYS. Maybe that's a factor as well. Ultimately, I think it's a combination of all of the above.
Upcoming events
- Admissions Open House(event)(5 hours)
- Men's Basketball vs Wagner(event)(9 hours)
- Caribbean Students Organization Thanks 4 Giving Dinner(event)(15 hours)
- LASO Multicultural Dinner(event)(15 hours)
- Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman, Duo Piano(event)(15 hours)
It's the social life stupid
Everyone goes home for the weekends!
Stony Brook just isn't fun. It's not the classrooms, the professors or the education. Someone tell Pat Calabria we're only in it for the education.
It's the student life, or lack of.
It's not like campus is doing anything to entice students to stay weekends. But even then, what could anyone really do? even if they did, the distance of the dorm quads in relation to one and other only fosters the lonely isolated atmosphere. Especially during the winter, when people won't trudge all the way from Tabler or Kelly to go to some lame school supported activity, offering "free food" only goes so far. Seriously, we have prepaid meal plans. It all feels like free food.
This school is depressing. I wish I never went here.