Future at Baruch

I have enjoyed working on the community service project this year. I believe we came up with a great organization and I can’t wait to actually participate and help out next spring. Throughout the year I developed some useful skills that I’ll use in the future. The most interesting and useful classes I took this semester was definitely communications because it helped me develop speech skills and now I feel more comfortable giving speeches than I was when the semester started. Also, I learned a lot about 3-D printing and virtual reality which was also a great experience which I may not have again. One of the centers I’ve utilized greatly this semester was the library. I would go there during the long 4 hour breaks or before I had a soccer game and do my work. It is a peaceful environment where I can get all my work done. I also enjoyed playing soccer this year. The experience as long as the kids on the team were great and it’s sad that I won’t play with another season. As much as I enjoyed some classes and  experiences at Baruch I very much disliked my overall stay and atmosphere at Baruch. Part of the reason was the school itself and part was just my preferences. Baruch is very much a commuter school and you can barely call the two buildings a “campus”. I have always wanted a real campus but that’s just a personal preference. The largest reason why I did not like my time at Baruch, is because I found the school very unprofessional. It all started off when we were given Dell computers after we were promised MacBook Air’s. The problem wasn’t so much that I didn’t get the computer but more so that we weren’t notified about this until the moment we got them. The school had over 6 months to notify us and then afterwards, and only because the students complained, they tried to make up for it with some pathetic apology. We are the Honors students, supposedly “the brightest” bunch of students and from the first week we got a good look at how Baruch treated us. Also, I was promised priority scheduling as a Honors students. The school knew that I was an athlete and they had the schedule of when I had games and they continued to schedule a math class where I would have to either miss half my games or half my classes. This wasn’t really the problem because I understand if they didn’t know my schedule but then when I went to fix they told me that it was impossible to fix and that I would have to figure it out. So now I am, as a freshman student who was told to go and expand my horizons, stuck to decided whether to miss half my soccer games or half my math lectures. The best part of the whole situation was that when I pursued the issue and brought the issue to the Dean they were able to find a solution to the problem, even though it also wasn’t ideal. Another issue I had was with financial aid. I was promised a certain amount of money at the beginning of the semester and I went to meet with the office workers just to make sure how and when I would get the money because with the previous issues that I went through I knew something was bound to go wrong. So after two months went by and I didn’t receive the money I went back to the office. Apparently the money had mysteriously “disappeared”. They told me they didn’t know what happened to it and they would look into it. Now a few weeks later, after I signed up for the direct deposit, I see the money in my account. However, it is under “Campus Housing” and I never actually received it which means that I have to go back to the office a third time to figure it out. Finally, me and the rest of the honors students, were finessed in the Maker Hub. Even though it was a great experience, many of our group were promised 3-D printing models and either didn’t ever receive the model or they were late. My group didn’t even know that we were not getting our model until the day we had to present. Once again there was no notifications which was the largest problem. During my time at Baruch, I found a lot of the staff and workers very unprofessional and rude. I don’t know exactly where I will end up for the next three years, but I can confidently say that it will definitely not be Baruch College.