A Tale of Two Schools
by Rob Becker

Originally published Jan. 7, 2001 on studentadvantage.com.

I got a lot of funny looks when I told people where I was going to college.

"Texas?" they asked with curiosity.

I had to explain many times that summer how I'd received a hefty scholarship from the University of Texas at Austin. Sure, for a kid raised on the streets of New York City, I knew Texas would be a very different experience, but I was ready... or at least I thought I was.

It's said that everything is bigger in Texas, and that stereotype comes to life at UT-Austin. UT is the largest university in America. I remember the shock I felt when I first saw the map of the campus bus system. I stared in disbelief at a tangled web of color-coded bus routes that weaved throughout the campus. That shock was a distant second, though, to the first time I sat among more than 500 students in my freshman chemistry lecture hall.

I spent three semesters at UT as a electrical engineering major. My first year was rather successful. I slowly adapted to life in a far away place. I enjoyed my newfound independence and made new friends. On top of it all, I enjoyed fairly good grades my first year. On the surface everything seemed to be going great for this fish out of water, but underneath I wasn't enjoying UT. Things would quickly turn sour as my sophomore year started.

By my third semester I was tiring of UT's big-school atmosphere. The smallest class I'd ever attended was 88 students. Most of my grades were administered on long lists of social security numbers. I never got to know any of my professors — in fact, sometimes the lecture halls were so large that when I sat in the back I couldn't even tell what the professor looked like.

What bothered me even more than UT's immense size was the attitude towards teaching many of the professors held. While some professors really cared about teaching the students, many simply did not. They were often more concerned with their graduate students or their personal research. This was never more evident than in my freshman chemistry lecture. On the very first day, the professor said straight out that he didn't like to teach this class. He preferred teaching higher-level chemistry classes, he said.

That chemistry lecture was the worst class I've ever taken. The professor rarely taught; usually, he went off on some tangent that had nothing to do with the course material. Multiple TAs handled all of our tests, quizzes and homework. The course was so worthless that after the first five minutes of every class, when the professor finished announcing that day's assignments, hundreds of students would get up and leave in a mass exodus.

Finally, I often felt like the entire academic system was rooting against me rather than for me. It was commonly understood that some courses were "weed-out" classes, designed to eliminate less-skilled or unmotivated students from the major. One of these courses was a class in C++. It was a required class for engineers, but only one section of the course was offered each semester — at 8 a.m. Once I and the 300 other students in the class had settled in, the lights would dim and our attention would focus on a giant projection screen set up in the front of the lecture hall. For the next hour the professor would type away at his computer, and as his typing displayed on the projection screen he would drone on while students scribbled his words into their notebooks. It was an awful, competitive and coma-inducing class. I was simply miserable.

About halfway into my third semester I really began to hate it at UT. The more unhappy I became, the more my grades dropped and the more I missed my family and friends back home. Maybe because of my bad experiences at UT, I also found myself increasingly disliking the city of Austin. It's not just that it was too hot there (though it was) — it was generally very different from my home in New York, and I was having trouble adjusting. Public transportation in Austin was terrible, so if you wanted to go anywhere in Austin you had to drive — and, I didn't own a car. The social scene wasn't too bad, but I continually felt like a stranger in a strange land. New York City is my home and it always will be. There is an intangible quality about it — a certain energy that you don't get anywhere else. I just couldn't bring myself to make Austin home.

I had made lots of friends my first year at UT, but by my second year most of them had moved miles off campus, making life pretty lonely. Eventually every little thing about the city, from the traffic lights to the local news, began to get under my skin. I knew that it was time for a change.

However, I still had that hefty scholarship hanging over my head; I felt like, no matter how bad it got, I just couldn't leave. I came home for winter break after my third semester — and that's when fate stepped in. A misplaced tuition check that never got mailed forced the school to drop me from all my classes. At that point I decided I wasn't going back.

I returned to Texas once more to collect my things and say goodbye to friends. It was a sad and difficult time. I felt like a failure and a quitter, and was often uncertain that I'd made the right decision. But I also felt a great sense of relief to be out of that situation.

With no sure idea what my future would hold, I found a job in New York City at a graphic production company. I worked full-time for a year, living at home and saving money so I could return to school.

When I decided it was time to head back to school, I found Manhattan College, a small school in the Bronx with a strong engineering program. When I visited MC for the first time I remembered thinking how it was everything that UT wasn't. It's a small school with small classes. It has teachers who are dedicated to teaching and administrators that get to know us and try to help us out whenever they can. And it's just a stone's throw away from the city I love.

I just completed my third semester at Manhattan College. My grades are great, I'm learning a lot and I'm really enjoying myself. I realize MC isn't a perfect school, but it's a much better fit for me. I still talk to old friends of mine from UT who feel the same way I do about the school, and I hear how they are still suffering through. I know that not everyone shares my opinion of UT, and I've known people who have enjoyed the school and were very successful there. But I realize now that transferring out of UT was one of the smartest things I've ever done.

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