CollegeHumor has a video entitled “Honest College Ad.” I wish that UW had one. I know I’m not the only one. In mid-June I attended a FEDS research session addressing issues facing students. The major issue by our group was how UW did not do enough to accurately inform students about which program to pick. There was a real sense of bitterness about feeling misled.
What I didn’t know about civil was that it was dirty, and that construction sites were unpleasant, and that the industry as a whole was rather risk-averse and difficult to innovate within. What the brochure told me was that I could specialize in Anything I Wanted – nevermind that transportation engineering isn’t actually a full minor (like math), option (like water resources), or certificate (like structural), and that my work terms would be like riding unicorns on the yellow brick road of SUPA RADICAL CREATIVITY AND XTREME MEANINGFULNESS.
Honestly, if I had to do it all over, I wouldn’t pick civil. I’d pick systems design or something else more versatile and cleaner. Despite early misgivings I stuck around hoping that it would get better. But it didn’t. And now the sunk cost fallacy (plus having to admit to my parents that I’d picked wrongly) means that I can’t go back and redo it.
I would have like to hear the testimony of mediocre students alongside the class stars. I would have liked to known about students who switched programs, and why. I would have liked to see the dark side of the co-op program: that for every student with an amazing dream job offering unlimited potential for creativity is one labouring as a cog in the corporate machine, with their main duties being photocopying. I would have liked to have known the hardest thing about each program, the worst things, but then why they stayed in it – what made it all worth it.
I realize that UW has to compete with other universities for the best students around the world. Brutally honest advertising doesn’t lead to mountains of Admissions Information Forms. But this comes at the cost of bitter students, bad fits in programs, and lifelong regrets.
In a perfect world, all universities would advertise honestly, allowing prospective students to make better decisions about which university and program is actually the best fit for them. But, that will never happen, so prospective students are stuck deciphering over glossy pictures of the most attractive (and newest) buildings on campus (that civils will probably never get to use, by the way!), staged co-op photo ops with clean equipment and neat lab setups (never actually happens), and nary a criticism from the photoshop-enhanced mouths of the profiled students (definitely false).
And realistically, UW will never sanction an official “honest engineering program profiles.” I kind of doubt that FEDS, bless their hearts, will prioritize the setup and management of a website full of the opinions of students who didn’t make the cut to be featured in the official UW promotional material. If they want to know the real deal about life on campus, incoming students will continue to be forced to rely on word-of-mouth, sketchy forums, and the cesshole that is OMGUW.
Perhaps, in that case, ignorance is bliss.
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