Jay
1/5
I was an honor role, Dean's Scholar, President's Scholar, 4.0 student at SJSU for a couple years in Nutrition Science: Dietetics, but I grew to have a distaste for this institution my senior year. I then changed schools and earned my Information Systems Management degree from UMass instead. My lamentations of SJSU:
1. They add so much stress to an already stressful situation when they make big mistakes, because they make you fix their mistake!
a. They lost all of my student paperwork multiple times while transferring to digital files, so I had to redo all the paperwork I did during orientation all over again.
b. They randomly put me on academic probation while I was a 4.0 student, and tried to make me take, and pay for, a 3-unit class on how to succeed in college. I have 240 units, 6 degrees, and a 3.9 overall GPA in college between 3 colleges; so give me a break.
c. They gave me the wrong grades: I asked for "I" grades my last semester so I could heal my military-connected disabilities that made me unable to walk (couldn't drive to San Jose and this was pre-COVID) and I wanted to come back to take the final exam the next semester, and one teacher gave me a "I", one a "W", and the other gave me a "C-" despite all teachers clearly agreeing to an "I" grade before the semester ended. To change those grades, you have to make 3 appointments with 3 different people (Dean's assistant, head of department, and teacher) and wait almost a year for the paperwork to process so I can TRY to change them. What if they say no, and I keep going to, and paying for, classes at SJSU? Unacceptable!
2. They lied about the prerequisites and would randomly create new prerequisite guidlines on the first day of class. Example: The class schedule, referring to prerequisites, states: "You can take this food science class if you took this other class, OR if you have experience in food prep. Then the teacher says on day one of class: "Wait ... just kidding ... no food prep experience people ... we simply have too many people who want to register ... we are only accepting people who took the prep cooking class ... even though you designed your whole schedule around this one class and the catalog says you can join. Oh ya, and enjoy that 6 hour gap in the middle of your school day now!"
3. Broken down and underfunded Nutrition Science program: Their food science machines were almost all broken while I was there in 2017, and our newly hired, probably underpaid, temp employee foreign teachers who barely spoke English would fail to provide any successful labs to us students.
4. I loved the fellow students for their kindness, but even half of the students in my English class (Medical Technical Writing) failed because they struggled to produce a basic 30-page, APA 7 paper with no errors due to a lack of English skills. Group projects were a nightmare because I would undoubtedly team up with someone whom with I couldn't communicate, regardless if they were U.S. citizens or not. Even local Asian American populations can still have very deep accents. The teachers with a M.S. degree in Food Science from Brazil maybe had science degrees, but they had strong accents and couldn't spell English words properly on the board. Also, when labs fail all the time, you question their science aptitude.
Overall, let’s be honest about what SJSU is, and what it is not. It is the place to go when you are a poor student who didn't get a scholarship to a better college in the Bay Area. It is a less expensive place to go if you want to work in tech, education, or business. It is not a private school or community college that is small and organized, but it also isn't a college that excels while being so big. They turn to textbook business practices so they can provide degrees, but it makes the journey and reward feel cheap. This school turns away 50,000 applicants a year because they are the last rung of the ladder a student can grab before hitting the ground, not because they are fancy or considered "high quality" like SJSU wants you to believe.
