Indiana University-Bloomington Top Questions

Classes and standards are pretty reasonable allowing students to balance school and a social life.

I have been very happy with the academics at IUB. Every professor has been very knowledgable on the subject they are teaching, and also very helpful if you need it. This is a large university, but the professors, administrators, and other students create an atmosphere of a much smaller, close-knit place. Since this is a big school, you will have to take classes that meet in large lecture halls, but usually the professors are very adament about class/student participation. You almost always have a smaller discussion class that meets once a week for each large lecture class, where you get to know other students and usually some of the associate instructors (usually graduate students). Once you begin focusing on requirements for your particular major, the classes become much smaller and more focused on specific topics.

Definitely go to class and get to know your professors. I get good grades mainly because I try hard and my professors know so. I do poorly on tests but because they see the effort I put in, they raise my grade. This is true!

The professors in the music are great! The music school offers a ton of courses in all aspects of music so you are able to get a well-rounded "book" education beyond the perfomance aspect of music. Since there are a lot of general electives needed to graduate (more than other conservatories), I would reccomend either studing for AP Exams or taking a few community college classes.

I'm accounting and finance in the Kelley School of Business and have been extremely pleased with my experience. The professors in the B-school have been awesome. They are down to earth while still having an incredible knowledge of the subjects which they teach. Some profiles include former VP of Tax for Fortune 500 Company, fair value accounting expert who consulted the chief economist of the President of the United States during the subprime housing crisis, and alumni from companies such as McKinsey, PwC, GE, etc. The school is nationally recognized and provides top performing students opportunities to pursue premium career paths such as management consulting and investment banking. If interested in either of these industries, check out the Consulting Workshop (contact Prof. Rubin) or Investment Banking Workshop (contact Prof. Haeberle).

Kelly Business school is re-donk-u-lus. They produced Mark Cuban, yeah that billionaire that gets to boss around Dirk Noviwnkskwyssksky. (sp?) Great Med School. The Journalism School puts out a great publication with the IDS (Indiana Daily Student). Can't forget about LAMP (Liberal Arts and Management) and CMCL (Communications and Culture), these programs contain the best professors in the country, and ensure you a broad level of learning that will land you a job ANYWHERE. Oh yeah, and we have the Kinsey Institutue, where sex was invented..

Looking back on my first year at IU, I am surprised at many things. The amount of participation and interaction students engage in during classes is much higher than I had expected. Students want to get everything they can out of a course. Learning is of top concern in the classroom. If you happen to have a large lecture course, you have student email addresses available to you through the IU website and students welcome help from each other. You can really get to know your professor if you are the type of person who enjoys more specific, one-on-one teaching or just trying to find out who your teacher is. I feel every professor and employee at IU is there to help you. Any questions or concerns you may have, there is always someone there to guide you. They are there to help you in your path towards a career and a better education.

Some of the classes are huge lecture halls with at least 200 students. Professors of those classes never know your name, of course. But the smaller classes tend to be about 20-40 people, I would estimate, and teachers often try to learn students' names in those classes. Class participation is common in some classes, and definitely minimal in others. Some teachers are really good at getting the students interested in the subject and initiating discussion, while others are more passive in this respect and would rather do most of the talking themselves. Each class has a different atmosphere, I've noticed. Having to take four semesters of a foreign language (because I'm in the college of arts and sciences) sucks! I am really bad at learning other languages, memorizing vocabulary, etc. So I can't wait to get that out of the way. I think most students would agree with me on that. I also think the Spanish department here is pretty terrible: the books they choose to use are awful. They don't give hardly any examples, they aren't organized at all (it's impossible to find things in them), the dictionaries in the back don't have half the words you need to look up in them, and the requirements for the course don't help you learn how to speak Spanish at all. I haven't learned how to construct sentences. I can't even say a single sentence in Spanish, and I've taken two semesters of it! I mean, the books we had in high school were much easier to use than the stupid Sabias Que series we're using here. I would like to be able to speak another language, but I've found out college isn't the place to learn one! Also, being a music minor here sucks a lot, too. Music majors are usually in performance. For they most part, they're uppity bastards who think they're smarter at everyone else and better because they also play an instrument all badass-like. If you're a music minor, all these majors think you're some sort of push over or something. You still have to take classes with the majors, and they go around and say what "their instrument" is. Like the own the world's supply of the damn thing. And I always don't know what to say when that happens because I play like three different instruments and I wouldn't consider any of them "my instrument." The practice building sucks, too. like 80{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} of the pianos in there are pieces of shit. The keys stick and they're always out of tune. This is supposed to be one of the best music schools in the country or something, and the practice building is really small and has crappy pianos? What kind of nonsense is that? Being a music minor has been difficult for me because of how discouraging it is. They pretty much make you feel like if you're only a minor, you probably suck at music but you just like it so you're wasting time and taking up space in the Jacobs School of Music. It has been very frustrating for me, having grown up with a love for music and learned to play multiple instruments and having been involved with a lot of music programs in high school. Now I have to take really basic classes about theory and music history where they treat you like you're in middle school, just because I'm a music minor and wanted to learn about other things rather than being couped up in a stinky room practicing "my instrument" for about 12 hours a day. As far as what the education is geared towards, I would say that depends on the school or department the student is in. Some schools, probably like the business school and SPEA definitely focus more on getting a job and what types of jobs are available to those students, and a lot of classes required through the college of arts and sciences, which often have nothing to do with a students' major, are more geared toward learning for its own sake, like culture studies and arts and humanities. Some students' majors have nothing to do with courses in those subjects, but they have to take them, anyway.

I feel that the professor that I have had are always willing to go the extra mile and help you if you don't grasp something that was discussed in lecture.

Academics? I won't talk long on that. It's definitely what you make it. I won't make this personal, but I can give you plenty of general stuff. Your intro classes for your major are always big... I've been in classes that's had 5 students in it, and I've had an online class that's had 300 students in there. We only met for exams. Regardless of the size of your class, you should never feel like the professor won't have a chance to know your name. For example, I knew my professor that taught the class of 300 because we actually participated in the same social/dance group! Connecting with the class and instructor could not get too much easier. Email is the main means of communication, so we get mass emails all the time. However, they have adopted a few ways to avoid clutter in your mailbox. We use an online collaborative learning tool called OnCourse. With this, we can see the people in our class, check out our syllabus, course assignments, and retrieve resouces and articles that our instructor might post for us. Chat is oftentimes activated as well. We can take our test online, if the instructor chooses to do that, and we can submit timed and untimed assignments online. I've also used an online system called webwork. With this online web system, I was able to do my calculus homework online. One very interesting class I had, the one with 30 students in it, was a class called the "Sociocultural perspective of African American Music." This class allowed us to see and hear the instructor, watch his powerpoint slides, view the music and videos that he had for the class, and it allowed us to have public and private chats that allowed us to have a very collaborative and effective learning environment. Speaking of instructors, I do my best to get to know all of them. There are less than a handfull that I may try not to cross in the future, but for the most part, I either meet with my professors during office hours or for lunch, and I usually pass by, email, or facebook my past instructors. I think that IUB has a stable academic environment, and I feel that with the requirements for being admitted to IUB undergrad and the institution's colleges rising, I think that they sometimes make it a little more difficult for some students who may have more potential or knowledge that their gpa or other credentials may show. At the same time, I hope that this means that the caliber of students that IU will have will be more competant and persistant. I also believe that IUB will be looked upon as a more selective institution...