MU was the only college I actually visited as a high-school senior. I knew I wanted to major in journalism, and I knew the word was, MU was one-stop j-school shopping. After the visit, I wasn't sold exactly, but I knew it was a perfect marriage of convenience. I could go to school two hours from home, far enough that I'd be living on my own, yet close enough to seek refuge every few weeks for good food, free laundry and familiar company. I could virtually finance my education with the two hefty state scholarships handed out to people with ACT scores of 30 or more. I could go to a huge school that hopefully would yield smaller communities as time went on. And I could get a bachelor's degree from one of the most respected journalism schools in the country.

I did all those things in my four years at the school. (I graduated last May -- wanna offer me a real job? I haven't really been looking.) And after all that time, I still don't feel completely qualified to review the university as a whole. I don't think one person, particularly someone who ducked all involvement in the Greek system and campus clubs, can give a complete overview, but I can give you a few of the impressions I got out of my microcosm, less-social-than-most experience.

The campus itself? It's under construction, perpetually marred with scaffolding and orange, re-routing mesh. It was under construction when I got here and there are still buildings going up, coming down and getting cleaned up. But the MU campus today looks a lot better than it did when I got here in 1995 -- most of the buildings from its original heyday at the turn of the century have been remodeled, the university bookstore complex looks completely new, and Jesse Hall is actually white again. The campus is fairly large, at most a 20-minute walk from diagonal corner to diagonal corner, grouped in clusters but still not completely organized. (I'm not going to get into the times I had English classes in the Engineering building, history classes in the Geology building, etc.)

Social atmosphere? This is a state university, and the Greek system is in full sway. Any night of the week, there's probably a party to be found in the area, but that goes for most of the off-campus apartment complexes, too. So, yeah, if you come to MU, you can get drunk a lot, but there are also clubs and groups for just about every sober taste, and Columbia offers at least one of every leisure activity. (Hey, we have TWO bowling alleys.) Downtown Columbia is within walking distance of campus, and with a car, everything else is 10 or less minutes away. Living in this 70,000-population town, you basically only need to get on the highway if you're headed to St. Louis or Kansas City.

Administration? Well, it's a bureaucracy. Nothing more really needs to be said. Get to the front of the line, and you'll be transferred to another one because you didn't have the proper TPS report or whatever. At least the school is on top of technology -- as long as I was at MU, I was able to register for classes and find out about grades by phone. It ties in with the overall anonymous nature of the large state school, but people who just want to get the job done have their ways out of the mess.

Classes? Now we're getting into an area I can actually talk about with some degree of certainty and conviction. I was here eight semesters, with four or five classes each time. Simple statistical odds (and, yes, I took Intro Statistics) will tell you that, no, not all your classes will be perfect, 12-person seminar discussions led by a revered, tenured professor who will occasionally invite the entire class over to his or her house for an elegant, home-cooked dinner. Now, this did happen to me a few times, but more often than not during the first two years, I was in crowded lecture halls with a few hundred of my favorite classmates, straining to hear the professor over the guys in the row behind me. But I'm an introvert; I like being a face in the crowd of a huge class.

I've had classes taught by ignorant doctorate students. My intro English TA was a bad writer. My communications professor didn't know what "WB" stood for. My intro economics professor's exams were so poorly planned and error-ridden that a 30-point curve was the norm. These aren't horror stories; I file these anecdotes away in the "inevitability of bureaucracy" folder. This is a huge school that probably doesn't get enough funding -- you're going to have some large, badly taught classes. But there are good, even great professors here who will inspire and challenge you, and those make the living lemons a lot more bearable.

Degree programs? As I said, I can only offer up my own experience as evidence. I got through two years of mainly liberal-arts intro courses, some good and some painfully, mind-numbingly bad, before I got into the heart of the journalism program. I didn't truly realize I was getting an education until the second half of my junior year, when I was spending 20-25 hours a week tracking down stories for the Columbia Missourian, the student-staffed, university-run community paper.

The MU journalism school has its newspaper, an NBC affiliate (KOMU) and a radio station to provide a sort of reality education, and that's what makes the endless theory and technique taught at you during class come to life. The Missourian was where I hit my stride at college, where I met the most fun and dedicated people (I'm talking about students and educators here) and realized I could do this professionally, if need be. Most other arts degree programs here don't have this sort of learning lab, but I found myself more than satisfied with what the j-school offered me. It was practical.

I'd recommend MU, certainly to anyone interested in print or broadcast journalism, but also to anyone looking for a fairly large institution in a pleasant college town. It wasn't just the education I started to truly appreciate my junior year -- I also really started to get to know Columbia and the breadth of the MU campus. This is a nice place to be for four to, uh, six or seven years of your life.



Recommended: Yes