The Best of What’s Around: Parting advice
Graduating senior reflects how JMU canuphold its excellence
Posted on April 26, 2007
“Leaving college after four years is like leaving a bar at 10:30 p.m.” Unfortunately, the parental cash flow seems to only be working for a four-year period and graduate school is luring me in like the Sirens did Odysseus. Over the past three years spent at JMU, one semester abroad and one semester doing an internship, I leave with an extremely satisfied feeling from the time I’ve spent here at this fine institution.
Minus one radical professor and one Mel Gibson copycat encounter, JMU has provided me with everything a student could ever want from college life. In a last attempt to help ensure that JMU continues to be the college atmosphere that I enjoyed, I leave with a few logical suggestions to help keep JMU the wonderful place I have known it to be. These suggestions are hopefully straightforward enough to not warrant an exclusive column solely dedicated to their analysis.
First, until more dormitories can be built, do not increase the amount of students accepted each year. After witnessing the voyage that students make from Rockingham Hall each day simply to stand in a mile-long line at D-hall, I pity that their college lifestyle consists of a daily commute. Accepting more students to offset rising costs will essentially create higher costs from the dormitories that must be built to house all the extra students. If JMU hopes to raise its student population to 20,000 by 2010, it should work on housing options first before adding students every year.
Next, speaking of costs, if JMU is going to raise tuition, then do it for the appropriate reasons. In an ideal world, JMU could allocate enough money to help all the good causes and organizations on campus, but this is not economically feasible without holding the student body hostage to paying for the increased costs by raising tuition. If one group gets to have tuition raised to fund their politically charged cause (the Green Tax) then why not raise tuition to allocate money for every good cause and group on campus? What is to say one cause is more important than another?
A more logical option instead of making those who may not agree with the political cause have to pay for it is to make the tax optional. JMU could have redistributed its monetary resources more evenly from other activities to fund this initiative instead of overspending on some other aspect of campus life.
Finally, when discussing even redistribution, it would be a great idea for JMU to seriously restructure its overloaded General Education Cluster Three program, and in particular the science courses. Of all the courses I studied at JMU, none were as hard as my GSCI 101 class. In this introductory science course, I received one of the worst grades of my college career, when compared to my upper level politics and foreign language classes. Not only that, after luckily being pre-enrolled during freshman year, it took me until my junior and senior year before I could even get into another GSCI course.
Despite the complete misunderstanding of the term “general” and the inadequate ability to funnel students through the GenEd program before their senior year, GSCI remains one of the only courses that JMU does not offer transferable credit from most community colleges. Why continue to require more science classes than the GenEd requirement while not allowing students the option to complete it at another institution and thus having to become a fifth year senior?
Compared to other universities, I feel JMU stands out significantly in the quality of education and enjoyable atmosphere it provides to its students. These possible suggestions could continue to keep it that way, because there is always room for improvement. And in the final words of Dave Matthews: “I shall miss this thing when it all rolls by.”
Craig Finkelstein is a senior international affairs major.