Argh I can't decide!
I'm going to try and ask stuff that I didn't already see on the factor thread:
So I'm looking for the tuition fees..I didn't see it in our letters. The website is for 2014-2015. Should I email the university and see how much it is for 2016-2017? What are the campus fees? Should I expect to add on atleast $3k to the tuition every year?
Also, books...do you buy a lot of books? If you do, are they mostly e-books? (I'm a paper kind of person)
Does this school have a laptop program? I can't seem to find it if they do.
How do they treat attendance there? I rarely miss class but I've been down with the flu all week. (First time in over a decade) & now I'm thinking what happens if I was in school?
How supportive are the classmates there? It seemed kinda impersonal when I was there, but there was so many people I don't think it was an accurate representation.
How safe do you feel campus/Savoy is?
Where is the dodgy part of town?
Anyone have any experience with university daycare? Any idea what the public schools are like? Or know someone else with kids in the vet school and how they get along? Is the faculty supportive? (Cause stuff happens) Is there anything to do with kids, or is it mostly bars & pizza places?
Like I said I'm pretty cloudy from being sick, so I apologize if this stuff has been covered. Thanks.
Addressing the questions that I can, in order:
I wouldn't expect to add 3K to tuition every year. Our tuition is going up 0.5% for IS students and 2% for OOS students next year and my understanding is that this trend has been similar in recent years. Tuition is unpredictable and largely increasing every year, unless you go to a place that fixes your tuition on matriculation.
However many books you buy depends on the student. Evan's Guide to the Dissection of the Dog is a must. Beyond that it's up to students what they buy. Most of the information will be available in the powerpoints, but Costanzo's Physioology has been an indispensable resource for me in Physiology and Neurobiology and I know others who really liked Cunningham's Textbook of Veterinary Physiology. You can buy however many or few from your booklist that you feel like you'll need.
There's no laptop program--they give you some minimum system requirements and you're free to buy your own from there. We use software to take our exams on our computers and all our lecture notes are online, so you'll need one.
Attendance is required per our syllabus, but they never take it when we're in lecture. The second years had some unannounced Iclicker quizzes to make sure they were going to class. But, nobody's going to punish you if you come down with the flu and can't come to class one day. Attendance is stricter on rotations and you need absences approved. My understanding is that days missed due to illness are made up later.
I'd say overall, the classmates are very supportive and many of the faculty are, there. I've never got a competitive vibe off of our class and largely, everyone is kind and friendly to one another. As with any university, you'll get faculty who are kind of impersonal but I feel like most professors and clinicians are genuinely enthusiastic to work with you and really want you to succeed.
I live in Savoy. It's smaller and quieter than Urbana-Champaign and that confers a degree of safety to me personally. How safe you view campus depends entirely on where you come from. People from very rural areas probably feel less safe than classmates from very urban areas. Overall, though, I don't feel unsafe walking around and feel like the crime rate is about on par with what you'd expect for a large university campus.
Kids are a harder one since I don't know too many people who have them. There was a fourth year student on one of my rotations who had a son, so there are parents here at school. I am aware of a few local museums, but am not sure about others. A serious perk of the school's geographic location (for me at least) is that there's theee major cities that are ~2 hours away, which makes weekend trips possible. Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapoolis will all have nice things to do with children of you can't find anything here.
I would be nothing without my dogs. I adopted another one in August 2015. No regrets!!
