Western is great if you are a self-learner. Because COMP has a history of being very vindictive against students who speak out against the school, and trust me this school is all about "big brother is watching," I will not answer any details about what year I am/was, gender, etc.
On one end the school does not want you to whine, and they really emphasize being a self-learner. "Lifelong learning...etc. etc." Well the problem is, on one hand they say that but then on the other they are completely fascist when it comes to class attendance.
One of the perks of Western is the apreso system, which is basically a webcast recording that you can go back and learn from. Half the administration says that not physically attending class is fine if you are a better learner by watching the videos for that day, while others are completely opposed to students skipping lecture. For example, the second years just finished a pediatrics week where the course director overstepped her bounds on numerous occasions and pretty much interrogated students whenever they got up to go to the restroom, for fear that they were trying to skip. From the start her solution was unannounced pop-quizzes. To get the full impact of this, you've got to understand that up until that point second years had pretty much figured out on an individual basis for themselves what study habits worked for them, and which didn't. Class attendance on the average is less than half, because students either watch it at double-speed, or simply depend on books altogether and teach themselves. For courses such as biochemistry, knowing how to learn from a book is essential because the professors are horrible. This is one of the few courses where, for those of you who will be attending COMP soon, you will get a virtually unanimous opinion that the biochemistry faculty, to put it colloquially, "sucks."
Western is in a time of flux right now. The faculty who have been with the school for longer than 10 years are about to retire if they haven't already quit from school-politics controversy, or they got fired because Western seems not be place great emphasis on teaching prowess. The faculty who have been here for less than four years, will mysteriously dissappear as the school will tell the students that they quit, when really it's general knowledge that they were fired. So basically the bottom line is this: there are some faculty who are quality, but the vast majority, though they may be experts in their fields as phds, do NOT succeed in conveying their knowledge to students. There is one professor (associate professor) who's name has the two words "mits" and "sour" in her name, that would indicate a lack of proficiency in not only teaching, but also her field. To those of you who will be joining us at COMP, she may or may not be here because she has gotten unanimously horrendous reviews by the students, as well as being on the bad side of the course director.
The bottom line is this: right now the school is focused so much on expanding and trying not to hemorrhage money from every orifice. Just go to the website. The school already has 6 colleges, of which only 2 were bringing in substantial income, which are the pharmacy program and the medical school. The other four were not self-supporting (Physician assistant, physical therapy, master degree of health/public policy, and veterinary). And now, the school is opening three more schools in what it hopes will be a very lucrative venture: podiatry, dentistry, and optometry. Exactly how does a single, third-tier medical school, expect to afford and maintain a quality educational experience expanding so voraciously? You can't have quality and quantity. Somebody is going to suffer somewhere. I wish I had known that this school had the reputation of being just a factory that pumps volumes of students out at a class-size of 220.
Many western students are successful. My point in posting this is that it's not the school that is doing it. Western is just very good at picking students who will survive the poor-education this place offers. Let us not be naive. All schools first and foremost are a business. So what you really should be looking for, for those of you who truly do have many choices and options, are physical facilities, the current student-body's critique of faculty, and as dumb as it seems, the hours the library is open. Why? Because it is a very basic indicator for whether the school truly promotes and nurtures a scholarly environment for the students. Western's library hours? Just to save you the trouble: closes at 6pm on fridays, and seven pm on saturdays and sundays, regardless of whether the students have an exam or not. The rest of the week? 11 pm. I didn't go to a very presigious undergrad, but even their hours were not as pathetic as this.
It could come as a shock to people not inclined to the hammock lifestyle.
