Tom Barstow

Review of Mid-American Review

Unfortunately I'm a BGSU alumni and I cannot recom...

Unfortunately I'm a BGSU alumni and I cannot recommend this university to anyone. I had several problems with the housing especially at MacDonald and all of my concerns were totally ignored (by Briar Wintersteen and others in Housing... Briar would walk around everywhere barefoot yet somehow he was the Resident Director of MacDonald dormitory).

There were several decent teachers in Computer Science department when I attended but usually when scheduling you'd just see 'STAFF' in the Star90 scheduling system so you barely could pick who your instructors were anyway. Once, I had an English professor named Elsa Gutman who was so bad she admitted she had only given one person an A in 10+ years of being at the school. She constantly mentioned how German she was and made constant daily references to alcohol and bar tending while teaching the class.

The entire university is centered on a cemetery so nothing is conveniently located besides the graveyard and maybe the Math building.

The parking was also comically bad. Many students would have to park out in the Lot A Overflow lot which was very aptly named because it would fill up with water if it rained lightly and I had witnessed multiple cars get stuck in high water and multiple years cars were abandoned due to getting flooded in this wonderful Lot A Overflow... which, by the way, was right next to I-75 and required a bus ride into both the town and the university. They were also extremely heavy handed with the parking tickets for having such poor parking availability. I think the average student had around $125 in tickets before graduating.

I was told they were going to build a parking garage (as a reason for increased tuition charges), but as of my last visit in 2019 they still haven't built a parking garage.

From everything I saw the University treated their students as solely a cash commodity... They just saw them as a way to make money and not as real people. The only place that had more disregard for the students was the city of Bowling Green which is also funny because without the university that town would have next to nothing other than the national tractor pulls and Scott Hamilton. It's surrounded by corn fields. There is pretty much nothing to do there in the winter and there are no hills so you can't even really get out and enjoy the windy snow.

If I had to give anything pluses for my anything from my entire stay for undergrad here I'd say a lot of things the school doesn't control are good and a few things at the school... Big ups to Campus Pollyeyes breadsticks, the Rec center, Hayes Hall, Guy Zimmerman, the Art building for being open 24/7, Pita Pit/Subway/Taco Bell and all the decent bars and clubs Uptown/Downtown, Brat Haus, Howard's, and the Dane Cook show.