Jonathon Hesley

Review of George Mason Review

GMU is a great university! Students are extremely ...

GMU is a great university! Students are extremely friendly, the professors are great, and the facilities are modern. Yes, you will get a well-rounded college experience, but you come here to get: Jobs High-Paying Jobs! The students that attend this school are very career-focused, and take full advantage of being located near DC and Northern Virginia. Mason students are very driven people, and you will be motivated by your peers who get local internships at the Pentagon, FBI, Capitol Hill, Ernst & Young, World Bank, and the Smithsonian Museum among others.

Give credit where credit is due: Mason is a very young university, founded in 1972, that has grown so much in reputation. In 2016, GMU was the newest member of an elite group: "R1" which is a group of 115 US research universities that perform research at the highest level, ranked by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. I m also amazed to see it climb up the US News rankings so quickly, with many graduate programs in the Top-50. When I started in 2005, GMU was barely a Tier-3 school. For 2016, Mason is a Tier-1 school ranked at #135 (up from #138 in 2015) among all national-level universities, and is #68 among public national-level universities.

So the take-away point is that compared to the expensive private colleges in downtown DC, GMU is the best value school when factoring tuition, quality of life & education, and job prospects. GMU is 19 miles/30 kilometers west of DC in a very safe and wealthy suburban setting in Fairfax County --the #5 wealthiest county in the USA (Forbes, 2015). You have metro/subway access to get to DC, Uber & Lyft options, and a car-friendly campus if you own a vehicle. You get everything good about the DC region for half the price ---or less if you are a Virginia resident.

I am a consultant at a major DC-area technology consulting firm.

-JH

B.S. Public Administration (2011), George Mason University
Master of Business Administration, MBA (2015), University of Maryland