One of the things I’ve struggled with the most here is my very tenuous relationship with NYU, which just happens to be the institution receiving incredible sums of borrowed money from me and is supposed to be giving me a top-notch education in teaching languages in return. To put it simply, I am currently rather disappointed. Coming to New York to study education seems worth it, but doing it at NYU? They haven’t made a believer out of me yet.
I’m not interested in just totally bashing NYU, but some things have definitely made me question this investment in a big way. First and foremost: I can’t speak for the whole university, but the graduate education department – at least the part of it that covers language teaching – is extremely unorganized and unprofessional. If I had visited NYU before choosing to do my Masters here (I couldn’t because I was in Berlin), and encountered anything like what I’ve encountered in the past 6 weeks at NYU, I’m not sure I would’ve still decided to go here. The orientation session was the most useless one I’ve sat through probably in my life. I think it was actually more useless than the Pedagogical Exchange Service’s orientation for teaching assistants in Germany (which was pretty outrageous). It was poorly organized, poorly structured, poorly presented, and literally left me thinking, “Is this really what I’m paying for?”
On top of that, students are not assigned advisers until the middle of their first semester. So we all had to pick our first semester courses with random temporary advisors who knew nothing about us, and while I can’t speak for those whom the other students met with, the one I met with was basically clueless and could not explain to me the logical progression of coursework from one semester to the next – about a month later I finally got this information from the lead advisor, only after approaching her personally though! – and gave me plenty of useless information about courses and little useful information. I went home, looked at the course descriptions online – which no one had told us how to access until that meeting – and picked a different set of courses from what we discussed on my own, making the initial meeting essentially useless. (Add to that that there are required courses for the program which are “full” – how can a university require a course and then not provide for enough places in it so that everyone in the program can take it? – and that they can’t seem to find field work placements for us that actually fit our studies.)
Now I should also mention that I have a professor who doesn’t teach and in fact gives the impression that she is basically clueless about a) how to teach a graduate course and b) the subject material (beyond what’s in the required texts for the class). We have to do a case study for this class, and she literally spent over 45 minutes describing how to do a case study, though the assignment was totally clear after about the first 5 minutes. It could’ve been summed up in a paragraph on a handout. The other sessions we’ve had so far have been comparable.
And, though it’s a touchy subject and I don’t wish to be judgmental, let’s talk about the students. Now, to be fair, I often had kids in classes at Penn that made me think, “Did they really get into Penn?” Usually it was because they couldn’t write, which I’ve discovered is basically an epidemic ın this generation. Here, the general academic level is just lower. There are some really smart people in some of my classes, but there are also some who seem clueless and whose contributions to class discussions consist of simplistic value judgements and have little or nothing truly intellectual about them. It’s horribly boring and frustrating not to receive much quality imput from my peers.
Overall, what worries me the most is that grad school hasn’t been challenging. Undergrad was so much harder, and in that sense, a lot more interesting. I do have one class here that is challenging, but I feel it would be much more interesting and challenging if I had more peers at my level.
This has been the hardest thing for me to cope with since moving to New York. I’m coming to terms with the high cost of living (I still hate it, of course, but I’ve accepted it and am finding a balance), and feeling less threatened by the obsession of so many New Yorkers with trendy clothes, places and lifestyles, but NYU is still cause to some uneasiness.
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