What's It Like Not At BYU?

[mic0]

I at first was going to ask this to the Board but realized the people here are probably better qualified. Those of you who have attended BYU for any amount of time as well as another university: what did you like from each? What differences were there?

Just curious! I'm at a super liberal university now and I like how people have very unique hair/tattoos/clothes, and sometimes very different ideas about the world than I'm used to, but I don't really like how many people smoke (cigarettes, marijuana, whatever), and curse even in a classroom asking-the-teacher-something setting.

[Eirene]

Pros: Can wear gym shorts/yoga pants to class if I'm working out right after, without worrying whether I'll get a side-eye for being immodest.
As a woman, I feel like I'm treated as a professional equal here as the default, whereas at BYU, I usually only got that treatment if I had already "proved" myself to someone by demonstrating that I was smart or accomplished or serious about school or whatever.
There are enough vegetarians/people with meat-related dietary restrictions in this part of the world that there are always vegetarian options at restaurants and catered events.

I don't know whether this is a pro or a con: the sports (the ones I care about, anyway) are much better here, but on the other hand, this school is never going to feel like my home team the way that BYU did.

Cons: I loved BYU! I miss the friends I had there and all the fun stuff I did while I was a student there. BYU is always going to feel like "my school."
I often miss the shared Mormon cultural perspective. I liked when people would drop references to Nephi or Relief Society or General Conference and everyone knew what they meant—it was like always being on the inside of an inside joke. I also liked not having to explain getting married young or not drinking coffee.
Smoking is so gross. I hate walking by people who are doing it, and it's especially bad when I see someone who looks 19 smoking on campus. When they're so young, I just want to smack the cigarette out of their hand and tell them they've seen enough smoking PSAs that they should really know better.
I think the worst thing about my new school is that EVERYONE drinks. SO MUCH. Going to a bar is the default hangout and the default entertainment at people's houses is alcohol. It's not like I'm clutching my pearls here about legal adults making legal choices; it's just that I find drunk/tipsy people boring and annoying, and being at a bar without drinking or hitting on people is almost always very dull. Why can't everyone just get ice cream and play board games???

[Portia]

I was non-matriculated at the University of Washington for a summer.

The weather was ideal, the library was amazing, and the atmosphere was laid-back.

Everything was way too expensive, the facilities at BYU are nicer overall, and it was much harder to make close friends.

[Yarjka]

BYU is very nice, as it's not too big and not too small, so you have nice facilities and many resources at your disposal (including an amazing library!) but you don't feel lost on campus or unable to join groups and have fun. The structure of the student body (into student wards and the like) promotes friendship across disciplines. The belief in the honor code allows for the testing center, which is a fabulous system for administering tests.

Other universities I've been at are just too big to get that same feeling of togetherness. Things like devotionals and the playing of the national anthem, while they can be tedious, really do provide for shared experiences for the students that other universities lack. I also thought BYU had some pretty great sports teams, which is also a plus to student camaraderie. The other universities I've studied at don't really promote sports all that much (this is obviously not true for all universities).

The departments at BYU are on the whole well-administered and the professors are well-qualified and excited to teach. At least in my experience. I also like that they allow professors from all departments to teach some of the religion courses, like Book of Mormon. It prevents those courses from being unnecessarily difficult and provides for a wide array of ideas and opinions in class.

In short, BYU is the perfect size and the administration does a great job overall of making campus a nice and enjoyable place. The location of BYU is pretty fantastic, as it's not entirely in its own bubble and there are quite a few things to do nearby.

The cons to BYU are rather obvious: if you don't agree with church doctrine, the requirement to attend church meetings and the constant barrage of home teachers and ward activities can be overwhelming; the sheer number of religion classes required can be annoying, and they also don't look so great on the transcript; there's way too much focus on modesty and appearance, and the culture of Utah County Mormonism can be stifling to liberal and dissenting voices.

[Katya]

Pros:

More liberal student body. (That's a pro for me, anyway.)

More tight-knit wards. (In my singles ward, at least. The married student wards might have had some of the same problems as BYU married student wards.)

No one finding it strange that I was 25 and unmarried. (I suppose that's the flip side of Eirene's "con" that marrying young is hard to explain.) I felt like I was being treated for the first time like a full person instead of an incomplete marital unit.

Cons:

Eirene's observation about the drinking culture is astute. I had a group of friends who used to hang out at a different neighborhood bar every Sunday. I don't mind bars (although, yes, drunk people are boring), and I don't mind hanging out on Sundays, but I felt like the combination of the two was more than I could do. In that and in other ways, the drinking culture definitely got in the way of making friends and networking.

Swearing. It's not as if all non-G-rated language bothers me, but I do get tired of walking past frat boys who apparently don't know any modifier besides the F-word.

Greek life. Social fraternities and sororities are an amazing combination of pretty much everything I despise (shallowness, snobbery, good ol' boys, plutocracy). I am very proud of BYU for having shut down their fraternities and sororities decades ago. As a grad student and now staff member, I was pretty far removed from the Greek scene, but I still don't like the influence.

Anti-religious sentiment. I wouldn't say this bothered me a lot, but it's definitely there. Then again, as a liberal Mormon, I generally have to settle for being the only liberal in a room of Mormons, or the only Christian in a room of Democrats. Having grown up as the former, I definitely found the latter an interesting change of pace.

[Genuine Article]

When we first moved here I went up to campus with my husband to use the library and there was a guy smoking right outside the door and my brain almost exploded as it made the shift from "That's not allowed!" to "Oh my goodness students here are smoking all over the place and everyone's okay with it." I hate the smell of cigarette smoke, so I was thrilled when the university decided to make UO a smoke-free campus. Some of the posters announcing the change originally said tobacco-free instead of smoke-free, which made me laugh because this is a big marijuana town.

[Defy V]

My husband is at a very large university right now, so I asked his observations.

Likes: Big university means a lot more classes available to take. It's so big that you have to take buses to get to the different campuses, and he actually likes how it sprawls (in addition to the free public transportation). He likes how much collaboration there is between departments and colleges. Likes all the seminars.

Dislikes: He says the grounds aren't as well kept, nor are the bathrooms as well maintained. Even though there's a new smoking ban, it's not followed all the time, so he doesn't like that either.

As for as the social aspect, it's probably not all that different from BYU for him. Even though it's a really liberal institution, he only really associates with engineers, many of whom are international students (and only here to study) and the rest are fairly conservative anyway. We see a little bit more liberalism in our ward members, but we all just avoid politics at church so it's no big deal.

[Katya]

I thought of another con. Both the universities I've been associated with since BYU have been much more financially strapped than BYU (although that varies by department). I'd say it's not so much because BYU is super rich, but because private universities have been better shielded from the recession since they can't have their budgets cut by outside parties, unlike state universities, which are prime targets for state governments looking to cut costs. (It doesn't help that Illinois and Maine have particularly bad state economics. I can only imagine what it's like to be part of the University of California system right now.)

Also (and I wouldn't say this is a pro or a con, just something different), it seems like at BYU, it's always students working everywhere (on the grounds crew, as custodians, in the cafeterias). We have some of that at Maine, but we have a lot of non-students working in those jobs, too. Maybe it's a union thing?

[mic0]

Okay, this has been fun. I was sort of busy all day until now, but I've loved reading these answers.

Comments to you all. Definitely agree that students dress more casually outside BYU. Like, even though the people in my program dress fairly nicely, they aren't wearing suits (a common occurrence among men at BYU, mostly those who worked at the MTC, which was a lot), and all the undergrads seem to wear sweatpants and the like.

I was really surprised to learn that other univerisites do not have free parking. BYU, you will always be well thought of by me because I could park on campus without buying some overpriced pass. The parking lots here are still a 10 minute walk from the real classrooms, but parking passes are almost $300! I'd rather take the bus (and I do).

Interestingly, I haven't felt like my new university is any better or worse at helping students feel "together," but that may be because the people in my department are very friendly. Also interestingly, the dating aspect. Katya and Eirene, that is so funny that your experiences are two sides of the same coin. I haven't noticed anyone being too shocked that I'm married, even though Eirene and I are pretty close in age, but maybe our groups of people are just different (or I haven't made enough friends ). But dating in general seems to be not as important as at BYU. The girls in my department go on dates, but it's not a big thing, and everyone seems much more concerned about school/learning/academic experiences than dating. This may be more because it is grad school, but I have a feeling even in grad school at BYU there is a lot of tension about dating.

Everyone goes to bars to hang out, so true! Even as someone who doesn't care so much about drinking these days (not that I drink often, I'm just not worried about it), I feel incredibly awkward "hanging out" at bars and generally avoid those outings.

Katya, I noticed the same thing about student workers. Is BYU saving money by hiring students? Are adult workers more likely to stay long term in a job, since students have higher turnover? I can see reasons for both having student workers and non-student workers, but I took it for granted that most staff jobs at a university would be filled by students.

Defy V, is the campus spread out in a city or is it still one campus but just huge?

[Yarjka]

I just realized that I am comparing vastly different experiences between undergraduate and graduate level study. That's probably where the idea of BYU being better at the "togetherness" is coming from--I was just younger and looking for relationships back then. I'm really not a part of student life here, and that's probably more my own fault.

[Whistler]

Yeah, my graduate cohort at BYU was a lot tighter than my undergrad one (although I was in one of the most popular undergrad majors so that's not saying much).

[Eirene]

Oh, I totally forgot the grounds. The landscaping at BYU is really, really good and I did not appreciate that before I saw the lazy gardening around here. And it's not like my school is so strapped for cash or anything; I think they just have unambitious plans for making the grounds look good, and the people who actually plant and mulch and everything are lazy and don't care about making things look awesome.

And parking, too. Parking is the worst here. I pay $150/year to park in a lot that's still a ten-minute shuttle ride away from school. So lame. When I go on clinical rotations next year, I'll have the option to pay $250/year to park in a lot that's a 7-minute walk away from the hospital, but the lot is so crowded that it fills up by 8:30 am every day. They're doing a bunch of construction now, and some garages are closed, so the whole parking situation is just a disaster. I miss living an eight-minute walk from my classes! I never appreciated how easy it was to find nice, close housing at BYU.

[Katya]

Oh, I totally forgot the grounds. The landscaping at BYU is really, really good and I did not appreciate that before I saw the lazy gardening around here.

I've heard BYU compared compared to Disneyland in that regard, and I think the comparison is apropos.

Illinois was clearly hurting financially in terms of keeping up their grounds. (They also had a much larger campus, which makes sense for an ag school, but it made for more grounds to maintain.)

Maine doesn't do a lot of grounds maintenance (at least not that I ever see), but it's a much more natural landscape (the trees grow and the grass grows and it's all good), so I think it's lower maintenance, overall. Well, except for some of the flowering trees, which could use pruning. (You can actually tell in the growth of the trees when they had to cut back on that sort of maintenance, because the trees have a lovely shape up to that point, and then the branches all start to grow up instead of outwards.)

[Defy V]

Defy V, is the campus spread out in a city or is it still one campus but just huge?

It's split into a few campuses (North, Central, and South, plus the med school in between). Each campus is almost adjacent, but it would take at least an hour to walk from North to South.

[mic0]

I hadn't really noticed things one way or the other about the gardening here, but you all are right! BYU had amazing gardening. And, they just generally kept things clean. I noticed a lot of trash all around today, and (of course) cigarette butts. Interesting. Good for you, BYU.

[Yarjka]

Here's another difference: a transcript from BYU costs me $2 (although they may have increased it to $5 now that they offer the spiffy electronic one), and they send it to you for free (even internationally), but one from my home institution costs $10 plus a delivery fee.

Overall, fees were much cheaper at BYU it seems (or maybe the times have changed).

ETA: okay, BYU's transcript costs $6 now, but still, free shipping and they're quick about it. It was $2 for a long time, though (I should have ordered a lifetime supply, but there's no way to know how many that is).

[Portia]

See, I think Provo's contracted system is ridiculous, and that each student ends up way overpaying when you multiply it by a factor of 6. At other schools, it seems much more common to live at home, with a significant other, or with actual friends rather than strangers.

[mic0]

See, I think Provo's contracted system is ridiculous, and that each student ends up way overpaying when you multiply it by a factor of 6. At other schools, it seems much more common to live at home, with a significant other, or with actual friends rather than strangers.

I was sooooooo happy when I got married at BYU and could live away from campus a bit. So much more chill.

Also, I had no idea transcripts *weren't* free until I had to order one at BYU. I guess I can now be grateful it was so cheap there.

[Laser Jock]

One of the big differences I've noticed being not at BYU is that there's a lot more ethnic diversity where I am now. I've been in classes where the number of people from India and Asia rivaled the number of Caucasians in the class. (These being computer science classes probably helps, but still.)

It was strange to have roads going right through the whole campus, whereas at BYU there's essentially no vehicular access except to the periphery. Also, people write on the walls in the stairwells and bathroom stalls here.

[Defy V]

Oh! Here's one thing that surprised me. My husband's in a male-dominated field, so I figured there would still be more guys than girls in his classes, but there are still only 5-10% of the students who are female (and all are international). I expected a lot more (and am admittedly quite disappointed).