I am your average student. I have a job while also maintaining 12 course credits. I pay for my own groceries and luxuries but also get by with the help of financial aid and my parents. No shame there, just gratefulness. However, I am paying to go here and will in the future have to pay back my student loans and it makes me wonder if i am actually getting what i pay for. Maybe I'm sounding a bit ridiculous but maybe not, because I'm paying over $11,000 (excluding room and board) a year in order to go here and get an education for myself. Now don't get me wrong, I love my school, but sometimes I feel that my school isn't accommodating to me at it's full potential. Let me explain.
For the most part of the reason I am writing this is parking. Florida Atlantic University has a total undergraduate enrollment of 25,209 and I am thankful to be apart of that statistic. However, with so many students there can only be so much parking to maintain. My school hands out more parking permits than they have spots for and it makes it so much harder to find a parking spot. I live 10 minutes away from campus but I have to leave an hour early before my class just so I can assure myself to find a parking spot after 30-40 minutes of driving around, parking lot after parking lot in order to catch the next spot open. This hurts me because it can possibly make me late for/miss class and has me waste gas in my car over a situation I have no control over.
Moving on to my next point. Once I find a parking spot, the first thing I want to do is get to class and relax in my seat. But to my surprise there are only so many seats that are assigned to a class. And I'm not talking about the big classes that obtain over 150 students, I'm talking about the classes where there's about 30 students per class and 5 less seats that meet that number. Now my only options are to either sit on the floor or go to the classroom next door to find an extra seat and I don't really consider that fair. When I sign up for a class it tells me the allowed number of students per class, so my classmates and I expecting for the classroom to occupy that many seats.
The next problem I want to touch base with is wifi. All my assignments are online, which means I need wifi in order to complete these assignments. Going to a school where you never know how good the connection is going to be or where the wifi may be down for a few hours or more is tough. I'm depending on my University to simply provide me wifi, and this is just another situation that I don't have control over. With only two wireless connections and so many students who are either on the two connections, then there's bound to be problem where I can't get access to it.
All in all, I am thankful overall to be attending college and to be getting an education. I just want to make sure my money is being put to good use and my education is being provided to me at the best it can be achieved at.
