Located in the quaint little town of Macomb, Western Illinois University is a great school with large diversity among its students, activities and programs. I absolutely love Western, it was/is the perfect fit for me for college—yet, like with any school, it does have some issues. Check out some advantages offered to Western students that aren’t always as advantageous as they seem to be.
1.The Dining Halls
WIU boasts about its dining halls and the variety of foods they serve. However, those foods aren’t all that great. I rarely get meat from the dining hall that is fully cooked, even the omelets are often not cooked completely! The food is also so greasy and fattening, it makes my stomach hurt!
2. GO West
The Go West buses present an extremely useful service, even including an app that allows you to track them and their approximate arrival times. But the app is rarely accurate and the buses take much longer than they say they will.
3. The Beau
What a fantastic idea, a full-service health center on campus so students don’t have to try and make an appointment back at home or find a doctor in town. I haven’t visited the Beau often but I have not ever had a good experience and I have only heard horror stories from friends and fellow classmates. They also do not write notes, so if you ever need on because you are sick don’t waste your money. So be cautious when utilizing this service.
4. Western Online
A place for all of your assignments to be turned in, announcements from professors and items poste—sounds great, right? Yet WesternOnline often crashes and glitches and can cause more issues with turning in assignments than traditionally handing them in.
5. OARS
Online Attendance Reporting Service—a convenient place to let all of your teachers know at once that you won’t be coming to class due to illness…sounds perfect right!?! Wrong. Most professors will not accept this as an actual excuse to miss class and insist on a doctor’s note from the beau.
6. Freshman Residence Halls
Bayliss, Henninger and Tanner are the freshman halls. How convenient right, keeping all the freshman together? Or a train wreck. The fire alarms go off almost weekly and you can almost guarantee there will be medical services called in for some student every week or so. Because. Freshman.
7. OPS
Honestly OPS is super helpful most of the time. However, they can be extremely frustrating, particularly when it comes to ticketing students in the parking lots. Speaking of parking…
8. Parking Services
There somehow always seems to be a lack of parking spaces in all of the parking spots at all times. And the residence hall lots require specific tags 24/7 and you can get a $40 ticket for parking in a lot that your sticker doesn’t match. Makes no sense to me, if you go to the school why does it matter which parking lot you use?
9. Q Lot
The dreaded freshman Q lot. This lot is gigantic, which seems great, except that it isn’t close to anything. Walking across in the summer you feel like a piece of bacon on a frying pan and in the winter, well you might as well live in the arctic.
10. Laundry
Having laundry in your residence hall, sounds great right? Again would be convenient except that it costs a ridiculous amount of money to actually get all of one’s laundry done. Especially when the driers don’t get your clothes dry the first time you run them through, or if the washing machine eats your clothes.
Living on campus can be both fantastic and horrific. Like any campus, WIU has many wonderful things to offer and then also has many its pitfalls. But we all put up with it because at the end of the day we love our school!
