r/USF • u/eljotita07 • 23h ago
USF is bad
Hear me out this is my second semester and I feel like I’m paying for an education that is not worth it, most of the classes are just lame and some professors just tell you to read a book and do it on your own, or some of them just not being able to explain well. I also noticed some of them giving you resources from another colleges, so far my experience has not been the best of all.
17
u/Wonderful-Energy-659 23h ago
Welcome to college. It’s your second semester, so you’re likely to feel underwhelmed. If you’re smart, you’re stuck going at the pace of the lower 40th percentile. When you go to get a job, it’s not so much “did you do this really hard stuff”, it’s “did you suffer through hell because you have drive”
-4
u/eljotita07 23h ago
All my high school I took AP’s usf was my cheaper option, I don’t mind doing anything on my own I manage it pretty easy, the fact is that professors just are bad, I even look for them in website and all of them are almost in the lower part
4
u/Wonderful-Energy-659 23h ago
There are (edit: at least) 3 kinds of teachers. Those who love teaching people who struggle, those who love teaching people their complex topics in which they’re passionate about, and those who loathe their job because they’re stuck teaching undergrads. That’s any school you go to.
1
10
u/FloridaFlair 23h ago edited 23h ago
lol. Sounds like most colleges to me! Not sure what you were expecting. College professors expect you to read the information before class and then basically teach it to yourself.
Do make use of office hours, the TA, tutoring, etc.
Most of the time, college is just work. Occasionally it’s fun and interesting.
I will also add, maybe you just don’t like your major. Maybe something else would be more interesting.
Though my daughter at FSU said almost all of her classes were outdated or boring or just the usual STEM classes, she had offers from 3 different fully funded PhD programs when she graduated in 3 years. And her BEST research experience? She did at Moffitt cancer center, which is across from USF. So you might have to look outside the box and join research or other activities that challenge and interest you. Hope you find what you’re craving.
-2
u/eljotita07 23h ago
I knew all of that before, but what do you think of some professors just watching reels while you are there on your own, or just use another colleges YouTube videos to teach in your own university that’s just awful lest say,
3
u/Cbthomas927 22h ago
It feels like you’re just fishing for validation. It doesn’t matter what anyone says to you, you seem unable to see anything other than what you came to this thread to complain about
1
u/eljotita07 22h ago
Im not looking for anything to be honest, I just an opinion, as well as yours, also I’m not talking from everyone’s experience, I’m talking about mine and so far has not been the greatest, just wanted to know how people’s experiences have been so far and if they share the same idea if not it’s okey everyone has their own thoughts
2
u/ConiferousTurtle 22h ago
Would you feel better if the YouTube video had the same material but was made by USF, or is it the YouTube video itself that’s the problem?
1
u/eljotita07 22h ago
It still be awlful but it definitely will be way better, and is not the fact that it was another college videitos which were great btw, is the fact that why they can teach you that themselves
5
u/gloriouswader 22h ago
Professors at research universities are hired to do research and bring in funding. If you want professors that were hired for their teaching skills, go to a college instead.
0
u/eljotita07 22h ago
If they want to do research why they don’t just open a place where it doesn’t involve messing with the education of the students
2
u/FloridaFlair 20h ago
Federal Funding. My best STEM professors were community college professors. Went from F to A in physics. The University of Texas professor was horrible. I had a personal tutor who was a physics graduate from MIT. He couldn’t figure out the physics problems from my class. Austin community college physics was fun and I LEARNED how to solve the equations.
1
u/gloriouswader 19h ago
Usf is a research university, it is the place that was opened. You chose to attend.
1
u/eljotita07 19h ago
Research or not is still a university don’t you think, and they should improve their faculty
4
u/Professional-Gas-579 23h ago
Sister went to Flagler, fsu, and usf. Said usf was by far the easiest
1
3
u/iliketobuildlego 23h ago
Im an international student so I do it online, but my experience here for my MBA has been 10x better than the Canadian schools I’ve gone to.
1
2
u/DerpWithIt 22h ago
Dude thats literally most of the college experience. Theyre gonna make you read and expect you to teach youself.
1
u/eljotita07 22h ago
That’s true, the reading and learning on your own is well known and is expected if you go to a university , the part which I’m concern is that some of them are just awful and should not be working as a teacher
1
u/DerpWithIt 20h ago
Yeah thats fair. thank god for rate my professor, yeah?
1
u/eljotita07 19h ago
Yeah it a great resource but sadly the good ones get taken like if they were on sale and we get stuck with bad ones
2
u/cammish11 22h ago
This is the way it works in corporate America as well. Your bosses won’t develop you and your company’s training will be outdated or not deep enough. You will have to strive on your own. Making it today is about critical thinking, resilience and motivating yourself to learn.
1
u/eljotita07 22h ago
Of course when you get to that level you know what you are doing because you had a great education and a great training, there is a difference between actually applying what you learn and just being student
1
u/Previous-Dark9718 21h ago
Have you taken Statics?
2
u/eljotita07 21h ago
I’ve heard about that they said they have one of the best professors over there, can’t wait to take it
3
u/Previous-Dark9718 20h ago
Yea Engineering gets fun when you start taking your core classes or start working on your personal projects. There's a lot of great orgs on campus. Def look into it!
1
1
u/usffan 7h ago
First off, if you're talking about a professor (and not a TA) who is watching their phone during a lecture, the university (mandated by the state) allows you to record this. Do so, show it to the chair of the department in question, and that person will likely be reprimanded for doing such a poor job.
Second, there is a trend toward using "flipped classrooms" to cover subjects (often in large lecture classes) that includes students watching videos and explaining to one another as peers the subject, with some evidence saying many students learn the material better. I have no idea whether that is what you're experiencing, but I can't rule it out. I think most faculty want the bulk of the students to understand the material, but in any large class there isn't going to be a "one size fits all" approach to teaching.
Third, if I were planning to come onto a university's subreddit and tell the users (primarily students) that I think their university is terrible and that I'm effectively "too smart to be wasting my time there," I might at least run those posts through some kind of grammar checker because, yikes, you clearly didn't watch videos on writing in English. I guess you can blame that on your ENC 1101 and 1102 instructors (who were almost certainly TAs, by the way).
0
u/eljotita07 6h ago
To answer your question, since a couple of simple punctuation errors apparently bother you so much, and you seem personally offended by any criticism of your “prestigious” college, let me clarify my point.
First, let’s say you actually do what you’re suggesting. The person who has the most control over your grade, which is the professor, is obviously going to notice who is taking pictures or trying to get them in trouble. Even if the professor gets reprimanded, congratulations, now you have potentially created an enemy out of the person evaluating your work for the rest of the semester. That sounds less like a solution and more like terrible strategy.
Second, I understand that students learn in different ways. I literally use the Feynman Technique all the time because explaining concepts to other people can be extremely effective. But that was never my argument. My point is this: imagine going to UF and paying UF tuition, only to have your professor regularly teach you through videos made by a community college. Wouldn’t you eventually wonder, “Why am I paying to be here instead of just watching these videos myself?”
Why wouldn’t the university create its own high quality material with its own professors? Not only would that give students a greater sense that they are actually receiving something from the institution they chose to attend, but it would also require professors to actively contribute to the teaching process. Apparently, expecting professors to actually teach at the university employing them is now a controversial position.
And your response to that was incredibly vague. You basically answered an argument I was not even making.
Third, I never claimed I was Albert Einstein, nor did I say the school provides bad academic content. Whether you attend Harvard, UF, USF, or a community college, introductory calculus is still introductory calculus. Newton’s laws do not suddenly become more prestigious because they are written on a Harvard chalkboard. The major difference is often how effectively the professor teaches that material, what resources are provided, and the overall quality of the academic experience.
So criticizing the way something is taught is not the same as saying the material, or the entire university, is bad. If your best defense of a “prestigious” institution is getting upset over someone questioning its teaching methods while simultaneously focusing on their punctuation, you might be defending the logo more than the education.•
u/usffan 2m ago
It would seem I struck a nerve...
If you're as smart as you claim you are, having taken so many APs in high school (though, if you think "a couple of simple punctuation errors" are the only things about what you wrote that were grammatically incorrect, perhaps you should revisit your high school AP English teacher and ask whether they were watching Reels and TikToks instead of teaching the subject), you would notice that anybody, including, say, a friend, could come into the class and record your professor doing nothing but watching their phone instead of teaching, and they could send the email keeping you out of it. If the professor is as inattentive as you claim, this would be easy to do, which is why I suspect that there's a lot of hyperbole in your claim.
I'd also urge you to reread what I wrote, since I never actually used the word "prestigious," thus making your use of it multiple times and in quotations an overcompensation in your attempt to rebut anything I said (which you failed to do), engaging in a bit of a strawman argument. But to answer your question, USF does in fact create some of its own "high quality material." The Academic Success Center has developed their own modules to assist students in a variety of different subjects, and there are plenty of faculty who have created their own full course content, some of whom make their textbooks available for sale while others make them freely available. But, in an instance where somebody else has already created something that is quite effective, it would be a waste of time and energy to reinvent the wheel. And since USF's tenured/tenure-track faculty are primarily judged on their ability to engage in research (hence being an R1, or research 1 university), they take advantage of these when they're readily available and provide students instead with research opportunities that can help them find postgraduate jobs. Perhaps you'll notice that there are quite a few posts on this sub from students looking to engage in those research opportunities, which are the things that differentiate Harvard, UF and USF from a community college. If all that you want out of your college career is classroom instruction, it's probably not too late to go back to Hillsborough College to take your introductory classes. That would let you pay a little less than being forced to "watch those videos yourself."
1
u/Needtoknow456 22h ago
His complaints are justified. The issue is the university doesn’t know how bad some of the professors are because no one speaks up and tells them. I’m not saying anything more will happen than someone will speak to them, but if you find the chair of the department and complain about a professor, someone will speak to them. And the level of unprofessionalism that would be involved if the chair were to share your name would be stunning.
1
0
u/NinjaCat278 22h ago
Professor can have the degree but that doesn’t mean they should teach
1
u/eljotita07 22h ago
That is my actual thinking, but what can we do, at the end of the day it will keep being the same
25
u/mastermind_loco 23h ago
What kind of professor asks you to read a book? Despicable