Bowling Green State University-Firelands Top Questions

What is your overall opinion of this school?

Daniel

BGSU is an awesome school. I didn't think so at first when I went here, but the faculty, students, and programs have shown me different. The university is one of the only universities with a strictly male-oriented development group, Vanguard. Vanguard helps young men discover and cement their identity, deal with issues in college like time management and, in a recent meeting, helped them overcome masks they were wearing throughout life. If there was one thing I'd change however, it would be General Studies Writing. GSW is a required English class on campus, and is hated by nearly all of the students here. I would make the class much more interesting, rather than writing essays and sitting at computers all day. However, even my experience in that class is dwarfed by my excellent experience in other classes. Instead of focusing on memorization as most high schools do, teachers here help you understand the concepts behind what you are learning. For example test questions in my American Government exam consist of "What was Plessy vs. Ferguson about?" not "What year was the case Plessy vs. Ferguson brought to court?" I spend most of my time in the residence halls, which are not dorms (coming from the french word dormiere, or "to sleep") but places to live, have fun, and build community (I sound like an advertisement now, I swear). There is tons of school pride here, as you can tell by the amount of orange and brown you will see all over campus. My big complaint with this school is the colors. Orange and brown, really? BGSU is the only campus where you can wear shoot-me orange and still blend in. The last thing you should know is that Wi-Fi and A/C, both considered essential in our modern age, are not in most of the freshman residence halls.

Paul

To start off, if you’re looking at the size of our school, we like to say BGSU is “a large university with a small town feel”. While that sounds really corny, it’s also really accurate. During the school year, Bowling Green has about 30,000 people in the town. Once school is over and the students leave, about 12,000 remain. As you can see, not a lot of people live in Bowling Green. Our campus is big enough where you don’t know everyone but small enough where you can see people you know. Our campus doesn’t have the prettiest buildings, but that doesn’t seem to matter to students too much. We are currently constructing two new buildings on campus, though. One is for athletics (The Stroh Center) and one is for the arts (The Wolfe Center). The Union is the place to hang out before or after class. There are places to eat, the Bookstore, lounges to study, and a movie theater inside. Other than that, students go to the rec center or back to their residence halls. BGSU has a policy that students live on campus for their first two years. After those two years, most students move off campus because there are tons of houses and apartments off campus to live in. Living on campus is cool, but most students like the even greater freedom that off campus housing provides. One of the reasons I came here was because of the people. Everyone is normally super friendly. When you’re walking around, people tend to look at you, smile, and generally just acknowledge your presence in the world. The negative side about our students? It seems like EVERYONE smokes. While our Health Center says that’s not true, I might argue with them. You’re almost certain to get stuck walking behind someone who’s smoking. Either tons of people smoke on our campus, or they all just conveniently smoke near the doorways of every building. It’s not a huge problem, though, because it’s super windy here all the time, so the smoke just blows away.