St. Cloud State University — Attraction in St. Cloud

Recent graduate from SCSU here. The campus is nice. The admin and staffs are mostly amazing. Some buildings are old and outdated such as engineering building and education building. Comp Sci department is going downhill and nobody in the department cares. There’s a specific professor who can’t communicate with students and organize the materials on D2L (I’m sure the comp sci students reading this knows who I’m talking about). Seems like they put most of the money into hockey and centennial hall for business major students. Pharmacy doesn’t even exist anymore. They removed it and all the students now have to take a bus or find a ride to get their meds, but YAY all the money goes to athletes with their nice facilities 🥲

In my opinion, tuition is very decent for the price. For faculty, it depends what your major is. Business and nursing departments are nice. For computer science? Lol the chair of engineering doesn’t even reply to my email when me and the other student made a complain about some professor course qualities. But hey! He showed up on graduation to give us handshake! 😂😂😂

Shoutout to SCSU medical clinic - the staffs there are always welcoming and sweet to everyone. I honestly love medical clinic staffs here more than most of my professors I had.

Center for International Studies (CIS) is very resourceful. Not sure why nobody has complained yet (I assume there’s no CIS on Google maps to review), but every international student here (or at least 10+ that I know) agree with me that CIS staff (Kristy Nelson Ramos) is EXTREMELY RUDE. She treats international students like she hates working with them or they’re begging her for money. She doesn’t even make eye contact while talking to us. She tries to cut off the convo as short as she can in a rude way. The entire 4 years of experience here talking to her was horrible, but jokes on us - we have no choice since she’s the one who signs our paperwork. Hopefully it’s just that she has to deal with 1000+ students and it stresses her out way too much(?) Please for the love of god, her attitude here is very unacceptable and please make it more comfortable for international students to talk to you. I don’t think SCSU is a charity that we are begging her for help. She gets paid. We also pay our tuition.

HOWEVER, Jacob Mercer is absolutely AMAZING. He is calm, patient, and welcoming unlike Kristy. Sadly, he’s leaving his position based on SCSU email I got last night. Thanks so much Jacob for making CIS a better place all these years. Sooooo good luck to all of the international students who have no choice but to talk to Kristy to get your documents signed😬 I honestly risking my life posting review about her since I still have to talk to her (of course...

-Housing problems: The dormitories are very noisy and there is little to no enforcement of quiet hours resulting in parties heard regularly at 2am by noise echoing throughout the halls in each dorm. *These problems persist at full power even during finals week. I have seriously not found a quiet place to study on the entire campus in 2 years of attending. Even the library is fairly noisy at times.

-Cafeteria problems: They decided to decrease quality further from the previous year. There are often times where the only edible meals are the same burgers, pasta and pizza. The average quality of the food absolutely mimics high school quality.

-Overly political problems: the university is fighting so rigorously to erase its dysfunctional past that it seems to overvalue dvisersity and progressive elements. I am studying a STEM field so it seems strange to be required to take 9 credits of diversity when I came here to learn science and already value diversity (but this is just a personal issue)

-Activity upside: the gynmasium and workout places are crowded but useful allowing for lots of athletic activites. Many sports games to attend when in season

-Resource upside: this university is very big business. Therefore, there are lots of resources that are helpful and reliable (other than the CA's). Some examples are reslife and the...

Much of the SCSU campus is beautiful & worth a long walk or bike ride. Lovely historic old buildings & newer buildings show fascinating architecture. Plenty of gardens, benches & green space. Perfect for a decent environment on campus. Nice planning by SCSU leadership! Congrats!

Unfortunately.... the city of St Cloud didn't have the same insight & planning skills. Some of the surrounding college neighborhood buildings are owned by cheap, incompetent, opportunistic landlords. Many rental houses & apartments are Ugly eye sores....and this reflects poorly on SCSU!! WHY THE HELL did the city of St Cloud not have stronger building, housing rental codes & regulations? For many years the City Council & other city leadership groups failed SCSU. The nearby older historic homes (on lovely tree lined streets) were once very nice....yet were allowed to seriously deteriorate & become a drawback. This has hurt SCSU regarding new perspective students, home buyers, businesses & visitors. Shameful....for years there must have been Very poor, weak, inept leadership in the city of St Cloud!!!

I realize there have been some recent efforts to turn this neighborhood mess around. But the pitiful planning & damage was done over many decades....and the city is facing a very uphill battle. And sadly... SCSU has been left holding the...