Overview
College guides written by students for students.
Your ultimate source for honest, unbiased information, College Prowler delivers an inside look at the top colleges and universities in the United States. While writing our series of college guides, we felt it was critical that our content was unbiased and unaffiliated with any college or university.
We think it’s important that our readers get honest information and a realistic impression of the student opinions on any college campus—that’s why we intend to publish information about all aspects of a particular college, even the terrible parts you wouldn’t find in a campus brochure. While we do keep an eye out for the occasional extremist—the cheerleader or the cynic—we take pride in letting the college students tell it like it is. We strive to create a college guide that’s as representative as possible of each particular campus. Our guides cover both the good and the bad, and whether the survey responses point to recurring trends or a variation in opinion, these sentiments are directly and proportionally expressed through our guides.
College Prowler guides are in the hands of students throughout the entire process of their creation. Because you can’t make student-written guides without the students, we have students at each college campus who help write, randomly survey their peers, edit, and perform accuracy checks for every college guide that we publish. From the very beginning, student writers gather the most up-to-date stats, facts, and inside information on their colleges. They fill each section with student quotes and summarize the findings in editorial reviews. In addition, each college oruniversity receives a collection of letter grades (A through F) that reflect student opinion and help to represent contentment, prominence, or satisfaction in each of our 20 specific categories. Just as in grade school, the higher the mark the more content, more prominent, or more satisfied the students are with the particular category.
Once a college guide is written, additional college students serve as editors and check for accuracy even more extensively. Our bounce-back team—a group of randomly selected students who have no involvement with the project—are asked to read over the material in order to help ensure that the guide accurately expresses every aspect of the university and its students. This same process is applied to the nearly 300 colleges and universities College Prowler currently covers. Each guide is the result of endless student contributions, hundreds of pages of research and writing, and countless hours of hard work. All of this has led to the creation of a student information network that stretches across the nation to every college that we cover. It’s no easy accomplishment, but it’s the reason that our college guides are such a great resource.
When reading our guides and looking at our college rankings, keep in mind that every college is different and that the students who make up each college are not uniform—as a result, it is important to assess colleges on a case-by-case basis. Because it’s impossible to summarize an entire college with a single number or description, each guide provides a dialogue, not a decision, that’s made up of 20 different topics and hundreds of student quotes. In the end, we hope that this guide will serve as a valuable tool in your college selection process. Enjoy!
Synopsis
College guides written by students for students.
Penn State University Students
Tell It Like It Is
Aside from academics, PSU is also known for its social scene, especially in relation to sports and parties. Nittany Lion football-home of the 2006 Orange Bowl Champions-is a national draw and a point of pride for both the University and the town of State College. For anyone interested in playing or watching varsity sports, PSU is a top choice. Penn State has also been ranked highly by many polls and "party school" surveys as one of the top party schools in the nation. While it certainly isn't the wildest town, these rankings are definitely accurate.
Only the students can tell you how to balance PSU's social scene with academics...
Tips to Succeed at Penn State:
The fact that partying at PSU is ever-pervasive doesn't mean you have to always be involved in order to be cool. There's bound to be parties happening at least five nights a week. College will be your first chance to party every night without anyone to watch over you. Try to work out a schedule that allows you to party without burning yourself out. Early on, things seem really easy, but this will definitely change as time goes on.
Drink responsibly. It seems cliché, but when you spend enough time around people who don't, you start to realize just how important it is.
Read the Collegian to keep updated and involved with what's going on at school. Also, keep up with the Weekender (Fridays in the CDT) so you'll know what's going on in the area-though there isn't much of it, cool stuff does come around pretty frequently. Visit the Daily Jolt(http://psu.dailyjolt.com) for everything from national news, procrastination tools, club postings, candid professor quotes, and dinner menus.
The College Prowler guidebook to PSU will give you the inside scoop on everything from academics to the social scene to what the students think about the local atmosphere.
Find out if PSU truly has something for you, straight from the students' mouths.
Visiting campus isn't enough.
Read our Penn State guide and discover what it feels like to be on campus for 4 years.
Discover if Penn State University is Right For You.
The Boston Globe
The prospective college student's antidote to the Princeton Review doldrums.