Colorado State University

Location

Fort Collins, among Outside Magazine's 2013 Best Towns in America, provides a unique blend of big city advantages and small town friendliness. You'll find everything you want - several shopping centers, hundreds of restaurants, multiple movie complexes, a regional cultural center, natural areas, and miles of biking and hiking trails. Close to campus are world-famous Rocky Mountain National Park, the Poudre River, and Horsetooth Reservoir. These recreation areas, as well as many others close by, offer endless opportunities for outdoor activities - such as skiing, snowboarding, hiking, camping, white-water rafting, and boating. And the region's 300 days of sunshine a year enables you to take full advantage of the spectacular surroundings.

Campus

The weather is the biggest negative about this place. This is not the place to be if you like year-long warmth. People who have moved to Fort Collins complain that the weather here is harsh and controls your activities. You do not just go out and do things - you've got to plan ahead whether it's summer of winter. Winters are long and cold and summers are only for a month and a half. Dry air and winds are a nuisance.

Residing Options

13 residence halls with about 5000 living on campus. Food and dorms are considered to be average. Some dorm halls are fairly old, making it inconvenient with the A/Cs and showers malfunctioning. There are other buildings which are newer and savvy. For the range of Community Style to Suite-Style Halls, the cost of housing ranges from $875 to $1400 per month. Off-campus housing can be available within the range of $500-650 (State on Campus, The Grove, Ram's Village) to $865 (Ram's Village) depending on the facilities you need and the room sharing.

Faculty

Having 1540 faculty members, with the faculty to student ratio being 1:18, there is a little disappointment of huge class sizes at CSU. The university provides 72 majors, over 125 concentrations and over 80 minors. The pedagogy includes extremely qualified professors and most students seem to be happy with the faculty. There is a range of professors you'll find: old and strict vs young and flexible. Courses for which CSU is ranked high are Civil Engineering, Occupational Therapy, Environmental Engineering, Chemistry, Business, etc.
However, CSU classes are known as sweatshops for international students, especially for the students of Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry and Maths who can’t understand the intelligible and academic English. One needs to be really good at whatever field they are wanting to graduate into, especially Maths. Also, Colorado State is not that good in research as compared to the other higher educational institutions and so it may take longer to come up to speed, pass the qualifying exams and finally get one’s dissertation approved. There are a lot of projects given which may not be directly relevant.