Clarkson University Top Questions

Clarkson is a place where students have to work hard to get the full experience of being a student here. You can chose to be the student that studies all the time and locks himself in a dorm and have no social life but I would recommend you do that at a Community college instead and not waste your parent’s money. In order to succeed as a student you have to utilize the facilities, your peers, and faculty and put your name out there. There are a lot of opportunities here at Clarkson but they won’t just show up at your dorm room while you are playing videogames. While the classes aren’t extremely challenging students end up supper busy with their social and extra-curricular activities outside of the classroom. Clarkson students have the opportunity to utilize what they learn in the classroom by being involved in the student body government or by starting their own clubs and/or business. While it may be true that kids are a little obsessed with videogames we also have a good majority that know how to separate playing time with working time. As cheesy as it sounds we work hard and party hard as well. Once at Clarkson you will get used to liking Hockey whether you watched it before or not, at some point you will paint your face and go cheer for our D1 Hockey team. During the weekends you will find students that are busy with meetings, and students that party from morning till dawn. Greek life is somewhat prominent in our campus, but I would attribute that to our size (3500 undergrads) and to the lack of things to do during the weekends around the Potsdam community. Greeks don’t dominate the campus but you can’t help but notice that a good amount of the leadership positions on our Campus are held by Greeks. In all we are an evolving school with a somewhat diverse student body with a challenging academic life and extracurricular life.

The rigorous academics, as well as the small campus feel at Clarkson University is what originally attracted me to the school. From the minute I set foot on Clarkson's campus, as a high school senior, I knew that is where I would go in the fall. After taking a tour of the campus I knew that it perfectly matched my personality as well.

I believe Clarkson is perfect size, its not a huge university, if you want to go to a huge university then pick a different school, but also Clarkson isn't tiny. It feels just right, small enough to get to know your professors and other members of the faculty. It is nice to be remembered by name instead of by a number. Clarkson is in a nice rural location so we get plenty of fresh air up here. If you're interested into hiking and skiing on the weekends nature is not that far away.

The best thing about Clarkson would definitely have to be the people. Everyone from the upperclassmen to the professors are very friendly and genuinely want to help you. It is also very easy to make friends at the school with the comfortable atmosphere of the residence halls and the activities that Clarkson holds for freshman at the beginning of the fall semester. Clarkson is a good size school where you get to know a lot of people within your year, especially those that share the same major as you. The many clubs and organizations that Clarkson has is another opportunity for students to make friends with upperclassmen and learn about professors, classes, etc. that they will be dealing with in the future. The town in which Clarkson is located, Potsdam, NY, is a quaint little college town with coffee shops, a few nice restaurants and most recently a Super Wal-Mart. I sometimes find myself wishing that there was a nicer mall closer to Potsdam but most students typically do not have a problem with the types of restaurants and stores that Potsdam offers. A frequent complaint amongst students is the food, we can't use meals anywhere on campus past 8:30 pm, and can only use one meal at a time. So if we have 4 meals left over at the end of the meal cycle, instead of being able to buy the food we want and save it for later the meals are simply wasted.

Clarkson University is a small, private school located about 15 minutes from Canada. The work is hard, and the surrounding town is bogus. Social life isn't very impressive, unless you join Greek Life, in which case you'll never be at a loss for parties of extra currics. Its very cold here, so if your from the south, think twice. The work here is hard like I said, but the job placement rate out of here is something like 99{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c}. Every single one of my brothers that are graduating this year have gotten several job offers, and each of them has accepted one paying over 60k a year. Strait out of school. Pretty Sick. Hockey is really big at Clarkson. The students get real into it, and there's a bar right in the Arena, making games against Harvard and Yale interesting, as 1000+ students lose any trace of respect or decency, screaming " S-H-I-T, that spells IVY ! "

The best thing about Clarkson is probably the size. You WILL get to know at least a few of your professors pretty well, given that by second year classes have no more than 30-40 people in them on average. It is one of the largest reasons I came here, and the graduate program being so close is nice. If you ever want to get a chance to fool around with graduate equipment, most of the faculty are absessed with their work and more than willing to show it off. That aside, there are a few rumors I would like to bust. For one people say the library is awful, but all libraries today import and export books like no mans business, and the only thing this library is lacking is fiction. It is brimming with manuals and indexes, frankly the only thing anyone here is ever going to read anyway, if anyone decides they don't think the internet is good enough. Second, people say there is nothing to do. Clarksons party reputation aside, there are three colleges within a 10 minute range full of students also looking for things to do. If you can't find anything to do, your not leaving your room. On a third note, the career center is awful, and if the school brags about it do not listen, because anything you do on your own is 100X more valuable, and the career center will just throw you into a massive corporation like Lockheed Martin. The school actually has VERY good pride, and shows it by verbally abusing two or three other colleges when ever they get the chance.