r/gwu

I need the textbook for sociology, he told us to get it in the campus store but it says “out of stock” do they usually go in stock once school starts?

I’m an incoming freshman planning to start next week and it just hit me… can I get to The Vern in 30 minutes?

I have a class in Elliott ending at 2pm then my next class at Ames Hall on The Vern starting at 2:30pm, will I be able to make it in time? The Vern course is, UW 1020 and I’ve heard depending on those professors they may be flexible… pls LMK!!

https://preview.redd.it/tmgo58leg1kh1.png?width=1334&format=png&auto=webp&s=d92f9e81a23c1b11d37e4a653fa493de8771374b

Tuition increases, job layoffs, VSTC closure... How y'all feeling?

The DrPH program has significant strengths, including accomplished and committed students, access to distinguished faculty and university leadership, an interdisciplinary orientation, and considerable potential to prepare the next generation of public health leaders. At the same time, feedback gathered through listening sessions, cohort discussions, informal conversations, and observations over the past several years highlights several recurring concerns that deserve attention.

Curriculum Relevance and Flexibility

The curriculum would benefit from greater flexibility, modernization, and clearer coherence across the program. Students currently have no meaningful opportunity to take electives, limiting their ability to tailor their doctoral education to their professional interests, career goals, or areas of scholarly inquiry. This is particularly limiting in a practice-oriented doctoral program serving experienced professionals with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise.

Students would also benefit from greater attention to contemporary public health leadership topics, including health equity, strategic communications, systems change, implementation, emerging technologies, and other issues shaping current public health practice.

Artificial Intelligence

There is currently no dedicated course or clear program-level curricular approach to artificial intelligence, despite its rapidly expanding role in public health research, practice, communications, policy, leadership, and health systems. Expectations regarding AI use can also vary among faculty, leaving students uncertain about what constitutes appropriate and responsible use.

The program has an opportunity to move beyond viewing AI primarily through an academic-integrity lens and prepare doctoral students to understand its capabilities, limitations, ethical implications, biases, and responsible application. AI literacy is increasingly becoming an important competency for public health leaders.

Consistency Across Course Sections

There is significant concern about inconsistency across sections of the same course. Students can have materially different experiences depending on the instructor or section, including differences in assignments, workload, grading practices, expectations, interpretation of requirements, and instructional approach.

Faculty should retain appropriate academic autonomy, but students taking the same required course should receive a reasonably consistent educational experience. Greater alignment around learning objectives, core assignments, grading standards, rubrics, and workload would improve fairness and confidence in the program.

Course Administration and Expectations

Students should be able to rely on published syllabi, assignment instructions, rubrics, grading criteria, and course requirements. These expectations should be established clearly and early, applied consistently, and changed only when necessary and with transparent communication.

When expectations are unclear, conflicting, introduced late, or applied differently from how they are described in the course materials, students spend unnecessary time trying to determine what is expected rather than focusing on learning. Greater consistency in course administration would strengthen both academic rigor and student trust.

Class Size and Educational Quality

Class size has become an increasing concern, with some sections enrolling as many as 22 students. In a synchronous, practice-oriented doctoral program, larger class sizes can significantly reduce opportunities for substantive discussion, individualized faculty engagement, relationship-building, and meaningful participation.

This issue is particularly important in an online program because synchronous courses are among the primary opportunities for students to interact directly with faculty and peers. Class-size decisions should therefore be driven not only by enrollment and financial considerations but also by pedagogy and the educational experience the program intends to provide.

The program should consider establishing class-size parameters appropriate for discussion-, leadership-, and practice-intensive doctoral courses.

Connection and Belonging

Connection and belonging remain significant challenges for many students in the online program. Students can struggle to develop meaningful relationships with peers, faculty, program leadership, and the broader university community. This concern has surfaced repeatedly in student conversations and listening sessions.

Connection should not depend primarily on individual students or cohorts creating it themselves. The program should intentionally build community through cross-cohort engagement, mentoring, greater faculty interaction, small-group experiences, structured opportunities for relationship-building, and recurring in-person experiences.

The inaugural Winter Symposium demonstrated the value of bringing students across cohorts together and providing greater access to faculty, program leadership, and university resources. Opportunities like this are especially important in an online doctoral program and should become a sustained part of the student experience.

Communication and Transparency

Communication and transparency remain recurring concerns. Students sometimes experience uncertainty regarding program expectations, decisions, changes, timelines, and the rationale behind important decisions.

When clear information is unavailable, informal communication inevitably fills the gap, creating confusion and eroding trust. Program leadership should communicate significant decisions early, explain the reasoning behind them when possible, and provide consistent information across cohorts.

Students do not necessarily expect every decision to reflect their preferences. They do reasonably expect to understand what is happening, why decisions are being made, and how those decisions may affect their doctoral experience.

Student Voice and Listening

One of the cohorts recently conducted listening sessions with DrPH program leadership and demonstrated the importance of creating structured opportunities for students to provide candid feedback. These opportunities should continue and become part of an ongoing approach to program improvement.

Effective listening requires more than collecting feedback. Students should have opportunities to speak openly, quieter voices should be intentionally included, and leadership should close the feedback loop by communicating what was heard, what actions will be taken, what cannot be changed, and why.

Students should also have meaningful representation in discussions about curriculum, AI, student experience, and other decisions that directly affect their education.

Learning Climate

The program should continue strengthening a culture in which students can ask difficult questions, disagree respectfully, raise concerns, and challenge ideas without worrying that doing so will negatively affect their relationships or academic experience.

A doctoral program should model the leadership practices it seeks to develop in its students, including openness to feedback, transparency, respectful disagreement, fairness, accountability, curiosity, and continuous learning.

Program Coherence and the Student Experience

Taken together, these concerns point to a broader issue: the DrPH student experience needs greater intentionality, consistency, and coherence.

Students should not have substantially different doctoral experiences because of the section in which they enroll, the instructor they happen to receive, whether they independently find ways to build community, or whether they know whom to ask when information is unclear.

Greater curricular flexibility, meaningful elective opportunities, contemporary preparation around AI, consistency across sections, appropriate class sizes, stronger communication, intentional community-building, and meaningful student partnership would significantly strengthen the program.

The DrPH program has substantial strengths and enormous potential. Addressing these issues would help ensure that its structure and student experience fully reflect the rigor, leadership orientation, innovation, and sense of community expected of a leading practice-oriented doctoral program in public health.

Helloooo,

I’m a rising senior who wants to major in public health at gwu and I want to double major in neuroscience! How is the neuroscience program at GWU? I haven’t heard much on it? If it isn’t great I would appreciate if you guys could recommend me a similar major :)

Thank you for reading

I don’t know what they could do that it would last that long. first year orientation is different than transfer so I can’t really compare

hello! i’m a transfer student so i move in tmrw. however, i can’t find any information on what time my move in is. however, i did get an email of a paper i need to display on my car dashboard for my move in. it says 10:30 am on the paper, so should i assume my move in time is 10:30?

The title sort of explains it itself. I've had some trouble recently ordering Amazon Pharmacy packages for some important prescription medications and having them delivered to the GWU mail-room (they deliver them outside of operating hours because apparently Amazon Pharmacy doesn't take delivery instructions seriously at all).

So, I was wondering if there's a method that people have for getting their prescriptions delivered to them (such as if they live out of the state and need to transfer over medications from their prescribers in other states). Or is there another method that isn't Amazon Pharmacy?

as an aspiriing first year at gwu, im interested in knowing how much i could pay. the net price calc, from what ive heard, isnt accurate and doesnt include the new revolutionary promise.

i live in a family of four with one working parent who is 58, and our AGI is 84k with an annual income of 94k with minimal assets and a pre college aged sibling. i live in a low income, rural area and go to a very underresourced high school.

if anyone is in a similar financial situation as me, how much do you pay a year for gwu? ill put my stats below for merit purposes.                                                                                            

• GPA 4.5 Weighted, 4.0 Unweighted
• 1320 SAT, 680 RW, 640 M
• Class Rank: 2/125
• Relevant Coursework: AP US Government and Politics (AP SCORE: 4), AP Spanish, AP Language and Composition (AP SCORE: 4), AP World History (AP SCORE: 4), AP Environmental Science (AP SCORE: 4), AP Probability and Statistics, Honors Journalism 1 + 2, AP Psychology (AP SCORE: 4)

 Awards, Honors, Extracurriculars

• 2026-2027 Student Member of the Board of Education for County
• 2025 HOBY Ambassador
• Annual Golf Tournament Graphic Designer- create all tee signs, welcome banners, and fliers. The tournament raised $11,000 this past year.
• Carson Scholar
• HSDA Member + Summit Attendee
• AP Scholar with Distinction
• School wide AP Psychology Award + Honors English Award
• Student Ambassador for the Business Roundtable  
• Selected Participant in the Leadership Program through the County Chamber of Commerce
• College Board National Recognition Awardee: School Recognition Award, First-Generation Recognition Award
• Rho Kappa Honor Society President
• Spanish National Honor Society President
• National Honor Society
• Science National Honor Society
• Member of the First-gen scholars program
• Public Relations Officer of the Support club (Highschool’s support club for students in need)
• Editor, School Yearbook 
• Elected Student Council Secretary
• 300 Volunteer/service learning hours

Has anyone done therapy at the center clinic that’s located on campus (not CAPS)? If so, can you share your experience?

Im very picky when it comes to therapists and I’m looking for low cost options for therapy but don’t want the short term therapy offered at CAPS.

I have the “New Graduate Student Welcome Reception and Student Services Fair” tomorrow, and I’m wondering what the dress code is if any? Business casual or will it be relaxed?

Hey guys!

I’m a first-year student attending the fall orientation because I wasn’t able to attend one of the summer sessions. My parents will be staying at a nearby hotel for a few days after move-in, and I was wondering if I’d be allowed to stay with them at the hotel overnight rather than sleeping in my dorm.

Is there any kind of overnight headcount or attendance requirement during the first few days after move-in, or am I free to stay off campus overnight as long as I attend any required orientation events?

Thanks!!

From updated virtual tour

https://preview.redd.it/h1oboitmufjh1.png?width=2110&format=png&auto=webp&s=756c8325da79f85dfcabea797eaac51d0207b7de

https://preview.redd.it/7jlq7tioufjh1.png?width=2124&format=png&auto=webp&s=627211ab94f93f2e2e2a551efbb3140ff93e4cd5

https://preview.redd.it/cl6qsi2qufjh1.png?width=976&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6d3d605c03c02a9b6a43c3d0d229b8f98611252

Hello, i’m moving in as a transfer sophomore, let me know if anyone here is moving in and would like to connect i’d like to make some friends :D

And to anyone who has lived at west hall what’s it like and how big are the rooms because i can’t find the measurements

Are shower curtain required for Potomac housing or are they provided? The water bottle fill up does it have option for hot water ? Also has anyone used expand a bed ?

Hi!! I’m a first year student. Unfortunately, due to conflicting courses with the program that I’m in, I wasn’t able to register for Econ 1001 for the fall semester. I believe that means that I can’t do Econ 1011 in spring. My local community college offers Principles of Microecon in a compressed 2 week course program from late December to mid January. If I do this during my winter break, will I be able to transfer the credits to make up for Econ 1011? I plan to do a similar course program for Macroeconomics in the summer to make up for Econ 1012, if applicable. I want to avoid having to make up both Econ 1011 and 1012 in the summer, as it may interfere with my participation in internships!! Esp since im a finance major.. would be cool to snag a summer internship! Any advice or tips is welcome

Hello everyone, I was wondering if there’s any transfers in the fall thats in the school of business? And if so, does anyone wanting to chat before orientation?

Thanks.

Hey all!! So i’m an incoming masters student and was wondering if there are any other grad students lurking around here. I don’t really know anyone in DC so I was hoping to meet some people who are in the same boat as me, bonus points if you’re in the MPP program!

i’ve recently found out that i might actually be able to live on campus (otherwise i’m a commuter) but the only housing left is housing for 3rd-5th years.

i emailed housing and they said that i could apply for that housing even though i’m transferring in as a first/second year (it’s complicated)

is it worth it to live in 3rd-5th year housing or should i just stay a commuter this year?

or is it possible if i found someone with an open spot in their room to live with them if they’ll have me? (that being said, if so, is anyone looking for a roommate?)