City Colleges of Chicago-Harold Washington College Reviews

"The things I found unpleasant about Harold Washington was around their bureaucracy, which in higher education is almost to be expected. A warning for any transgender students who have had to make any document changes, for some reason the registrar will treat you as if no one in the history of the world has ever had a name change in their life. Given that transcripts don't need to verify things like a gender marker change this should be something they understand as many people have had their last names changed after marriage, however that is not how I was treated. Now to the stellar part. The instructors are truly some of the best teachers I've ever had. For the longest time I believed I was not good at mathematics. And compared to those who have a true aptitude for it I don't. However, the instructors at Harold Washington really proved to me that by trying different forms of explanations and plenty of open office hours I did not have the struggle my way through higher level math just holding my head above water. I had averaged C's in mathematics in high school to receive A's in college, and feeling more confident than I ever had. It's not just the math department. Most of the instructors at the school seemed to deeply care about the students, their ambitions, and even our emotional/personal well being. I was sometimes surprised by how much an instructor would bring up the counseling facilities or other resources at the school if I brought up something like, at the time a roommate who turned out to be an alcoholic, to help manage school/life issues. Speaking of, the school has many excellent non-academic resources as well. Though I can't say anything about their financial aide as I was never qualified for any. This I cannot say was as true for the online classes, and the care the instructors had in those classes seemed to be split somewhat down the middle. I had instructors snap at me for asking clarifying questions about the syllabus, or asking to make an appointment to see them outside of their office hours (some online instructors do not have office hours at the school you are attending making it very difficult to ever talk to them). I dropped those classes very quickly as I didn't want to deal with that kind of attitude for a semester, but that meant having to scramble to fill up those credit hours."