University of Haifa reviews

I had a very sweet time in Haifa! I made lasting friendships with persons that I am still in contact with today :)  My professors were very interested in my personal development. We went on field trips, I was an extra in a movie, the food was great and Jerusalem Rocks!

1) The dorms and school are not accessible for people with limited mobility and use a wheel chair. If you require a wheel chair, try a different school because one has to climb a lot of stairs to get from the dorm section of campus to the classroom section and one can’t access any dorms if they are in a wheel chair because there are stairs everywhere in the dorm section.

2) There is no written language support specialist on staff for people with a written language deficit. I had to spend 800 ILS a month on private tutors when I got the same thing for free at my American institutes I went to for my undergraduate and master’s.

3) If you, due to a disability, need extra time to get a degree that involves writing, try a different country. Israel allows a maximum of three years to do a PhD which often takes at least four in pretty much any other country in the world. 

4) Don’t do the Ulpan Etzion associated with University of Haifa. They don’t allow disabled people to take tests via alternate means if the test taker is unable to write which basically means that you can only do the first level

5) The quality of a PhD education in Israel when it comes to the classes is a joke. In my MA classes in the states, I read a book per class. At the PhD programs at University of Haifa, I only read three to four 30 or so page articles per class and I only had to take four classes for the entire degree.

6) On the bright side, the stipends for PhD students are insanely generous (in part because they were tax free). As someone with no dependents, I never worried about money even with me paying a thousand shekels a month for medical bills. I also got travel funding which I used to do research in Europe and that trip is probably the best times I had in my life. Also, if I didn’t have such a rotten experience at University of Haifa (I got kicked out due to disabilities two different times almost exactly a year apart), I would have wanted to never live anywhere other than Haifa for my entire life.