What is College life like?

November 5, 2009 7:46 PM

If you could go to college anywhere (in the US) where would you go?

I am not looking for a college to go to, but I am really interested in colleges as far as the atmosphere, area, everything really. I am interested in hearing about the "surrounding aspects" of different colleges and the lifestyle students experience at them. A city University vs. rural school? Private vs. Public University experiences, small town vs bigger town etc.

posted by boatsforshoes to Education (18 answers total)

I'd like to go to a school that's nearby a city, but that also has a sort of "campus" feel, ie not NYU.

I'm going to apply to schools next year, and right now I'm thinking:

University of Pennsylvania
Northwestern University
University of Chicago
Carnegie Mellon
Washington at St. Louis
posted by kylej at 7:59 PM on November 5, 2009

Sorry, I guess that wasn't very descriptive. I went to a liberal arts college and it was an incredible experience. I'm at an Ivy now, and it makes me so glad I went where I did for undergrad. The academic experience is very different - so much face time with professors rather than TAs, small classes, lots more experience writing and speaking, and the requirement that you expand your interests beyond your major. Downsides are that you're not surrounded by the kind of expansive, cutting-edge research you see at big research universities, and there's no real engagement with cultural life beyond the campus. The "surrounding aspects" you're talking about were much more insular than a large school, and a lot of people lived on campus and ate in the dining halls for all four years. We bonded with the people we worked with. By senior year, you'd either know or recognize most of the people on campus.
posted by you're a kitty! at 8:00 PM on November 5, 2009

Unfortunately this is a very personal decision that internet strangers can't really help with.
posted by k8t at 8:01 PM on November 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

uc santa cruz.
posted by apostrophe at 8:08 PM on November 5, 2009

It might help to narrow your question a bit. What are you thinking? Have you ruled anything out? Why?

That said, I've known some folks that really disliked being in middle-of-nowhere huge universities. Sure, there's plenty of student-age things to do (frat parties, football games, student film showings, study groups, etc.) but wider cultural activities tend to suffer. But lots of kids go for that sort of thing.

Most schools are good about connecting interested students with recent grads to get some (sometimes biased) inside information about the intangibles of the school's culture.
posted by GPF at 8:09 PM on November 5, 2009

Public school in a small town, a university town so to speak. I attended and graduated from the University of Virginia and I would do it all over again. And again. And again. The combination of academics, social life, weather and affordability was for me perfect. I liked the fact it was a medium sized school with enough social diversity to satisfy most anyone while at the same time being small enough not to easily get lost. The town of Charlottesville is amazing in terms of livability and is focused on the University for the most part. I was able to walk to everything I wanted to do when I lived in town and when I lived out of town on 250 West was able to easily drive or get a ride. There is a great hospital there, great athletic facilities and numerous student oriented bars and restaurants (White Spot!!!!) on the corner. My liberal arts education has served me well. I found that my professors were willing to engage as much as I was willing to myself. I also loved the traditions, some dating back to the University's inception ion 1819. I also really appreciated the benefits of a single sanction (expulsion) honor system. The weather was warm for most of the year (hot and humid in the summer) and you could engage in outdoor pursuits year round. You are close enough to DC that a road trip to see friends, meet girls or see a band is easily accomplished. There is a robust greek system and ample non-greek opportunities too. The music scene was and is still a big part of the town. See Dave Matthews as an example. U2 just played Scott Stadium. I loved seeing Skip Castro, Johnny Sportcoat and the Casuals and the other local bar and fraternity bands. Of course I would be remiss if I did not mention the trips down the road to the local all girls schools such as Sweetbriar, Mary Baldwin and Mary Washington.

Other colleges I would consider if I was going today would be UT Austin, UNC, Indiana and UC Berkely.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:13 PM on November 5, 2009

I would go to Brown or RISD, because of Providence. It's my template for a great city to live and work in. Beautiful houses, first rate architecture, walkable city, thriving arts, great restaurants, great campus, cheap beer, cheap eats, live music, lots of sports, airport and train links.

Those items made up a lot of the list 15 years after college when we were choosing where to live as adults. Were we in the US, we would have had the mother of all battles with Providence on one side and Chicago on the other, but as it is we chose Cork - the Providence of Ireland. Architecturally, it isn't Providence, but it ticks all the other boxes.

Critically, in both, you go to school and live in the city. I started out in a really rural university that was also dominated by the Greek system for its social life, and it was isolated, unpleasant and unconnected to the world in which it lived in any substantive way.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:17 PM on November 5, 2009

University of Washington

You don't get many huge schools right in the middle of big, progressive cities, and when you do, there's often lots of ancillary baggage, such as high costs, bad neighborhoods, etc. For example, USC and UCLA are both in the middle of Los Angeles, but the housing costs around UCLA are silly, and expensive USC is ironically in the very worst part of the city, crime-wise. Washington sits in a great sweet spot between cost, city life and social opportunity.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:35 PM on November 5, 2009

Oh, and then there's the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Someone mentioned Santa Cruz, above, which is great, but UCSB is damn fine, too.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:37 PM on November 5, 2009

I am about to graduate from a private school (hooray for being a super senior!) and I've observed a few things that make me think I would go to a state school if I could do it over again.

First is that the education you get in most undergraduate majors doesn't significantly benefit from the nominal perks of private school, because whether you have a TA or a professor teaching the class, they're still just teaching to one or more texts. The few really interestingly crafted classes I took in college were graduate seminars. If you're not getting a free or mostly-free ride and especially if you're thinking of pursuing a science degree, beware*. In my experience, the name recognition thing is not nearly as important as people make it out to be, especially if your academic plans involve graduate school.

Second is that private schools that are aggressively pursuing a certain image (for example, being a cutting-edge research school and pre-med factory) have little hesitation in underfunding other programs to an embarrassing degree. I went from a computer science major to a music major, only to find that the music department is utterly barren in terms of resources. They've hired some academic heavy-hitters so that they look good, which is a bit of a consolation, but all of my teachers have been just as frustrated as the students with the department's situation.

* The exception being if the school you're looking at has a unique and renowned program in the field you're interested in. This is more likely with fields that benefit, even in their undergraduate forms, from having sophisticated technology to experiment with.

Also, on preview, The World Famous mentions college towns, which can be a great thing for some people. If you suspect that you'll ever want a break from being around people very much like yourself (because, let's face it, as diverse as a college campus might be, most of its members are bound to base a large part of their identities on being students, as is to be expected when being a student takes up so much of your time and thought), a college town might not be the place for you. If it's not a city, there just won't be too many other thriving social scenes that you can escape to.
posted by invitapriore at 9:09 PM on November 5, 2009

Personally, I knew I didn't want to leave NYC, so every school I applied to was here. I visited each school and made my final decision on a number of factors, including the overall vibe I got from the place. I could've gone for a completely different experience somewhere far from home, but I love my hometown, and to me, there's nowhere better.
posted by cmgonzalez at 9:15 PM on November 5, 2009

Go to your public library and look for the college guide section. There are a bunch of these which are like huge phonebooks that list the top 50-300 undergraduate schools in the US (and often Canada too). You probably should use one that is comprehensive and all about stats and tables and charts, and one that gives a little narrative story about each school ("what's it like at Williams?") which they construct out of interviews with current students. Seriously, go, browse, spend a few hours with those books. Make a list of places you're thinking about, and you can narrow down from there.

Your decision will depend on a lot of factors -
1. small vs large school (to overgeneralize: large will usually have more expensive scientific equipment and specialized things like campus radio stations, but it may be harder to access these things since you're competing with more people; more of your courses will be taught by less-experienced teachers, though you'll be able to take graduate courses if you end up really excelling in a subject; you will have to "steer your own ship" because your profs won't know you well enough to help; easier to be anonymous; easier to fall through the cracks if you need extra help for any reason; more courses will be lectures rather than discussion-based)

2. liberal arts focus (more likely to have English, history, philosophy majors; also has sciences; usually few explicitly pre-professional courses), vs. major university (will have everything, but classes are big) vs pre-professional focus (lots of business, education, etc majors)

3. geography (near or far from family? big city or small town? cold weather?)

4. can you get better financial aid/tuition rate at one place vs another?

5. if you already know what subject you want to major in, you can see which schools have good programs in that subject. (the books will tell you this)

6. what do you want your fellow students to be like? Academically interested or mainly focused on having fun and getting done? At a large school you'll find all types, but at a small school you may be likely to find the culture is more uniform - so be sure to visit and see if you like the vibe of the other students.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:16 PM on November 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

You really, really need to visit. Ideally during the school year, and for at least an overnight per school. I go to a small liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts. I knew I wanted a liberal arts college pretty much right off the bat junior year of high school. I used the US News lists to focus my search, and now I'm at the number one school on the liberal arts college list. Yay, right?

Except I didn't visit. I visited a few schools but not this one, and hey, I was busy senior year, these schools are far away from home, all these schools are alike, right? And so I showed up here for orientation having never set foot on campus. Eventually, I realized that while the academics here are great, the professors are approachable and enthusiastic and awesome, I'm surrounded by ridiculously smart, driven people and I'm in a campus environment that is very supportive and nurturing, I'm not... quite... happy. I struggle with the urge to leave on a regular basis. There's so, so much more to a school than what you can get from those lists, or from a viewbook. Had I visited, I might still have come here because it has a lot going for it. I haven't given in to those urges to leave because of those reasons. And I'm working on being happy- a lot of the problems I've had are driven by my personality and by the general stress of leaving home and going off to school. My friends at UT Austin have had similar problems. But. If I could go back and advise my 17 year old self, I would have told her to visit, visit, and visit again, and not be so impressed by rankings and viewbook advertising. For me, at least, this was the first time I had almost total control over what course my life would take, and I'm not sure I made the most of that opportunity.
posted by MadamM at 9:24 PM on November 5, 2009

Do not go to a California public university. They are totally screwed right now.

I'd suggest thinking about both big public schools and small liberal arts colleges. Visit the 2 extremes and decide what kind of vibe you get. But even within those categories there is a lot of variance.

I was dead set on a small liberal arts college but then switch to a large public school at the last minute. (As I recall my boyfriend had a lot to do with that decision. He was going to go to community college in the large public school city. We broke up my first year though.)

Now I look back and I feel like I got the best of both worlds. My big public school (University of Michigan) felt like a liberal arts college because I was in small specialized majors. I RARELY had a TA/grad student teaching me because I sought out smaller classes with professors. I felt like I bumped into the same people all the time on campus. I knew a lot of people. I LOVED the college town atmosphere of Ann Arbor (I grew up outside of a college town and East Lansing was no Ann Arbor, but still pretty fun.) The long term effect of big school? People always recognize the name. If I had gone to small midwestern liberal arts college, NO ONE would have known that name when I applied for jobs and grad school.

Now I am at a big public school in California. Granted, I'm a grad student, but it doesn't have the vibe that Ann Arbor did. The classes are HUGE. Even upper level classes have over a 100 students. I would not want to be an undergrad here.
posted by k8t at 9:32 PM on November 5, 2009

I went to undergrad at a small state school in Colorado (and one semester at a small state school in Alaska). I wouldn't change my experience for the world. I was a rather nontraditional student though and went full time, then part time, then full time again to finish. Living in the West is important to me because of the access to mountains, deserts, etc. It might not have been the best choice career wise but life wise I'm much happier with this balance and found academics with trips into the woods to work well for me. As others remarked above, it is all about what you are into -- or, what you might get into if you have the opportunity.
posted by fieldtrip at 9:34 PM on November 5, 2009

I did my undergrad at UCSD and still work there. It is a weird school in terms of where it is situated and its relationship to La Jolla, and what that does to student life.

The university owns some of the most expensive coastal property in California, but that land is not really part of campus, unless you count the Scripps institute of oceanography. Campus continues to expand east, and to a lesser extent, north.

The city of La Jolla could care less about UCSD, and often actively opposes things that would benefit the student population because they're not befitting a place with such high property values. For example, we have very little off-campus, university-owned housing, and it's for graduate students. La Jolla opposed a Hillel right off campus for the Jewish student community because it would cause "increased traffic and parking problems." Many undergrads get kicked 5+ miles from campus by the cost of apartments. I have never seen a first-class university with a surrounding neighborhood less walkable than ours.

This has a predictably negative effect on student life. Students living off campus lose their connections because of the commutes they have to deal with (even though UCSD has greatly improved bus options into campus). Not many students spend their time surfing and drinking like you might think; there's not much to do after you get bored of the ocean, so you might as well study. You need to drive 15 minutes if you want any kind of party or bar scene.

On the upside, we're rolling in grant money and good science researchers.
posted by slow graffiti at 9:47 PM on November 5, 2009

I grew up just outside Charlottesville (a big state University in a small city), went to college in western Massachusetts where there were 4 colleges and a big statue U in close proximity, and then to grad school in the Triangle in NC where there were 4 universities (1 private) in a close proximity. Having more than one college/university in the area is awesome because you not only get 2, 3, 4 or more times the cultural opportunities but there are more creative and academic people coming into contact with one another.

In each of those places, there was more to the location than just the Universities - there was local history and culture, business and events not tied to a university, quick access to both nature and decent ethnic food. Colleges develop their own distinct feels, and with many you walk on campus and just know "This is for me" or "This isn't for me." I strongly agree that you should go visit the campuses and surrounding areas you are interested in if at all possible.
posted by julen at 9:56 PM on November 5, 2009

Unfortunately this is a very personal decision that internet strangers can't really help with.

There is some truth to this, but it is still poor advice. It also isn't even the sort of advice the what the OP was asking for. The OP didn't ask where they should go, they asked where we would go, which is actually a pretty good question to ask in trying to choose a where to go to college since it will expose a variety of perspectives on what criteria are worth considering when choosing a school, and how different schools meet those criteria, but it's not even clear that that is what is motivating the question.

If I were again choosing a school, only knowing what I know now, I'd probably make the same decision. I went to a small liberal arts college in Portland, Or. I chose the school sight-unseen because it seemed intellectually "hardcore," with a good sense of fun. I'd also really liked Portland on a visit to the Northwest a few years earlier, and while much of my existence was focused on campus, I tried to go downtown most weekends to take advantage of the shops, restaurants, bookstores, parks, people watching, etc.

I actually did my Freshman year in the dorms of the public research university in my home city. I wouldn't do that again, but I didn't really want to do it at the time, but my HS grades weren't very good. Faculty weren't very accessible, classes were large and there was rarely time to connect with classmates because we were all scurrying off to classes on opposite ends of campus, half the people in my dorm seem to have chosen the school because it was close to good skying, few people were very studious. There wasn't much of a student-oriented off-campus business district, probably because it was largely a commuter campus.

The other alternative that appealed to me was to go to an urban research university with a strong influence on the surrounding neighborhood in a large city. The University of Washington isn't a bad example of that, though I imagine a larger city, with the university in a denser area.

If you are, indeed, looking for a place to go to school, then I'd encourage you to narrow down your choices and then visit your top choice or two. Sit in on classes, do an overnight visit and stay in the dorms. Talk to students, check out the neighborhood and the town. It will help you knock out any glaring incompatibilities, but really, you still won't really know until you go and start digging in and embracing the whole experience. There are things that you just can't know about yourself, college in general or one given school in particular until you actually start doing it. And really, that's kind of the point of getting an education, and, well, living.

Other random advice: 1) Don't get "sticker shock" when looking at small private liberal arts colleges. A lot of people pay "list price," but a lot don't. At my alma matter, roughly half the students get financial aid grants, and the average grant package covers about half the annual cost.

Environment is definitely worth considering, but if the academics and intellectual life of the place aren't your primary criteria, I'd suggest questioning whether it is really that important that you go to school right now. It is expensive in terms of both tuition and time-spent, and if there is something you'd rather be doing, it may be worth focusing on that. Even if you know that you'll never make a living at what you'd rather be doing, there may be better ways to get the experience you'll need to make a living than going to a 4 year college or university.
posted by Good Brain at 10:35 PM on November 5, 2009