<p>Thanks Dave, didn’t know that. </p>
<p>This is a long thread so forgive me if these have been discussed already, but in my mind the two most unusual, unique (and for the right person, amazing) undergrad educations in the country are provided by Deep Springs (nothing comes close in terms of sheer idiosyncracy) and St. John’s College (great books program).</p>
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<p>Georgia Tech has one as well as a large water slide. I can’t think of anything that makes my uni unique, though I am extremely impressed at how well the greenspace obscures all but the midtown/downtown skyscrapers on West campus.</p>
<p>Duke has a lacrosse team with a bad reputation</p>
<p>Wow. Bob jones stops you from doing everything you want to do in college.</p>
<p>More about Illinois:</p>
<ul>
<li>Largest engineering library in the world (Grainger)</li>
<li>Illinois will be the home to supercomputer Blue Waters, 208 million dollars project</li>
<li>Largest library owned by a public university within USA</li>
<li>UIUC has the largest Greek system in the world</li>
<li>UIUC is the first institution in United States to give out a degree in architecture (Nathan C. Ricker)</li>
<li>22 alumni and faculty members are Nobel laureates, and 19 are Pulitzer Prize winners</li>
<li>HAL 9000 was born in Illinois :)</li>
</ul>
<p>Hi, my name is Becky and I am a student at Unity College in Maine. My college is very unique for many reasons. First, we are recognized as America’s Environmental College. All of our majors are focused on environmental studies dealing with conservation law enforcement, environmental sustainability, forestry, wildlife care and education, adventure education, etc… Our school faciliates learning through tactile, hands-on experiences in outdoor and real life environments. Most class time is spent outside, even when the temperatures drop to -20 in the winter months. All of our majors have a club that coordinates activities and events to assist in progressing the academic fundamentals from class. For example, my major is Wildlife Care and Education and the Wildlife Care and Education (WCE) club organizes events such as volunteering at a local bird rahabilitation center, Avian Haven. I have also had the oppurtunity to work with Maine Wildlife Biologists to work with black bears. Last february, we were able to observe how bears are tranquilized, tatooed, tagged and radio-collared. While observing, students like myself were given the responsibility of holding the bear cubs and keeping them warm while the wildlife biologists worked on the mothers. It was really cool and not many students are given that kind of hands-on experience. But here at Unity College, we are given these oppurtunities in our everyday curriculum.</p>
<p>Bennington!!</p>
<p>Where else can you look out at the end of the world??</p>
<p>Seriously–Field Work Term makes Bennington unique, as does the fact that the professors are all working professionals in their fields.</p>
<p>We are also about to get a lazy river, but I guess that is not so unique after all ;-)</p>
<p>Reed has the only nuclear reactor run by students.</p>
<p>Air Force Academy where you can learn to jump out of planes or fly them (and get credit for it).</p>
<p>“There has to be a university somewhere in Alaska that has its own runway and airport.”</p>
<p>No, but the University of Alaska Fairbanks owns something even cooler: a rocket launching facility. :)</p>
<p>[Poker</a> Flat Research Range](<a href=“http://www.pfrr.alaska.edu/]Poker”>http://www.pfrr.alaska.edu/) is located about 30 miles north of the campus, in the middle of nowhere even by Alaska standards. It’s the only university-owned and operated rocket range in the world. Professors and students from UAF and other universities use its five launching pads to place scientific payloads into the upper atmosphere and beyond, collecting data on space physics, the aurora borealis and geomagnetism.</p>
<p>UAF is also one of only a handful of “Land, Sea and Space Grant” universities, being the state’s primary research center for everything from agriculture to aeronomy, forestry to fisheries and seismology to structural engineering.</p>
<p>It’s also unique among American universities for something less-touted: regular weeks of 40-below temperatures in the wintertime that come with the added bonus of 18 to 20 hours of darkness.</p>
<p>We also have:</p>
<p>The largest library in the state (~1.75 million volumes).</p>
<p>The northernmost supercomputing center in North America.</p>
<p>An on-campus reindeer/muskox research farm.</p>
<p>A mediocre Division I hockey team (OK, not so unique.)</p>
<p>And, in the winter, engineering students design and build a ginormous arch made of ice, which stands in the quad until melt-off.</p>
<p>Carleton elected an imaginary person to student gov’t (not sure if that’s unique, but definitely unusual)</p>
<p>"Joe Fabeetz was a regular contributor to the sports and opinion pages of The Carletonian and the Carleton Daily beginning in February of 1977. He ran for CSA Senate during Spring Term 1977 and won in a landslide, receiving more votes than any other candidate in CSA history. His win was ruled invalid on the flimsy grounds that he did not, in fact, exist. "</p>
<p>That was just a few months before the previously mentioned Liter Bowl
The Liter Bowl was the first and only NCAA-approved football game ever conducted using meters instead of yards. Conceived by chemistry professor Jerry Mohrig, the game took place on September 17, 1977 between Carleton and St. Olaf on Laird Field. The field was marked in 10-meter segments and players’ measurements were given in centimeters and kilograms. The students in charge of rousing the crowd from the sideline were referred to as “Cheer Liters,” and the Knights were frequently called upon to “drop back ten meters and punt.” Sadly, the Knights took quite a beating, losing 43-0. George Dehne, then-director of College Relations, remarked that, “I suspect they [the NCAA] would rather not hear about this or any other metric game again.” </p>
<p>The game garnered Carleton a fair amount of publicity, with references appearing in (among others) Sports Illustrated, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the CBS Morning News. </p>
<p>The director of the United States Bureau of Standards attended the game and even threw the ceremonial first pass, which the Knights reciever dropped.</p>
<p>Bowdoin:
Bowdoin has the Coastal Studies Center on Orr’s Island (118 acres) and a biological research station on Kent Island (Canada, 200 acres, more than 140 papers published from this research station alone.)<br>
Bowdoin Orient is the oldest running college weekly newspaper.
Bowdoin Outing Club goes on excursions in the Maine wilderness.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written at Bowdoin.
Bowdoin has an Arctic Museum (Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum) and Art Museum on campus and an Arctic Studies Center. They also have a concentration program in Arctic Studies.
Design your own major program (I know a few other schools have this, though…)
One of the oldest colleges in the country (founded 1794)
“House System” like Harvard (Ok, it’s unique among LACs.)
SAT is optional =)
Coles Tower, a 16 story housing hall, was the tallest building in Maine for a while.</p>
<p>For Columbia, a network of tunnels underneath campus that may or may not be illegal to explore (people do anyway) is embarrassingly one of my biggest draws to the school.</p>
<p>Quite a few colleges have a 4-1-4 (Jan-term) schedule:
Samford, Austin College, Linfield College, Huntingdon College, ,St. Mary’s College of California, McDaniel College, St. Olaf, Oberlin, Cal State Stanislas, Berea, etc.</p>
<p>I can’t believe nobody already said this- University of Michigan has “hash bash” which is unique to Ann Arbor (as far as I know)</p>
<p>UCSD has a library that looks like a UFO and is named after Dr. Seuss.</p>
<p>The American University of Paris.</p>
<p>At the graduation senior last year, the speaker said that AUP is the only place where two Iraqi Swedes can meet one another, or something along those lines. It’s an incredibly international hodgepodge of a place.</p>
<p>whoops, meant to say…
“at the graduation SEMINAR last year, the speaker, a senior, said…”
Sorry! It’s been a long day!</p>
<p>Temple University:</p>
<p>-Largest computer lab on the East Coast
-Largest stock ticker in the U.S.</p>
<p>FSU: Highest Powered Magnet Facility</p>
<p>Humboldt State: only university in the United States with both a fully-equipped marine lab and a true oceanic research vessel (the 90-foot RV Coral Sea) dedicated solely to undergraduate research.
Students interested in the arts have access to large and well-equipped studio facilities including the largest metal-casting foundry on the west coast.
The only California state university to offer an undergraduate certificate in Museum and Gallery Practices.
HSUs Fickle Hill observatory is the only university observatory in California dedicated to undergraduate research.</p>
<p>MIT:</p>
<p>Its students somehow manage to find ways to do things like get fire trucks onto the Great Dome without campus security noticing.</p>