Chicago and fit

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
41

<p>Chicagoboy, I'm hearing a warning sign after warning sign that you will not like this school, because I think what drew me and others to this school was the opportunity to be in a place where students liked being forced to do things. Corranged and I certainly have different approaches, but I think at the end of the day we're fundamentally similar: the book in front of us is important, amusing, and interesting to us, and we just have to find a place for it among all of the other siren songs of college life.</p>

<p>The campus will bore you after a week. The name-brandedness will begin to wear off. If that's all you think about when you think about college, you risk falling into the kind of trap that happens when you buy an iPod: it's extremely cool for about the first two hours that you own it, then it just integrates itself into your life as a gimmick that plays music and is a magnet for nicks and scratches. </p>

<p>I didn't consider MIT because I'm very much on the humanities end of things. I did, however, fall absolutely in love with their website, their admissions officers, and the whole MIT package. I found their humanities offerings limiting and the bent on math/science a little frustrating. I'm pretty strong at math/science, but I'd much rather talk about Jane Austen and John Ashbery than I would about wiring a breadboard, and I wanted to make sure I went to a school with a good helping of humanities kids, too.</p>

42

<p>"I just don't like being forced to read books and analyze them."
Then Chicago is not the college for you, because you WILL be forced to do just that and be harshly graded if you your effort is less than earnest!
"I think the reasons I am picking UChi are because it was my favorite campus and because it has such a huge reputation."
Those are superficial ,and in reality really bad reasons to apply to Chicago. Listen to unalove.</p>

43

<p>Menloparkmom is on the money. I think that statement is pretty much a disqualifier, unless it's something about yourself you want to work on.</p>

<p>Also Hyde Park and Cambridge are VASTLY different. Hyde Park is a little sleepy and isolated. Cambridge is very bustling and upscale -- much more urban, in a way, and also much more, well, rich. The happening parts of Boston are much more easily accessible from Cambridge than the equivalents in Chicago are from Hyde Park.</p>

44

<p>Chicagoboy, Glad to hear you have Rochester. To which school in CMU would you apply? MCS? You would have a very solid chance there, not as sure about SCS or CIT -- mainly because more folks are applying there. No Penn State, eh?</p>

<p>Yeah, if you don't like analyzing books or the humanitities/social science, you would not enjoy Chicago. It's pretty much a pre-req. Did you discuss this in your essays at all? If you haven't been entirely honest with yourself about what you want in a college experience, now is the time to do some hard thinking before you're committed to a place where you would be miserable.</p>

45

<p>Hey thanks everyone. I still, for some unconscious reason, am leaning towards going to Chicago. I think maybe it is because if I don't go there then I will end up going straight into an engineering program, and I am very unsure if engineering is what I want.</p>

<p>Counting down: CIT at CMU, with MCS as my backup. I'm almost certain I will get into CIT though.</p>

<p>I guess I should maybe mention my reasons for wanting to go to Chicago, as I do have somewhat more valid ones than a campus and a name:</p>

<ul>
<li>small classes, discussion based, probably where I will learn the best</li>
<li>nice classrooms; cornell's sucked, all hot and stuffy with wooden desks in some</li>
<li>a good foundation for grad school</li>
<li>access to a big city, different lifestyle, people, everything</li>
</ul>

<p>Plus, I can get all of the humanities out the way in just a class for the first year, its not that big of a deal, I think...
... and maybe I'm just really thrilled about my first college acceptance and that this feeling will fade out</p>

46

<p>If you really don't like reading/analyzing stuff, Chicago is probably a bad fit. But a huge number of people don't really have an experience with tackling texts in a rigorous way before college, so it's also probably pretty difficult to know how you'll like courses in the humanities until you've done it.</p>

<p>On the other hand, people very sure of what they want (i.e. not dead set on a professional track) is a very UChicago thing, I think.</p>

<p>The other four reasons you have listed are pretty decent ones. (Again, if you really do hate humanities, then Chicago is probably not the best). Chicago is definitely a good general foundation for just about anything you could ever want to do from being the General Manager of a baseball team to a doctor to a university professor to a public policy maker to an economist to, with training afterwards, an engineer (I think the world would be a better place if engineers when to the University of Chicago first -- then again I think the world would be a better place if most people went to UChicago before getting trained in a narrow field). The exposure to a variety of disciplines and the rigorous environment get you conditioned to think about things more thoroughly than the typical person. I also think attending college in a place that is different from your home is a good idea. College is a unique opportunity to live in a place with no commitment to stay there past a certain, relatively short, timeframe.</p>

<p>This is coming from someone who applied at the very last minute mostly because the application was more interesting than others, after another EA application didn't work out, and who decided to attend, honestly, because it was the best school I got into that wasn't in a fairly small town, and I had a distant relative who went to Chicago and loved it. I'm pretty serious at academics, but I hate math (I haven't touched it since first year). </p>

<p>Again, from reading internet discussion board posts, it's hard to tell if you are a poor fit, or just really self-aware (i.e. most people, despite their professed interest in everything, when it comes down to it, are probably not going to actually take courses in a wide variety of subject areas). Some people really are into everything; however, many they respect a variety disciplines but have a few that they would rather spend their time with because specific aspects of other disciplines don't appeal to them. </p>

<p>I would say that if you could visit and sit in on a Humanities or Social Science core class, that would be a really good idea. If you really hate what goes on in there, then you probably would be pretty unhappy at Chicago. If you find yourself interested, then Chicago is probably fine for you.</p>

<p>Another consideration is how directly you want your college experience to relate to life afterwards. (i.e. do you want it to be specific content prep for grad school or more general practice at thinking rigorously and analytically) If you want pre-professional/pre-career training, Chicago is the wrong place. If you want skills that will help you be really effective in many different professions/disciplines, then Chicago may be the right place.</p>

47

<p>It's actually funny how different I am from you, collegeboy. I attend a very prestigious math/science school, where I went out of my way to take as many social science classes as I could, because I love the subject so much. I think that's what endears me to UChicago; I may not be a math/science nut, but I don't mind learning it. In fact I enjoy learning just about everything, and it would seem like such a waste to take twice as many math/science classes in high school and then give up all the learning and never do another integral again. The core sounds absolutely amazing for that. I don't have to give up anything, and I can still take my beloved humanities and social science courses.
That's what actually interested me about Unalove's musing on her fit to University of Chicago. I did exactly that: try classes and ideas that probably won't be too good for my grades but I wanted to try it anyway. Actually, I kind of foresaw this whole thing when I first applied to my school; math and science have never been a strong suit for me. I just hope the fact that a large portion of the asian geniuses at my school apply to UChicago and my less than stellar gpa won't ruin my chances to go to my dream school.
Oh, and chicagoboy, the social science classes that I take in philosophy actually seem a lot like the classes that Uchicago has. Mostly discussion based with readings of St. Anselm, Descartes, Dante, etc and it's really amazing. Maybe you'll like it more than you imagined. I know I adore those classes that are a bit quirky. Besides, I'm a chicago girl at heart and the city is well worth any struggle.</p>

48

<p>I love the idea of disscusion based classes. I can't wait to discus the ideas of Plato and Dante with my peers. I was reading through this thread and I kind of felt like chicagoboy bcuz I hate being forced to take classes that is just lecture based and has a room filled with 300+. But the idea of talking about the classics really excities me. I have never been the study all day person in the majority of my classes but I can reMember staying up all night basically reading everything i could get my hands before we had a class discussion. So I know Chicago is for me. Bio may be a lil rocky but I doubt everyone in the core likes every class</p>

49

<p>Machiavelli, I adore math classes and adore discussing Plato, and I'm going to be gritting my teeth through Bio. It's okay. ^_^ (And I might dare suggest that it's a better tradeoff than most other schools would provide you with.)</p>

<p>That said, I'd like to add my voice to the cacophony saying that if you don't like reading and analysis, Chicago is a baaad fit. I'd suggest that even though the core (depending on how you do it) only takes one to two years, that the people you'll be surrounded with /do/ enjoy that kind of analysis, think in that mindset, and will not go away after two years.</p>

<p>I also strongly concur with "I would say that if you could visit and sit in on a Humanities or Social Science core class, that would be a really good idea. If you really hate what goes on in there, then you probably would be pretty unhappy at Chicago. If you find yourself interested, then Chicago is probably fine for you."</p>

50

<p>ChicagoBoy:
Have you considered that perhaps, the reason literary analysis seems so subjective/open to interpretation is because the deepest questions about human existence - which philosophy and many great novels and poems deal with - are almost elusive? To me, that makes them more compelling: their difficult nature makes it imperative that I think about them, because I’m not getting easy answers anywhere else. Maybe in today’s media-centric culture, fundamental concepts like Truth don’t matter anymore, but the human condition is still basically the same.</p>

51

<p>chicagoboy’s last post on this thread was in 2007.</p>

52

<p>I rather agree with what Unalove had to say. Yes, you will always find those students whose main concern is not learning but rather grades. However, I feel that at UChicago, I have found that I have met far more people who had an intense passion in learning rather than grades than I ever met in high school.
Oh and if this is a repetition of what has been said in the thread previously, sorry, I just read the first page and decided to offer my thoughts.</p>

53

<p>well, this is a very old thread, but I’ve learned so much about Chicago (and the types of people I’ll find there) by reading it. I’m more sure than ever that it would be the perfect fit for me. Not only do I love reading and analyzing things, I’m open to learning about everything and anything, (although I like to be offered the opportunity to study in an area that is weaker for me rather than seek out things I normally wouldn’t be interested in). Hopefully I can come up with a Why Chicago essay that conveys that in an articulate and creative way.</p>

54

<p>Hello! I went to a public school in Korea and am applying to American colleges this year. As I am doing everything on my own from researching colleges to writing applications, your posts help me a lot and I wanted to thank you for it. I have one question though. You mentioned that your best friend goes to Oberlin and that she would not like UChicago very much because she is more intellectual than academic. What exactly did you mean by that?Also was UChicago your first and only choice when you were applying for univs?</p>