City of Chicago

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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I work in both NYC and Chicago (back and forth). How anyone can completely “hate” Chicago is beyond me. There is a lot to love! Like any city, parts are awesome…parts are decidedly not!

Chicago us more sprawling, so if you want population density, like Manhattan, live in the denser parts of Chicago. NYC is similar is sprawl, but tourists rarely venture out to Queens or Staten Island! Think of Chicago like all of NYC and it makes more sense.

It is very cold there. Nothing you can do:). But it HS an awesome city that retains that midwestern friendliness and open heart that other big cities lack!

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“Accepted to Sarah Lawrence College with an incredibly generous merit scholarship. Accepted to UChicago with a similarly generous financial aid package. My top two choices. Money is not a factor. I have a decision to make.
in SLC 2021 RD notification date? Comment by boringusername March 18”

@boringusername, it sounds like you have made your decision not to come to Chicago. Sounds like your decision was made before you made your CC account and created this thread, even if you did not fully realize it. Good luck at SLC or wherever you end up!

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@HRSMom, I’m afraid that @boringusername would find all that midwestern friendliness and open heart a bit . . uh . . . “jejune”. :wink:

There is something “Diane Keaton’esque” about OP but it’s more Mary Wilkie than Annie Hall.

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Sorry, I like the AIC better than the MFA. Maybe that’s just me. AIC also has a very good school attached to it, and Columbia College (the art school) is a very strong commercially oriented art college as well. Chicago has tons of secondary art museums as well, including the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum and its Oriental Institute. I’m not going to say that Chicago is a better visual art city than Boston – for one thing, I have run into a bunch of BU MFAs and faculty whose work I really love, some of which hangs in my house and my office – but it’s very vibrant, and very comparable.

If the Lyric Opera is “dinner theater,” what’s available in Boston is Jack-in-the-Box.

I forgot to mention dance, another clear Chicago win, thanks to the Joffrey, but also small companies all over the city.

Lots and lots of people are interested in arts management and curation now. It’s very hot, including at the University of Chicago. My kids both have close friends from UChicago who have traction in museum careers, one who has remained working in Hyde Park at the Museum of Science and Industry and another who works at the Getty in LA, as well as UChicago friends working for/as art dealers in New York City. Both of my kids spent real time in the arts community in Chicago – the one who lives there only recently stopped moonlighting in theater management. It’s a perfectly good place to start, from that perspective. (As are plenty of other places. One young woman I know who is having a lot of success went to the University of Toronto, and works in Washington DC.)

Anyway, it would be stupid to argue that Chicago is vastly superior to New York or Boston as a place to go to college for someone interested in arts management, or that the University of Chicago is better than anywhere else for it. There are lots of routes into that field, none of them easy. The people I know who have had the most sensational arts management careers include a Harvard French major who taught high school in flyover country for five years before moving to New York as a musician, a guy who started promoting concerts while he was a student at SUNY Buffalo, and a Yale history major who got her big break because the dean’s secretary in her residential college was the mother of the founder of a theater company. If you want to enter that world from the world of elite colleges, UChicago is a perfectly good path, but so would be Harvard, or Columbia, or Williams, or lots of other places. And if you want to enter that world by bypassing elite colleges, going someplace like Fordham or Parsons or Belmont, and focusing on networking and internships, that’s valid, too.

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Just spent a few days in Chicago. Stayed in a hotel in the Loop. For the first time ever in Chicago (after college anyway), did not rent a car and used public transportation, a bit of walking and Uber/Lyft. Went down to HP couple of times, out to United Center, restaurants in River North, west of the Loop and far North, flew in/out of O’Hare. Worked out great. Never waited more than 5 min or so for Uber/Lyft even in Hyde Park. Uber pool HP-Loop is about $5 and $20 otherwise. DD had the CTA app which made things much easier also.

Not only was it cheaper overall, it was also very nice not dealing with looking for parking etc. DH, usually given the job of finding parking after dropping us off, was quite pleased. I doubt we will rent a car in Chicago again.

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@ihs76 we go this method whenever we do a college visit because my kids won’t have cars so they may as well learn the ropes w/r/t public transportation. Chicago is great this way. The only disadvantage is no L between Hyde Park and Midway but I heard the busses are great for that trip. If one is in a hurry, I suppose Uber/Lyft works great as well.

After we left Chi-Town they put in the Orange Line between Midway and the Loop. I have used it whenever I fly in. I can connect in the loop to the Brown (formerly known as the Ravenswood Line) and take that to my siblings’ house in Lincoln Square. No need for a car.