I was accepted to USC, and while I like the warm weather, I’m worried it’ll be too southern for me. I’m from outside of Philly, love the city, and hate country music. I know it’s pretty biased to judge an entire school as one entity, but my brother is currently a student at USC and is now a southern-tide wearing, truck driving frat boy with an accent. So if anyone is a current or former student or just knows a lot about the school, what’s the culture like? Is it super southern? Will I have a hard time fitting in?
Well we’re from here and my D has friends at USC from here who are nowhere near southern-tide wearing or greek. D at USC is not in sorority and has no interest in greek life but she has good friends that are. Other D went to school in Va with lots of kids from PA who were extremely preppy/Greek. (In fact one of her sorority sisters has a younger brother at USC). In other words, you are right, you can’t judge by your brother. USC is large enough that there are all kinds of people and lots of them are from outside the south.
What are you interested in and maybe someone here can steer you toward the right clubs/groups. Music? WUSC, the campus station, is great and is dedicated to playing alternative music you can’t hear elsewhere and Columbia just got a “branch” of the Music Farm, a great music venue. Film? Nickelodean Theater uptown is newly renovated and shows lots of independent films. Obviously we have sports .Outdoors? Great river access (D took kayaking that ended with trip down one of local rivers) and within 2 hours of mountains and beach.
lolol. These are funny to me.
A) I’m from South Carolina. Have lived here for 20 years. The other year was in France. 
I really kind of hate country music. I’ve never been a fan.
B) How in the world did your brother acquire an accent? That’s quite a feat! haha I know plenty of South Carolinians who have really neutral sounding accents (including myself). I get “If you’re from South Carolina, then why don’t you have an accent?” quite a bit when I venture to other places.
C) USC is a pretty diverse place. We’ve got your stereotypical redneck, truck-loving Republicans, but we’ve also got your very liberal environmentalists, too. Most people are somewhere in between.
The culture here is what you make of it. If you like southern culture and want to be in the Greek scene, then you can. But if you want to be in a totally different scene, then you can as well. There are 20,000 undergrads here. There’s a niche for everybody. Personally, I’m not friends with a single fraternity guy, so your brother’s experience sounds completely different than pretty much every single one of my guy friend’s.
But scmom is right. It helps to know your interests. We can give you more precise answers if we know what types of groups you’d be interested in joining here.