Does anyone love UChicago?

UChicago love their angst, the same way the British love to complain about the weather. In both cases, reality is much less awful than people like to believe. UChicago has changed a lot in recent years.

I was trying to transfer to liberal arts colleges because I wanted a stronger community feel, where supportive structures for students were more readily apparent and fundamental to the school. UChicago is rough and has a reputation of a bit of a hands off approach (not that professors are not accessible, they just aren’t particularly helpful in guiding you or mentoring you), and is said to feel like grad school. I applied to schools like Oberlin, Kenyon and Vassar, and I assumed my 3.5 was too low for these schools because they have such low transfer rates and they’d want spectacular students.

I just haven’t found my niche here, I didn’t fit in at my dorms, I didn’t fit in with University Theatre, I didn’t do scav, etc. Alot of the UChicago traditions are pretty gimmicky and you have to buy into them to enjoy them, at least in my experience.

Ultimately I’m tired of the “life of the mind”, of the unwelcoming and overstudious and pretentious atmosphere (though some say this does not exist), of the classes which are difficult and obtuse for no reason but to maintain the UChicago standard, not to help you learn. It wears on you, and I don’t feel like UChicago is my home socially nor academically.

PAGRok: You seem to be having a rough time socially, but you are still doing well academically. As I understand it, a 3.5 is still above average at UChicago. So double congratulations for that since you are fighting the coursework while at the same time wondering about your place and whether you made the right decision in coming to UChicago. I completely understand how this is wearing on you.

Since it looks like you are going to be at UChicago I think you need to do something to break the logjam. Have you thought about the counseling center (I think it’s on University)? They take appointments and they will take walk-ins.
If I were in your shoes this would be hard for me to do, but as an outside observer I would urge you to avail yourself of the resources that are there to help open up your mind and unburden you. This place is staffed with professional “helpers” who will talk to people and offer suggestions on a strictly confidential basis.

Best of luck to you.

I’m sorry that PAGRok is having a hard time. It sounds like there’s a bunch of stuff going on, some of which could have happened anywhere (going too hard first year, having a bout of depression), although of course it’s always going to feel like it is responding to specific, local causes, and some of which may indeed be a matter of not fitting in at the University of Chicago. Oberlin and Kenyon (less so Vassar) are really different places than Chicago. My daughter had a number of friends at Oberlin, and spent a bunch of time there during her college years, as well as hosting the friends in Chicago, and she certainly reported that the academic atmospheres of the two colleges were very different. If you really don’t value “the life of the mind,” and you don’t secretly like the adrenaline rush of academic intensity, and you feel like intellectual b.s. in your classes is a personal assault on you . . . yes, you are at risk for not liking the University of Chicago.

That said, I don’t think Cue7 and I disagree fundamentally about anything, but I do think he underestimates how different the college is now vs. 20 years ago, both in terms of what the college offers and in terms of who its students are. I have two cousins who graduated in the late 90s, and kids who graduated 4-6 years ago, and the two sets of alumni effectively describe completely different experiences outside the classroom. Which is to say my cousins barely had any experiences outside the classroom, and rarely left the campus, and were completely dependent on their fraternities for social life, while my kids each spent a great deal of time on extracurricular activities (at various times jobs, publications, political groups, University Theater, club sports) and traveled all over the city. (Once, I was talking with an ultra-hip relative who lives in Chicago, and I read her a list of restaurant recommendations my daughter had given us, based on where she and her friends had tried. The relative said, “That’s like the 5 or 6 hottest less expensive restaurants in the city. She sure gets around for a college kid!” And she did.) There were hundreds of students actively involved in University Theater. They both had friends who were serious artists (two of my daughter’s friends have supported themselves in the art world since graduating).

I also think it’s no longer the case that there’s a big difference between the students Chicago accepts and the ones you would find at Yale or Brown. The university realized a couple of decades ago that it wouldn’t have a vibrant extracurricular life if it didn’t admit the sort of students who wanted to join and to lead organizations – something that had been absent from Chicago’s admissions calculations for a long time. It took a while, but I think those students are enrolling now in enough numbers to make a difference. There are plenty of recruited athletes, too. They are special recruited athletes – recruited athletes who want to come to the University of Chicago – but there are plenty of them, as many as you would find at a NESCAC school. They are a smaller percentage of the class at Chicago than they would be at Amherst, but they are a real presence. Finally, I have no idea how to quantify this, but I personally know three current (as of next fall) students with major inherited wealth – quirky intellectuals all of them, by the way. I think there were fewer such kids twenty years ago.

And, yes, some of those leaders, artists, rich kids and athletes have taken slots that in the past might have gone to quirky intellectuals who are a couple of inches or more onto the autism spectrum. Those kids are still around, but in concentrations more like you would see at Ivy League colleges.

That’s not to say Chicago is a great party school, or a place where everyone dances around with foam fingers yelling “We Are No. 1!” But it may well be a better party school than Harvard or Columbia, and there’s even an active minority subculture of vocal team-sports fans. It’s still not for everyone, but the tent has gotten a lot bigger and a lot more similar to other elite colleges than it used to be.

JHS,

I agree - the students at Chicago now, on the whole, are significantly different than my cohort from 15-20 years ago. Moreover, the offerings and resources provided for the current crop of students significantly exceed the comparatively meager resources doled out to my cohort. (That is to say, nowadays, Chicago offers roughly the same level of administrative resources as its peers, and 20 years back, it offered comparatively little.)

The Chicago experience, vis a vis its peers, has gone from being a difference in kind to a difference in degree. 20 years ago, the Chicago experience really did NOT resemble the experience found at many of its peer colleges. It was a fairly gloomy, cerebral place, and, outside the classroom, students were largely left to fend for themselves. It was just a different kind of experience than what you’d find elsewhere. Now, the general “top college” experience has become largely homogenized - the experience at Brown, Chicago, Hopkins, etc. are all converging, to some degree.

This being said, while the students are different and the resources have proliferated, there’s much to Chicago that’s the same as a generation ago. The faculty intensity and approach is similar (read: taking pride in being one of the most rigorous places of inquiry around). The administrative slant (read: not being too student friendly) is still the same because many of the same administrators are still there, or have left their imprint on their successors (read: Dean of Students Susan Art only just left, and she’d been there for years), and the physical resources devoted to undergraduate life are still comparable (the Logan Arts Center has been a great addition, but, aside from a new gym built 12 years ago, there hasn’t been much expansion in areas devoted to student life - no expansion of the Reynolds Club, no introduction of new varsity sports teams despite a 30%+ increase in the size of the college, etc.). In the past few years, we’re seeing prominent changes (Institute of Politics injected some energy, new entrepreneurship accelerators and the like give undergrads more opportunities), but I don’t think we’ve seen growth that’s commensurate with such a significant increase in the college’s size. Further, while Chicago has more grade inflation than it had before, it still probably lags behind its peers here.

To sum: the student body has changed markedly, but the administration and faculty have not. The admin and faculty views are much the same now as they were 15-20 years ago (minus begrudging consent to the changes former President Sonnenschein wanted to implement in the late 90s)
Chicago’s now on the spectrum of top colleges (20 years ago, it was a different beast altogether), but it’s still quite distinct from its peers. Again, I still see it as a liberal arts version of MIT or Cal Tech, with a focus on incubating budding academics. There’s more diversity and variety now as opposed to 20 years ago of course, but this type of college experience lacks a lot of the “ivy league” characteristics you’d find at, well, ivy league colleges.

I think the true test will emerge in 5-7 years time - when the dust from all the construction has settled, the quirky satellite dorms are eliminated, the older administrators will have retired, and the faculty have grown accustomed to educating a more dynamic student body. If we have an administration that’s more responsive to student input, faculty that support a college with an average GPA of, say, 3.5 - 3.6, more sports teams and updated sports facilities, and physical student spaces/student unions that can actually meet the demands of 6000 students, then I’ll agree, the Chicago experience will resemble the Yale or Brown experience quite closely.

Until then, I’d put Chicago more in line with the MITs and Cal Techs of the world. They are all top schools, of course, but they possess a kind of gritty, grind-it-out quality that deviates from the atmosphere you see at Yale, Brown, etc.