<p>Hey I am a junior who is starting to look at where I want to attend college.
I grew up in Atlanta and now live in Charlotte, so I am pretty used to the hot climate.
I am looking at a few schools that definitely get cold in the winter and I was wondering if anyone here that grew up down south but attends a northern school was bothered by the change in the weather when they first got there?
Thanks</p>
<p>I’m from the tropics, and I’m studying at Notre Dame, in the frigid tundra of northern Indiana.</p>
<p>I love my school and would want to go anywhere else, but the weather is my biggest complaint. You get used to it, but that doesn’t mean you like it. It’s definitely a problem you can deal with, though, and nowhere in the US is going to be permanently cold (you’ll have warm months).</p>
<p>Now, when I first got there, it was 90 and my dorm had no A/C. So yeah, that bothered me, but it didn’t really start getting very cold until November. A jacket solves most of it, and the snow can even be fun.</p>
<p>It’s definitely a big transition, and a limitless source of halfhearted complaining, but it isn’t actually that bad. Plus, your breaks will seem much better since you’re returning to warmth.</p>
<p>It is something to get used to but if you’re going to have to deal with cold and snow, best to do it while living on campus and someone clears the sidewalks for you to get to class.</p>
<p>One factor that doesn’t get much attention in cold-weather discussions is how compact the campus is. The effects of cold weather are worse if the campus is spread out, and you spend a lot of time walking or waiting for a bus. Sometimes small colleges are spread out, and larger ones are compact, so the compactness doesn’t always correlate to enrollment.</p>
<p>I lived in Memphis and Charlotte and then moved to Philadelphia for several years and loved it. The weather was great! Enough snow to be fun, no ice storms, and there was infrastructure to handle the winter weather.</p>
<p>There was a thread on CC last year started by a Floridian who was attending Indiana University. She complained that the school should have cancelled classes because she was getting snow flakes in her hair on the way to class. She also wanted IU to do something to make it warmer outside. She seemed like a pathetic hot house flower.</p>
<p>“There was a thread on CC last year started by a Floridian who was attending Indiana University.” </p>
<p>What makes that story particularly interesting is that IU’s climate is almost tropical compared to the rest of the Big 10.</p>
<p>My Maine-raised son headed out for classes one day last winter in Austin, and couldn’t figure out why campus was so empty. He finally asked, and was told that classes had been canceled due to the less than one-inch snowfall during the night. He thought they were kidding, but they weren’t.</p>