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I totally get what you’re saying here…but this doesn’t match with applying to schools in “every region except the midwest.” Most of the US population is not located near great hiking, so you need to specifically seek that out instead of just eliminating the midwest.</p>
<p>Trust me, you won’t be stunned by the hiking opportunities in New Jersey or Florida.</p>
<p>I don’t buy the 80% figure even as a guesstimate. Rockwell Collins, Fisher, Alcoa, Whirlpool, etc…?</p>
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<p>I’d rather do more exciting things with crude oil. But there’s a lot of research activity for biorenewables, and substitutes for petro byproducts. I guess we’re suppose to be the “green generation.” I’m actually part of a lab that makes polymers from soybean oil. Who knows, I might come back someday.</p>
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<p>I’m a chemical engineer. Everything we do has some sort of separations or purification process to it. if you look around at your every day stuff. The polymers probably came from petroleum. The processed food you eat probably has some sort of corn in it. Corn is huge… Even if there are other opportunities for chem e’s, the amount of jobs related to corn or some sort of cash crop is going to dilute your other job markets to very little.</p>
<p>Lots to do outdoors in the Twin Cities and northern MN!! You do need a windsurfer to surf, but believe me… it is a whole different place from Des Moines. If U of MN is good in your major, you should give Minnesota a try.</p>
<p>I think you should get out of the midwest entirely (including the big cities and northern MW) for grad school given what you’ve posted. </p>
<p>I think a good destination for you would be California. It’s hard to get much more diverse in geography than California (it’s diverse in many other areas as well) from the highest point in the lower 48 states to the lowest point in the USA (and there’s a spot from where you can see them both) to mountains, deserts, coastal, ag, and micro-climates galore and there are tons of outdoor things to do - just about everything you can think of. There are lots of grad schools in California as well including a number of excellent schools with excellent engineering grad programs.</p>
<p>You may end up back in the MW someday but you’ll have stretched you legs and expanded your mind in an area with all the attributes you’re concerned about not having where you are. If you go back you’ll be much more content at least.</p>
<p>There, is it decided then?</p>
<p>Agree with Gradgladdad. Get out of the Midwest!! Go west young man! Go northeast! But get out. </p>
<p>Now I love the Midwest, and am a transplant from the west and southwest. There is great quality of life here, and I was glad my kids grew up in my wonderful city. It is an outdoor place, and people bike and canoe and so on with abandon. There is music, education and diversity. But it is not the west, and if you want to be outside, the weather and the geographic variety of the west cannot be beat. You can spend your entire life exploring the wild areas of any of the western states, and never run out of destinations. There are fewer destinations in this part of the country. It was settled earlier, the topography is more accessible, and therefore farmed or populated, as you well know. </p>
<p>When I lived in the west, I’d see all the transplants trying out the new destination. Some stay, some leave. Here, I see folks wistfully talking of moving west. If the desire is there, go now. You can always return.</p>
<p>I grew up outside Detroit. I don’t miss the area. </p>
<p>Some places are quite diverse but that diversity tends to come with poverty, which may not be the intended kind of diversity. In that regard, I would say the suburbs of Detroit have one of the largest numbers of upper middle class African-Americans, which is good. </p>
<p>To see diversity that reaches across income levels, you have to go to the east or west coasts. I live in a town - basically Boston - that is so diverse I sometimes can’t hear English on the street, but is well off. I think today I heard close to 10 languages walking home, Russian, both Mandarin and Cantonese, German (or Dutch?) and Hebrew and Spanish and a few others that skip my mind. My point in mentioning that is there are many kinds of diversity, from economic to ethnic and racial. On the coasts, you’ll find more of all these kinds. </p>
<p>When I visit Detroit, there are plenty of Iraqi- and Lebanese-Americans and in the city a number of Bangladeshi, but there isn’t the same degree of diversity and I mean of all types.</p>
<p>As for the outdoors, the most active outdoor lives are in the West and NE, with the West including Colorado and thus the mountain states. One great thing about New England is an hour’s drive takes you into other states, etc. A few hours takes you from ocean beaches to mountains, from cities to beautiful little towns and farms. I remember driving from Detroit “up north” to the Traverse City area. It takes about the same amount of time to drive from my house to Montreal.</p>
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<p>believe me, I’ve had that thought planted in my head since senior year of high school. But it didn’t work out, so I got stuck here. All the grad schools I’m targeting are not in the midwest. I got 2 schools in cali right now, but maybe I should add another like UCLA just to improve my odds of getting into one of them.</p>
<p>Just because there’s lots of ethnics in one area does not necessarily make it more diverse. A good deal of it has to do with interaction between various groups or individuals, how well they’re received, financial diversity, and so on. </p>
<p>Detroit above is a good example. I spent a few years in the north suburbs and it’s ‘diverse’ but not diverse…</p>
<p>The Midwest isn’t diverse? Are you people crazy? The Chicago public schools count native speakers of at least 100 languages among their student body. There are some 1.8 million Latinos in the Chicago metropolitan area, including roughly 30% of the city’s population, with the nation’s third-largest Mexican-American population after LA and Houston and the third-largest Puerto Rican population after New York and Philadelphia but with Cubans, Central Americans, and South Americans also well represented. Another 30% of Chicago is black; the city has the nation’s second-largest African-American population, after New York. Chicago also has the world’s second-largest Polish population, after Warsaw, including a lot of people for whom Polish is their first and still primary language, with numerous bilingual Polish-English-speaking shops and restaurants up and down Milwaukee Avenue, or increasingly trilingual Polish-Spanish-English-speaking businesses. It has the world’s second-largest Serbian population, after Belgrade, and the world’s third-largest Czech population, after Prague and Vienna, along with tens of thousands of Romanians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Croats, Russians, Slovenians, and Bulgarians. Chicago has the nation’s third-largest Italian-American population, after New York and Philadelphia. Chicago has one of the nation’s largest Arab-American populations, along with Detroit-Dearborn; it also has one of the largest Jewish populations, after New York, LA, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, and Philadelphia. Devon Avenue on the city’s north side is said to be the largest “Desi” (Indian-Pakistani) business strip in the nation. It has not one but two Chinatowns with tens of thousands of recent Chinese immigrants, and thriving communities of Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, and Filipinos, and other southeast Asian groups well represented. It has the world’s only Cambodian museum outside of Cambodia. It has a thriving Koreatown on the north side. It’s one of the few cities in the U.S.with identifiable Native American neighborhoods. Walk into any of the city’s numerous Irish pubs and you’re likely to find a gaggle of recent Irish immigrants, fresh off the boat. It has growing Ethiopian and other African immigrant communities. It has 80,000 Assyrians, making it the world’s largest Assyrian community outside of Iraq, and it’s the seat of the Assyrian Church of the East (and you probably thought they were wiped out by the Babylonians around 600 BCE). Roughly one in 4 Chicagoans is foreign-born.</p>
<p>And yet the contrast between this huge, roiling urban ethnic stew–quite possibly the most diverse in the nation, or if not then second only to New York–and the small towns and agricultural areas of the rural Midwest could not be more staggering. Which is itself a dimension of diversity.</p>
<p>Then there’s the diversity of landforms, ecotypes, and distinctively American cultures. Travel to southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinous, or Missouri, and you’re basically in the Middle South, with vegetation and folkways virtually indistinguishable from Kentucky or Tennessee. Travel north to northern Minnesota or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and you’re in the boreal forests and glacial lakes of Canada, amidst the world’s greatest concentration of fresh surface water; but the rural and semi-rural population forms its own ethnic stew of people from many lands who came to work as lumberjacks and miners in the later 19th and early 20th centruies, possibly the most ethnically diverse rural population in the U.S. Rimming the southern end of the Great Lakes is the nation’s industrial heartland, an almost continuous and interconnected network of steel mills, foundries, and factories from Milwaukee and Chicago on the west through Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio and on into such “Eastern” cities as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse which are genetically, culturally, and economically in many ways more Midwestern than Eastern; and with it, racially and ethnically diverse industrial cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, along with dozens of smaller industrial hubs, with Chicago-Milwaukee-Gary and Detroit-Toledo-Cleveland their rival epicenters. Then, generally to the south and west of this industrial heartland is the world’s greatest grain belt, extending from Ohio on the east to Nebraska on the west, and the Minnesota and the Dakotas on the north to Kansas on the south (but in fact, of a piece with Oklahoma and north and west Texas, which have more in common with this part of the Midwest than this part of the Midwest has with the industrial Midwest, and more than this part of Texas has with south Texas and the Southwest, or with east Texas and the South). And finally, to the more arid western reaches of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, which are in landscape, ecology, culture, and history very much part of the West. And at the heart of it all is Chicago–partly industrial behemoth, but also unrivaled capital of the grain belt, and simultaneously one of the world’s great financial centers, ever a city of immigrants from all over the world and all over the nation.</p>
<p>Anyone who thinks the Midwest is not diverse has a hole in the head. But then, coastal stereotypes die hard.</p>
<p>bclintok:</p>
<p>Wow - that’s quite a post there.</p>
<p>Don’t go from the thread title on this one. You might note that what the OP appears to be looking for in the posts doesn’t seem to be ‘diversity’ in the context of how the word’s usually used on CC (racial, economic, etc.) but rather, something different than what the OP’s used to in Iowa as far as landscape, activities, etc.</p>
<p>If the OP wants a change from Iowa, someplace like California will offer a much more dramatic change than going to another midwest state for certain. Sure, there’s some variation from Iowa to Nebraska or Missouri but not quite as dramatic of a change as someplace like California. I used California as an example because it has probably the most varied terrain, climate, seacoast, etc. of any of the states plus it has some big cities as well along with medium and small towns. If the OP’s pining for a change, rather than shifting to Illinois, or Ohio, etc., why not go someplace much more different to satisfy the OP’s urges?</p>
<p>I’m not knocking the midwest - just addressing the OP’s desires for something quite different than Iowa.</p>
<p>California has a large amount of geographic diversity by itself simply because it is relatively big.</p>
<p>Come to California and stay until the money runs out! I know so many midwesterners, myself included, who came out to CA for a visit 30+ years ago and never went back home. If you love the outdoors, it’s the greatest place to be. Autumn is my favorite time of year here, because every year I think back to fall in the midwest, and remember that sick feeling I’d get, knowing what awaited us… 5 months of misery. Not anymore! Every season is glorious.</p>
<p>GladGradDad,</p>
<p>I appreciate your concern for the OP’s interests. I was responding more to some of the people on this thread who were trying to say the Midwest isn’t diverse. I think that’s just nuts, and it’s coming from two sources–people who have spent little or no time in the Midwest, and people originally from the Midwest who had miserable teenage years there (as many people do in their teenage years, as much, I’ll wager, in coastal communities as in the Midwest) and were glad to leave, and have nothing kind to say about the place they came from.</p>
<p>But going to the OP’s concerns: I don’t think the root problem is lack of diversity, it’s teenage restlessness and ennui, but it may be compounded by the lack of diversity in the particular corner of the Midwest where the OP lives. But I think it would be a huge mistake to write off an entire region of the country out of a mistaken belief that the region as a whole isn’t diverse, extrapolating from the particulars of one’s own community. I think, in fact, if the OP were in Chicago or Minneapolis-St. Paul, or Madison or Ann Arbor, whole new worlds would unfold. And I truly believe that what the OP would find in any of the places I just mentioned would more closely resemble anything s/he could find in New York, Boston, LA, or San Francisco, than Chicago, MSP, Madison or Ann Arbor resemble the OP’s life to date in small-town Iowa. Heck, I might even say that about Iowa City, which I don’t know well but which on my occasional visits there has struck me as a surprisingly hip little college town.</p>
<p>Ultimately, I don’t really care whether the OP stays in the Midwest, or goes to California, New York, Boston, or wherever. I do care that the decision should be well-informed, and not influenced by the ignorant stereotypes of those who have never spent any time getting to know the Midwest, or those who hold grudges based on their own limited experiences during their unhappy teenage years.</p>
<p>^^ I understand your perspective. For the record, I’ve lived in the midwest before (Kansas) and lots of other places and I’m the one who enjoyed visiting western Nebraska on vacation once. Sometimes it takes leaving a place to appreciate the assets of the place.</p>
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<p>oh boy, don’t get me started…</p>
<p>Bclintonk, my daughter met girls at school in Boston who thought that because she was from (suburban) Chicago she must be living amidst stacks of hay. They said about their suburban Boston campus and town -wow, this must be totally different from where you’re from. And she said, no, it looks just like where I’m from. Really, suburban Boston, suburban Chicago – all the same thing. Nice areas, suburban sprawl, restaurants and malls. But they really were that hick and unsophisticated that they thought she’d be bowled over by - oh wow, a mall, a Cheesecake Factory, a Bed Bath and Beyond, a Target all in one block - can’t imagine you’ve seen something that fancy before! </p>
<p>Last year I sat on a plane with a NY family coming to Chicago for a family event. They were stunned by the size of the city. They truly were expecting a small town, almost like a suburb of NY in size and scope.</p>
<p>It’s provincialism.</p>
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<p>In other words, lucky you if you live in Chicago, but best of luck if you end up in Toledo, Lansing,Peoria, or South Bend…</p>
<p>1/2 :)</p>
<p>I know for a fact that I go to more concerts, live music venues, book readings, talks, art shows, etc in Iowa City than all of my friends in the Chicago suburbs do. It is so easy to do here and the choices are plentiful. All this great culture in big cities is great, but you have to actually use it.</p>
<p>My son’s elementary school has students from 30 countries this year. Yes , in Iowa.</p>
<p>Just so you know, I had a dream I was driving around Cedar Rapids, IA last night snapping photos of the hills to post here just because of this thread :D.</p>
<p>My spouse grew up in the Midwest. With exception of the town’s two doctors, everyone else was of German lineage and Protestant. But the town is trying to join the 20th Century … everyone is still Caucasian and Protestant, but there are now a few residents of English lineage. Spouse thinks there may be one Hispanic family a couple towns over. (And yes, this is in the same state that Chicago is located in.)</p>
<p>Sorry bc, but the Midwest is a big place, and Chicago comprises a very small part of it.</p>