<p>Wash U is lots of fun. Before I respond with details justifying this, you really have to keep in mind that you make your own fun. Any college of the sorts you are looking at will provide tons of opportunities for athletic games, fraternities, academic breadth and depth, research, student groups, etc. There’s going to be people who take advantage of all of those opportunities, or just some opportunities that really interest them. It’s up to you as a college student to make your own experience positive, and not expect a college to satisfy every whimsy you have. Much of your experience is beyond the college’s control, because I know that Wash U / Duke / and Michigan will all have varying degrees of the same types of activities going on.</p>
<p>With that said… many Wash U students don’t take advantage of St Louis as often as they should. That doesn’t mean that “no one goes into St Louis.” Many people don’t, while many people do. Personally, I fall somewhere in between. I know tons of people who go to the Loop, Forest Park, Central West End, or Downtown on a very regular basis (leaving campus 2 - 3 times per week for food, shopping, walking, museums, etc).</p>
<p>I’d say an equal amount of people at Wash U chose to come here for one of these two reasons: 1) it’s a beautiful campus, feels “collegey” and intellectual, and isn’t in the middle of a big city; or 2) it’s close to tons of things to do off-campus so you don’t need to be in the “college bubble” 24/7.</p>
<p>St Louis will have much more to do in the immediate vicinity than Raleigh-Durham, just to compare with what your brother has experienced. The Loop and Forest Park are both within walking distance of campus (10 minutes away, and right across the street from the front of campus, respectively). The Loop is a great street of coffee shops, book stores, independent movie theatre, restaurants, a concert hall, art galleries, etc. You can read about Forest Park on your own, but it has so much stuff to do. Regarding UMichigan… it’s in Ann Arbor, which I’ve heard if very pretty, but it’s a college town. Probably one of the nicer college towns, but it’s still a college town. You can make your own opinions and judgements about this, but to me, nothing says “going to the same frat parties and restaurants every weekend” than a college town. 1/3 of Ann Arbor is college students. It’s going to be quite cold in every month your’re in session except for probably Sept and Oct.</p>
<p>St Louis has a very convenient public transportation system for Wash U students — two Metro line stops on campus, and also the Metro Bus system. Free passes for all Wash U students. St louis has lots of neighborhoods — really cool neighborhoods-- instead of just being one downtown urban mecca. Luckily, the Metro takes you everywhere you need to go from neighborhood to neighborhood, and STL is small enough where you can hit up lots of parts in the city in a day. Downtown is a 15 minute Metro ride from campus, and in between WU and downtown you have the Central West End (more upscale neighborhood and destinations), Forest Park, and Midtown (theatres to see broadway shows and concerts).</p>
<p>STL clearly isn’t New York City. But, it’s not pretending to be, and you’re obviously not looking at schools in NYC. For what St Louis is: a larger-medium-sized city, it will provide everything you can want to do in your 4 years.</p>
<p>I think the reason why many Wash U students don’t take advantage of STL, is because we have so many people from Chicago and NYC here. A lot of Wash U students are used to a VERY urban city that they grew up right next to (or from directly in one of those cities). While St Louis does have a downtown, it is smaller than the type of environtment that a lot of people were spoiled with growing up. It’s better than the place where I came from, and where lots of other WU students came from, but a big portion of people in our student body just compares St Louis very unfairly with cities that are twice its size and have a more vibrant downtown core.</p>
<p>Another unique thing about Wash U that you should keep in mind — and this could be a bad or a good thing for some people… to me it’s a good thing — that Wash U does NOT have an over-arching culture that everyone does the same thing. It doesn’t have a vibe where frat parties are the most popular thing on the weekend, where everyone goes to the football game, where everyone goes downtown on the weekend, etc. Wash U is big enough to offer tons of different types of things, small enough to feel that you know what to do / where to go / how to meet people, and in a city that isn’t college-towny and also isn’t overwhelmingly big.</p>