<p>On funcomes’ last point, I would say that the UChicago CC board has been blessed by a range of student posters, some of whom are/were as social as anyone could want to be. And some not so much. There is always turnover.</p>
<p>One former student poster is now serving as “UChicago”; as a fourth-year she was Scavenczar, which has got to be something like Football Captain, Prom Queen, and Socrates combined. Anyway, very popular.</p>
<p>Based on what I saw of my children and their friends during the past six years, social life was absolutely fine, well within the range of similar schools. Lots of parties and as much alcohol, drugs, and sex as the participants wanted; lots of lower-key fun among friends; lots of doing the town for some and getting cheap Chinese food for others; vibrant extracurriculars that brought people together and often got them laid. </p>
<p>What was different compared with some other schools was: (1) Probably slightly more people who were truly socially awkward, especially in their first few years. Overall, a small minority of students, but more visible than at, say, Duke or Penn. And, what’s more important, more tolerated – people at Chicago don’t expect everyone to want to do the same things all the time. Which leads to: (2) One of the great things about Chicago is that there is very little expectation of social conformity. If you were Alpha Girl in high school and expect everyone to follow your lead, things can be disappointing, at least until you figure out that even you are happier in an environment where you really have a choice how to live. (3) That means there aren’t so many must-do events. People elsewhere may develop an expectation that the pinnacle of college social life is the Big Weekend where everyone vomits and passes out at the same time in the Central Quad. Chicago has its versions of all the proms and big weekends everybody else has, but they just aren’t the single focus of social life that they may be elsewhere. (4) What’s also largely missing is the hardest-core 10% of partiers, the ones who are willing to sacrifice their academic standing and livers to provide others with a background of wild frenzy they can enjoy vicariously. I believe much of the sense that social life is deficient relates to that. The actual students wouldn’t be doing anything different themselves if they were at Duke or Penn rather than Chicago, but at Chicago they are not seeing someone else go absolutely bonkers, so they can’t say, “Wow, what an awesome party, there was this dude going absolutely bonkers!”</p>
<p>The campus is hardly “very urban”. Hyde Park is this sleepy neighborhood with lots of trees, dogs, and kids, and really not so much urban. There are many, many campuses that are a lot more urban. (Harvard, Penn, and MIT, to name a few, feel much more urban than Chicago. And places like NYU or BU are in a whole 'nother category of urbanness.) Chicago has lots of gothic architecture and green, open spaces. All first-years and almost all second-years live in dorms that are on campus, except for maybe 200 who live in dorms that are a block or so away from campus. What it doesn’t have is a clearly-defined border between campus and non-campus (which is true of lots of other urban universities, too). And it does have low-income, minority-dominated neighborhoods within walking distance, so people of color wearing non-preppy clothing are visible on the street on a regular basis. That’s usually what people mean when they say UChicago is “very urban”. That and it’s not Dartmouth.</p>