The total lack of nature: False. As I said before, leafy quads and streets with 2 and 3 storey houses. The midway, the lakefront. A distinct contrast to the REALLY urban setting of Columbia or NYU.
It has a lot of trees and green space. The central campus area feels very much like the central campus area of a non-urban college. It’s not an enclosed campus (like Columbia), but that means it doesn’t have the compressed, somewhat paranoid feel of Columbia, either. It’s surrounded mainly by parks and residential neighborhoods without tall buildings – it’s nothing like, say, NYU or Boston University.
Given that Canada has the perfect weather, have you considered any Candian schools?
@Consolation @JHS you both are right and I apologize, it’s true, the UChicago campus looks beautiful, I haven’t visited there yet but checked it on Google and it’s very leafy. Don’t take that sentence too hard, I just misspoke, I tried to make a comparison on what I like (urban schools in big cities) against my son’s wishes (rural/nature "feeling), which in this example would apply only to Columbia. His reserves about UChicago at this moment is just his belief that kids there are too competitive, what I was already told it’s not true and hope he will be able to see when he visits. I want to consider all options and as I mentioned many times, UChicago is my favourite school for him.
Has anyone mentioned Colgate?
IMO, the fact that OP’s son doesn’t want greek life or a sports heavy campus would knock Colgate off the list on fit.
@colfac92 Yes, IF my son is open to apply to big universities (he’s not there yet) then we may include UofT in the list as well. Thanks!
A young man that was in my carpool for years just wanted Columbia, u ntil he saw U of Chicago.
My son at MIT has been a TA many more times than requirements. He only leads sections. He was flattered to be asked to TA for a certain prof last semester, and paid well. In UG, he never had a TA as anything but support, leading discussion groups. As a grad student, his role is always support, never the prime.
If he’s going to look Canadian, McGill vs. Toronto is (a) colder, (b) closer to nature, and © closer to skiing and other winter sports. Both of them are pretty much in the vein of very urban campuses, but in McGill’s case it backs onto the large, beautiful Mont Royal park. Toronto is really in the middle of the city, although it does have some open campus areas.
@ucbalumnus wrote:
Oh, I agree. But, keep in mind that not every peak academic experience is going to be found in a traditional course catalogue; the OP may have to ask for a tutorial; he may want to design his own major; he may want to pour everything he has learned into a faculty sponsored capstone project (e.g., senior thesis.) It’s not at all unusual and far more common to find faculty with overlapping appointments at a LAC than you will at a research university, IMO.
http://www.wesleyan.edu/qac/
FYI: Boston College is actually located in the Boston suburb of Newton and has a suburban campus with many trees and grass. However, its rah rah sports culture/school spirit and competitiveness among certain cohorts of students (pre-law students mostly) may not make it the optimal campus for him.
Yes, I agree. But that means finding out if the faculty in the social science and math/statistics departments at each school would be supportive of such things on an individual basis if there is not already a formalized program for such (like Northwestern MMSS, or a more quantitative emphasis in social science course offerings).
^It sounds like the Northwestern MMSS program is very similar to Wesleyan’s:
http://www.wesleyan.edu/qac/
Fair enough. I will say Columbia is surrounded by pre-war buildings, not skyscrapers, and has giant parks to the east (Morningside park) and west Riverside Park) and for that matter to the southeast (Central Park), and a riverfront also. It may be more like U of C than different from it. People have crime fears about both, also, and I think in both cases they are overblown.
All that plus the core makes me think of them together.
re#172, they do not at all look “very similar” to me.
However if I were OP’s son I would investigate Wesleyan, among other possibilities.
If Canadian schools do get a look, consider University of British Columbia.
@monydad wrote:
Well, I’m not going to quibble. The Northwestern MMSS program is a major; the Wesleyan Quantitative Analysis Center offers a “certificate”. They both rely heavily on comp sci and applied mathematics, as opposed to higher level theoretical mathematics.
If diversity matters, Amherst and Vassar are the most racially and economically diverse of all the top LACs.
And I can’t speak to all LACs, but at Amherst, the classes are taught by professors and the discussion sections are also taught by professors and labs are led by professors. There are no TAs. The only non-professors are in foreign languages, because the school brings in a few grad students from other countries so the students have a native speaker to talk with outside of classes.
My D had an intro econ class with 50 or so students. It was taught by three professors, who rotated lectures between them and then each led their own discussion section of a third of the class. Her intro biology class was run the same way.
@OHMomof2 – There almost couldn’t be more difference between the Columbia campus and the Chicago campus. The main part of the Columbia campus is essentially walled off from the surrounding city, with only a couple of access points, and it is artificially elevated so that it towers over everything that surrounds it. That was an expensive bit of engineering, so a lot is packed into the resulting space. There is a green, open area, but it is treeless and geometrically divided, and dominated at either end by massive neoclassical buildings. All of the buildings are tall. I know that it is possible to appreciate, and even to love the architecture and landscape of Columbia, but I find it claustrophobia-inducing and even offensive in its deliberate separation from its neighbors.
And it may be surrounded by pre-war buildings, but they are pretty big pre-war buildings, and they are right across the street.
The University of Chicago is much more spread out, and it doesn’t have a single building as monumentally imposing as Columbia’s neoclassical ones. There are trees everywhere, it is open to the street everywhere, and except for a few fairly graceful towers there are hardly any buildings more than four or five stories tall.
See for yourself – compare aerial photos of the central area of both campuses:
http://i.yochicago.com/images/hpmain/162/287162.jpg
I do agree that their respective neighborhoods are both much safer and more affluent than outsiders tend to imagine. The difference – very much in Columbia’s favor – is that it is organically part of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and that the Broadway subway line that you can board literally at the campus gate takes you to the center of the world in 5-10 minutes. The University of Chicago is much more in a backwater far from the action in the rest of the city.
deleted – posted in wrong thread