Overall "feel" of some top colleges

<p>Hey everyone, I just joined this forum and this is my first post.</p>

<p>In my opinion, getting the right type of college is as important as the prestige the college has. So I've been looking at university websites to find out about them, but I couldn't really find much of valuable information yet. Even if there are, it's not easy to extract them out. So can I ask help from everyone, to write down what you know about the overall 'feel' of the following colleges (and other good schools with strong science curriculum if I forgot to mention them):</p>

<ul>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Caltech</li>
<li>Cambridge</li>
<li>Oxford</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Harvey Mudd</li>
<li>U Penn</li>
</ul>

<p>What I mean by "feel" here may include things like:</p>

<ul>
<li>Size of the campus</li>
<li>Liberal/Conservative tendency</li>
<li>Strength of their mathematics/physics/engineering/computer science curriculum</li>
<li>Anything special in student life in the respective college (of course, apart from the prestige of high-level learning. However if there is anything extraordinary about their prestige, I'd like to know about them)</li>
<li>Other miscellaneous stuffs that you know, such as... maybe something like how haughty students are</li>
</ul>

<p>Yeah I probably sound like I'm asking to write an essay of exhaustive top college review... but I am more than grateful to see partial reviews. (you can just jot down a little about Princeton, for example) Thanks a lot!</p>

<p>IMO, the best synopses of “feel” regarding colleges is on PrincetonReview.com. Look up a college there and click on the Campus Life link. You’ll get condensations of multiple student interviews regarding the campus vibe. Some will criticize the fact that their interviews reflect a small “N,” but consider how influenced you could be by talking to one student at a party, or hearing from four or five on a campus visit. PR’s number of student opinions are more representative than that.</p>

<p>I would also balance that with c o l l e g e p r o w l e r info for another viewpoint.</p>

<p>I agree that both sites offer a pretty good look at “feel,” though my favorite written source on this topic is still the Fiske guide.</p>