<p>^^^^^^
Yes, but one thing we always love when visiting the Midwest in the summer is fireflies and thunderstorms. We don’t have either, but I will take the sweet summer weather we do get. Love the responses. Its nice to hear the differences from those who have experience. I have to say that from reading CC the impression I get is that things are more intense, competitive, stressful in the Northeast, at least in the education area. I know this isn’t true for everyone and every situation, but just a general impression after reading for the last year. Actually, my son sounds like he would fit right in, especially, the driving (and he only has a permit)! I also agree with some of the not so positive comments of the PNW; I can see that, too. One of the things I haven’t liked as much here is that there is much less racial and cultural diversity than some areas (maybe not more rural NE). Though we do hit the jackpot with subcultures and alternative cultures.</p>
<p>I grew up and went to college in MA. After school I moved to SoCal and that is where we still live. We have gone back to visit New England often, so my daughter is not a total stranger to the area. </p>
<p>On one our visits we toured Worester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and DD loved it. She applied there, was accepted and is attending. However, my DD is very much an introvert, so we had some real worries how she would fair so far from home.</p>
<p>She has two great roommates, she has had to get an entire new winter wardrobe (and it has been exceptional snowy and cold this winter) and she has done great. My wife has suffered more.</p>
<p>We use Skype often, it helps to see as well as hear each other. Texting is great across the time zones as you aren’t always immediately available to talk.</p>
<p>WPI is a small school with mostly kids from the northeast. She gets a lot of questions from her classmates as to what California is really like. DD is amazed at the number of her classmates that have never flown on a commercial airliner. She does miss SoCal and looks forward to breaks to come home, although she did stay back in NE for Thanksgiving (just too near Christmas to want to come home).</p>
<p>DD has had to learn a whole new set of lingo. What she is used to calling a “water fountain” is a “bubbler”, etc. She found pictures of many of the new items and posted them on her dorm room door with all the “new” names (outside of her door so everyone walking by can see it). People will stop, see her pictures and then come and talk with her.</p>
<p>So it probably really does depend on the person how well they will do being so far away, but its hard to tell until they try it.</p>
<p>worldtravlr: I grew up in NYC and lived in Oregon for a few years. Your perceptions (post 21) match my experience.</p>
<p>msref: Thank you for mentioning Mo’s, its been years since I have thought about them and their clam chowder. Its time for a trip!</p>
<p>I haven’t read this whole thread, but we are in Oregon and our son chose a college in Massachusetts. I grew up in CA and spent some years living in NYC in my lurid youth.</p>
<p>My son is a junior now. I think he really loves living in the east, although he’s not in an urban area at all, so in some ways he’s living in a place very similar to where he came from… just on the other side of the country.</p>
<p>I’m not sure where he’ll end up once he graduates. Somehow I think ultimately he’ll end up back in the PNW. If it’s back east, that’s fine with me to. I like having an excuse to go visit… but I love it here and will probably not live anywhere else until the kids put me in the old age home. ;)</p>
<p>We are from out west. We would take our daughter’s back east to visit H relatives. Ever since then our senior in high school always wanted to go to schools back east. So this summer we toured 6 schools in 3 states back east… So far she has been accepted to all and is waiting to hear back from the other.</p>
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<p>When people refer to “back East” does that just mean New England or the mid-Atlantic states and New England? When someone says PNW, I assume they mean Washington and Oregon. But when someone says “back East”, I’m thinking they mean the whole Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida, but now I am wondering if it really refers to the top half of the east coast. </p>
<p>BTW, we have fireflies on the East coast too.</p>
<p>Actually, my title is a little misleading, though I did narrow it down to the Northeast in the second paragraph; the area we are most interested in learning about because we haven’t been. I put ‘back east’ because it would definitely be something someone on the West Coast would have heard before. When I say that to relatives in the Midwest, ‘we are planning to go back east this summer’, they think it is weird. I would say that most people here consider anything East of the Rockies ‘Back East’, but it may be different for different areas. I would consider Florida, S. and N. Carolina part of the South, so personally wouldn’t have that on my radar when saying ‘Back East’. I wonder if it is a colloquialism from the pioneer days, since we are here at the end of the Oregon Trail.</p>
<p>Both of my d’s went back east for school, and may be there permanently. The older one went to Smith, and is now a graduate student at Princeton. Barring a job in the PNW, she is more likely to work in Europe than return home. The younger one is graduating from American U., and has worked in Jordan and India, and likely this summer in South Africa. Given her career path, she is likely to need to be based in either DC or NY (if in the U.S. at all.)</p>
<p>Both my wife and I are originally from the East Coast (DC and NY), and went to colleges on the east coast. My younger d’s business career requires an entirely different style of dress than we would ever need here, and luckily, she enjoys it. Other cultural differences including many more African-American and Jewish friends, and much easier/better public transportation both within cities and between them. And shorter distances to everything! My younger one enjoys the faster pace. (My older one doesn’t notice - she;'s a Ph.D candidate!) </p>
<p>It takes about the same amount of time to get from DC to Olympia as it does from Olympia to Pullman, Washington (home of WSU) in winter.</p>
<p>^^^^^^
Good point about trying to cross the passes in the winter. I hate doing that. </p>
<p>Also, you mean they don’t wear North Face, Keens, and tie dye to work and/or the opera on the East Coast? We definitely don’t have much of a fashion sense here, but we love comfort and staying dry! (But don’t use an umbrella or people might look at you strangely).</p>
<p>Thanks for all the replies; I have loved reading them.</p>
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<p>Ah, eastern Massachusetts! It has a vocabulary–and an accent-- all its own. When I moved all the way from CT to MA to go to college outside Boston–no more than 250 miles–I encountered a whole slew of new terms: tonic (A general term for what we called soda. In CT, tonic was something one drank with gin! 
), frappe (milkshake), jimmies (chocolate shot or sprinkles) and various other things I’ve forgotten.</p>
<p>I’ve spent more time in Europe than on the West Coast. And when I first moved to Chicago, it always took me extra time to find it on the weather map, because I automatically looked in the middle of the country. :D</p>
<p>One thing to remember is that most of the schools in the northeast are made up of students from all over the country. We are from CA, and our daughter is a student in CT. She has a couple friends from NY, a couple from TX, one from SC, one from NV, a couple from CA, etc. It seems to me that at her school, the student population is very much in proportion to the population of the states.
She really doesn’t spend too much time in the “real” CT, around people who grew up there. For us, a huge plus about her education is that she is in a little microcosm of great students from all over the country and from all over the world.</p>
<p>So glad you started this thread. D1 sticking in the PNW with her schools but thinking that D2 (HS 2015) may or may not and I was wondering about the same things you are asking about.</p>
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<p>I was actually surprised at how untrue this seemed to be for DS who is at a nationally drawing research U on the East Coast. It’s possible that his friends are skewed for whatever reason, but <em>all</em> of his friends seem to hail from NJ/CT/MA/NY/MD. There’s an occasional PA thrown, and I know of one from Chicago, but that seems to be as far west as his circle reaches.</p>
<p>Such an interesting thread. My son is hoping to do the opposite - wants PNW or CO or CA.</p>
<p>My BIL did the PNW for college. We thought he’d never return, but he has happily settled back in our region and looks forward to relaxing vacations in the PNW annually.</p>
<p>ihs, that’s interesting…my D is at a large research U and they draw from all over the world! I’m not kidding when I say you can’t go 100 yards without hearing a foreign language being spoken! The upside is there’s all kinds of ethnic food to be found right on campus!</p>
<p>I once asked a friend who lived in both places to explain the difference. He quoted the song “sunscreen”</p>
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<p>Maybe others who have lived in both places can expand.</p>
<p>The ‘Sunscreen’ song was actually written by Chicago columnist Mary Schmich. She wrote a column about the commencement speech that she would give, if ever invited. Somehow, the speech became attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, who supposedly delivered it to the MIT graduates of 1997. However, Kofi Annan gave the commencement address that year, and Vonnegut confirmed that the ‘Sunscreen’ speech was not his.</p>
<p>Australian film director Baz Luhrmann (“Strictly Ballroom”) obtained rights to Schmich’s words and turned them into lyrics that were mixed with Quindon Tarver’s “Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good)” song. You can see several videos on YouTube that use the ‘Sunscreen Song’.</p>
<p>Even though the speech was never actually delivered, it should have been - there are a bunch of great lines in it, but one of my favorites is, “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.” This alludes to the generalization that the occupants of NYC tend to be more aggressive and confrontational, which could lead one to becoming a ‘harder’ individual, i.e. someone not as interested in the feelings of others. On the other hand, the generalization that one could make about Northern California is that folks there are a little too relaxed and laid-back. Living there could possibly make one a ‘softer’ person who is unable to bear up to the rigors of fast-paced life or hard work.</p>
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<p>This is true of many privates but the public U’s will generally have the majority of students from their own state. Most of the PA public’s in the Kutztown-West Chester-Shippensburg- Slippery Rock group have 90% of it’s students from Pennsylvania and the majority of those students will be from a two hour radius of campus. </p>
<p>If you ever look at a map of Colleges in the US, you can the huge difference in how many colleges there are East of the Mississippi. I have this map, which is pretty cool:[Hedberg</a> Maps, Inc. - Custom College, City, Regional and Specialty Maps](<a href=“http://www.hedbergmaps.com/store/catalog/10098]Hedberg”>http://www.hedbergmaps.com/store/catalog/10098)</p>
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<p>If you look at the actual distribution of students at the schools, at many schools that doesn’t pan out. For example, </p>
<p>[Number</a> of Students in the Class of 2014 by Geographic Region](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/map.htm]Number”>http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/map.htm)</p>
<p>If you take out CA and TX, total of 103 enrolled freshmen (out of 1312) are from the entire west of the Mississippi River including HI and AK. That is 8% of the total freshmen class. I have not looked at other schools but I suspect many are more lopsided if anything.</p>
<p>Caveat: I don’t know the percent of population that are in these many states, but I have to believe it’s more than 8%.</p>
<p>I know at DS’s nationally/internationally drawing university with 5000 undergrads, he thinks he is the only one (in all 4 years) from our state.</p>