Sample Walking Time Around Campus

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

In light of @BrianBoiler walk on campus on September 7th, I decided to do the same today and I used the stopwatch on my iPhone to time myself. Naturally this is by no means to be definitive in any sense. I am a middle age man while the College kids are teenagers or early 20’s. So they may walk a whole lot faster than me. Also today is 76 degree with 48% humidity and sunny. You can’t find much better walking condition during school term than today.

First of all, for parents who are not familiar with the UChicago campus, here is the official map:

https://maps.uchicago.edu

I would start with I-House in light of the recent controversy on freshman being assigned there. All time is being rounded to closest ten seconds.

7 minutes 30 seconds from I-House front door (near 58th and Blackstone) to Saieh Hall

9 minutes 40 seconds from I-House front door to middle of Main Quad

You have to add at least 3 to 4 minutes to account for the time to get from the dorm room to front door of I-House and the time from Main Quad center to, for instance, Eckhart for your math class.

3 minutes 30 seconds from Main Quad center to Max P Purple Entrance next to Reg

4 minutes 30 seconds from Main Quad center to Max P Yellow Entrance on 56th Street

6 minutes 20 seconds from Main Quad center to Baker Dinning Commons at Campus North

6 minutes 40 seconds from Baker Dining Commons to Levi Tunnel

6 minutes 30 seconds from Levi Tunnel to Cathey Dining Commons

9 minutes 30 seconds from Cathey Dining Commons to Booth Woodlawn Entrance

Obviously, if you really want to stay in the middle of the campus and minimize walking distance to classrooms, then Snitchcock is your first choice. But Snitchcock is an acquired taste and not everyone will enjoy being there.

Judging from my walking experience I-House is really not that far away from the Main Quad than RGG or Campus North. We are talking about two to three minutes each way. In fact, I think the walking time from RGG to Saieh or Booth will be more or less the same as from I-House to Saieh. Do remember that if you or your kid is an Econ/Business Econ major. On the other hand, if you/your kid is a STEM major, it would be a much longer walk from I-House to Crerar than from RGG to Crerar.

Max P is the only big dorm that is closest to Main Quad as well as the Science Quad. For students who abhor the extra walking, Max P is the way to go.

P.S. Construction Update

I am happy to report most of scaffoldings around I-House are gone. I did not go inside but I have to assume I-House should be ready to receive the Class of 2022 in 10 days.

I walked south of 60th street along Woodlawn. Chain linked fence had been set up around the construction sites for Rubinstein Forum and Woodlawn Residential Commons. They had digged the foundation for Rubenstein Forum. And a small elevator shaft structure was already rising at the site of Woodlawn Residential Commons.

2

@85bears46 Thanks for the info. Glad to hear that the scaffolding is almost gone from I-House. Did you happen to do the I-House to Cathay walk?

3

@“Kathy V” Sorry I didn’t do that walk but my guess that would be around 15 minutes.

If your son or daughter is going to be in I-House and he/she wants to eat regularly at Cathey, he/she should really explore the UGo Shuttle.

https://safety-security.uchicago.edu/services/ugo_daytime_shuttles/

https://safety-security.uchicago.edu/services/ugo_nightride_shuttles/

4

I appreciate your efforts but complaints about I-House (and Stony Island) are more than just distance to quad:

  • No in-dorm food commons
  • 0.7 mile one-way distance from meals
  • Isolation (east edge of campus, away from undergrad action, plus North and Max near each other, South and BJ near each other)
  • No ac
  • Paying same housing and meal fees as those in best dorms (total ripoff)
  • Being misled through admissions and deposit process about housing shakeout
  • Housing “lottery” isn’t a lottery at all. EDs and athletes get preferential treatment, lock up best locations before the rest have a chance to join the “lottery”. When I hear housing lottery I think everyone who gets in by lottery deadline has the SAME ODDS, that is not how U of C does it. Calling it lottery is intentionally misleading, just call it first come, first served, and remove North South and Max as they fill so families aren’t misled into thinking those are possible after Dec/Jan.
5

Taking a shuttle to food sounds rad, far cooler than just pushing an elevator button while in your pajamas!

6

@coldbrew22 No one has in-dorm dining. Everyone has to leave their dorm to walk to a dining hall, but yes, some have less of a walk than others.

7

To paraphrase from an exasperated UChicago student on reddit who was answering a similar question from another user last year re: UChicago dorm (I think it was South) distance to food/classes/library… “it’s walking, if you have a problem with that, then just give up.”

8

Walking’s a good way to clear your head and rest your eyes and brain if you, like most U of C students, will spend a large part of your day sedentarily. Many - I was once like that - don’t have any other regular excercise beyond walking. When I was a U of C student I walked not because I had to in order to get to food but voluntarily because l enjoyed sauntering around the university and its environs just for soaking up its sights and sounds. It was another way of feeling a connection to the greater community of which one had become a part. I would call it a necessary adjunct to your education, especially if you’ve come from a distant, small-townish or southern place. Speculating about people and things seen in the course of a walk is delightful in its own right. And there’s this special benefit if you are walking to get to dinner: You will often walk with a friend or someone not yet a friend but whom you get to know in the course of the shared walk. Some of the best walks I’ve ever had were made while walking with friends. Talk and Walk go together.

9

I was a grad student at GSB. In those days we lived at wherever the university had subsidized apartments and they were all over Hyde Park. So everyday I walked 20 to 25 minutes each way to Walker Museum or Rosenwald.

And I didn’t have the luxury of UGo bus. If you look at the transit map of the UGo shuttle linked above, Ugo shuttle goes everywhere and stops at every dorm. Anecdotal evidence from our friends’ kids suggest that they take the shuttle when they don’t feel like walking (in heavy rain or subzero wind chill).

U of C has a very compact urban campus. Compared to my undergrad college, walking distance at U of C is almost cut into half.

Again, everyone’s utility curve is drawn differently. A pleasant and fruitful 15 to 20 minute walk for me may be a tortuous and painful quarter hour for another person. Still, I think any dorm residents will find the walking manageable even if one is assigned to Stony. And most college students move out of their dorm rooms anyway within a couple of years. U of C does not have enough dorm space for all 6,000 undergrad students. Most students will find living in Hyde Park off campus much cheaper than staying in a dorm but their walking distance to the main campus will increase.

10

Another benefit of walking is that lots of bright ideas come to you when your mind isn’t torturing itself in front of a book or keyboard. I’ve had many a Eureka moment in the course of a walk. The thoughts were circling around in the mind but wouldn’t coalesce or reveal their proper pattern until one stepped away from the battle briefly. Wallace Stevens apparently composed most of his poems while walking from his home in Hartford to his place of work. There are many such examples. Something about the steady drumbeat of putting one foot after another seems to stimulate one’s powers of synthesis. If the stomach is growling, of course, synthesis may have to wait for digestion.

@85bears46 , when I next get to Chicago, I ought to look you up to take a walk.

11

I’ve never seen where UChicago calls the housing placement system a “lottery”. It is very clearly stated that they assign housing based on the date of deposit…

12

Maybe the confusion here is because we do have a housing lottery for returning students. Everyone is placed in a cohort - the calculation is: years at the college + years in a house = cohort score. Then everyone in the same cohort is entered in a lottery that decides the order of picks within that group. So a returning second-year will always pick ahead of a first-year, and people who’ve stuck with the same house (i.e. the vast majority of residents) get a leg up on those who’ve changed dorms, but there is some randomness involved. Not so for first-years.

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@marlowe1 It will be my pleasure. We shall pick a route that reminds us of the bad old days :wink:

Problem is that campus has improved so much since our days that it is harder to find the tough old gritty U of C. :))

14
  • No in-dorm food commons [As noted above, there are no "in-dorm" dining halls anymore. When there were, only two dorms had them. Everyone else had to put on clothes to go to meals, and that's the norm now. Harvard and Yale are the only colleges I know where in-dorm dining halls are the norm, and even they don't have that for first-year students (at Yale, most first year students).]
  • 0.7 mile one-way distance from meals [Obviously, this isn't one of I-House's selling points. However: (1) It isn't the farthest away from a dining hall of any Chicago dorm, Stony is farther. (2) In the recent past, there were even more dorms that were as far or farther from a dining hall -- Shoreland, Breckenridge, Blackstone. Literally thousands of young Chicago alumni survived worse distances, and many even enjoyed their houses. My son and daughter-in-law were both in the Shoreland, more than a mile from his dining hall. My son didn't like it much, but that had a lot more to do with its physical deterioration and his roommate who tended to get drunk and throw up in the room a lot. I have never heard either kid complain about the distance from the dining hall. It was something I think they stopped noticing fairly quickly. (3) The shuttle buses get lots of use and make a huge difference. (4) Don't underestimate the countervailing value of being closer to transportation north to the Loop and beyond. It's great to be half a block from the Metra, and easy walking distance to the 6 bus.]
  • Isolation (east edge of campus, away from undergrad action, plus North and Max near each other, South and BJ near each other) [The premise of this is that there is some physical center of "undergrad action." I don't think that's true. Remember, most/all of the upperclassmen live off campus. My son never lived as close to the center of campus as I-House, and he was deeply involved in all sorts of undergraduate action -- an officer of two vibrant clubs, and a core Scav community participant. His original house/dorm was not into Scav, so he simply scavved with another dorm. There are plenty of kids in I-House; it's going to be its own center of undergrad action. I-House also has a bunch of programs tied to its once and future function as a bona fide International House, which is really cool.]
  • No ac [As many have noted, ac is still the exception, not the rule. For what it's worth, I don't think there's any ac in dorms at Harvard or Yale. Lack of air conditioning is a problem maybe five weeks out of the 36-week school year. Global warming may eventually bump that to 6-7 weeks, but your kid will have graduated by then.]
  • Paying same housing and meal fees as those in best dorms (total ripoff) [The housing and meal fees are a total ripoff for everyone. As far as I know, all of the colleges Chicago wants to be peers with charge the same price to all first-years for all rooms, good or bad, so it's hard to fault Chicago for doing that. It would be disgusting if Chicago segregated first years by ability to pay. It's a bad enough problem that upperclass students do that to themselves when they move off campus. Meals -- everyone gets to eat the same meals. The extreme ripoff there is the extent to which women cross-subsidize men, not that people who have to travel a few extra blocks pay the same as people who live closer.]
  • Being misled through admissions and deposit process about housing shakeout [Totally agree they shouldn't do that. But totally disagree that it was something that should have made a difference to anyone in deciding where to go to college.]
  • Housing "lottery" isn't a lottery at all. [That's on you. No one ever said there was a "lottery" for first-years, because really there isn't. If you read one thing, any one thing, and paid attention to it, you would know that people who made their decision after the first week in April would be the people least likely to get one of their top three choices, unless they really loved some dorm most other kids didn't (which can happen). It's not, or not only, that there's effectively a preference for athletes, deferrers, and ED admits. What there is is a preference for people who don't have a hard time deciding to go to the University of Chicago, who aren't debating where to go or waiting to see what happens with some other college. A stupid policy, perhaps. But from that standpoint, your daughter may like the company in I-House more than she would in a more popular dorm where no one had ever wanted to go anywhere other than Chicago.]
15

I was with you all the way, JHS, until that last sentence, meant only half-seriously as it was. One of the principal reasons for not wanting to be in I-House would be that it will have more than its share of folks like coldbrew in it. That won’t be very stimulating.

16

Those sorts of insults are just as uncalled for as the insults coldbrew was flinging. You rightfully questioned her on her incivility… model the change you’d like to see. We should all be able to discuss concerns and differences in a reasonable manner; isn’t that something UChicago values?

And let’s all remember not to penalize the kid for the bad behavior of the parent. Coldbrew’s kid could think completely differently than her parents and be a wonderful addition to IHouse.

17

It’s my belief that coldbrew IS a kid, but let me rephrase: I-House will have a subset of disgruntled kids, not the kids of most of the posters on this board but the ones posited by JHS when he spoke of a possibly toxic atmosphere derived from I-House being the receptacle for kids who had aspired to schools (we know the ones) other than Chicago. Will there be a critical mass of such disappointed and disgruntled kids? I don’t know. I hope not. However, that’s an ancient syndrome at Chicago, and it IS a toxic one. The couple of instances of that attitude we have seen on this board are certainly not unique. I’m just pushing back against the suggestion that these RD kids at I-House might constitute better company than the lesser kids who actually saw Chicago as their first choice and ended up in other dorms (generally if not always). I believe that was what JHS was getting at, and it irritated me. Perhaps my tongue was not as obviously in my cheek as it could have been.

18

I agree that the women are cross-subsidizing the men at the dining hall. Unfair!

19

They should keep marketing Uchicago as where fun comes to die. Low expectations means no disappointment!

20

That’s a great idea! They should do a modest marketing campaign for I-House as representing the true University of Chicago tradition, like Snitchcock. Except I think they intend to return all or most of it to graduate housing when they get Woodlawn built.

@marlowe1 : To be clear on my position, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a kid wanting to consider Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc., as well as Chicago. My kid #2 was like that, and there’s no bigger Chicago fan on the planet. He married one of his classmates and never really left the university. (I wish he would now, for personal growth reasons.) Those kids aren’t necessarily toxic at all, although they certainly could be if they had nothing more to offer than the attitude on display in this thread. That’s not to say that they are “better” than Chicago ED acceptees, but there may be some subtle differences. I was trying to be honest/straight/supportive when I suggested that @coldbrew22 's kid might prefer a community involving lots of those people (including her) vs. one with few or none of them.