What is the social atmosphere like at Bing? How are the students? Parties? Campus activities? Area? Food? Greek Life?
Binghamton social life is varied. There are students that choose to go out and students who do not. The student body is very diverse. There are many groups represented on campus and it is easy to meet people from a similar background as yourself by joining clubs. The jewish community in particular is very active and I recommend you check it out if you are jewish. Most of the parties occur downtown. When you are a freshman you can attend frat parties. Later once people move downtown they have their own private parties. There are also the bars on state street. There are a lot of campus activities. Some of them are fun and others people just join to boost their resume (I would avoid those if you want to make friends they are just extra work).
The area is not the greatest. The campus is not in a college town it is kind of isolated in suburban vestal. There are various stores and restaurants. Some of them you can take the bus to. The food on campus is not good. I will just be honest about that. The food outside of campus isn’t bad at all. There are some decent restaurants in the area. I recommend the lost dog cafe. I personally would not recommend joining greek life. Bighamton greek life is small and it has a reputation for extreme hazing. I don’t think it is worth it. The one downside to binghamton is that students there can be very cliquey and the do not branch out once their cliques have formed (typically the first week or 2 in the school year).
Agree, there’s a lot of students who are downtown Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at bars or frat parties. Others are really involved on campus and might be doing a club-related thing on the weekends, while still others just spring for movie night in their dorms with friends. We do have a lot of diversity among groups which can be good and bad. Some people say it’s cliquey in that the Jewish kids stay together, the Chinese students stay together, the Long Island friends stay together, etc which is not a hard and fast rule, but a general trend. It also means that there are a lot of pre-existing, built in places for you to thrive.
The area is alright. You can go to the movie theater or the mall or the bars or out for frozen yogurt. Nothing to write home about, but nothing terrible. I happened to find the food not so bad at all. The new food court is actually pretty good. There was always a lot going on around campus IMO, whether it’s an a capella show or a film screening or a party in the union.