Hi! Can someone tell me about the types of students at UChicago (sporty, nerdy, demographics, etc.) and about the culture? Is there lots of partying or mostly studying? What about the student life?
I’m from the south and am only used to bigger state schools and the types of people that attend. I’ve looked at smaller liberal arts colleges (Davidson, Wake Forest, W&L) so how do these compare to Chicago?
Thanks so much:)
Answer in short is all of the above. Everything from NCAA athletes to top researchers to Overwatch teams to musical groups and everything in between in the undergrad population. It’s as diverse as you could possibly imagine.
You can find parties every night of the week or study groups just as easy breaking dawn. Intramural sports and house events.
Son is a second year and never has a dull day and enjoys that classes are incredibly challenging.
Weekends he heads into the city with friends for dinner, shopping, museums, sporting events (Bulls, Bears, Cubs, Sox, Blackhawks), concerts, beach, etc.
Have you visited ? Done an overnight ?
I’m touring over Christmas break but wanted to ask since I know most students will be at home. Thanks so much for your help!
OP, if you can, stay over at Hyde Park for one or two nights to get a feel of the place. Hyde Park is a racially integrated middle class urban neighborhood. You can have a much better idea of UChicago by walking around Hyde Park and the main campus.
During holiday break the hotel rate is pretty reasonable. There are the Hyatt Place and the new Hotel Sophy. Both of them are decent city hotels.
Thanks! I’ll definitely try that
@mmb333 my son is a first year at UChicago and was down to there, Colgate, Navy, and W&L. All extremely different as far as campuses and feel. He’s always been tied to his XC and Track teams and it appears that is still the case at UChicago. But, he’d tell you that all of the types listed by you are represented by the student body at UChicago in big enough numbers to acknowledge their presence. While, they are no longer the “Monsters of the Midway,” the athletes at UChicago still take their sport seriously. Obviously, there is a stereotype of the nerdy students at UChicago and he says that they still exist. In fact, he probably crosses into that group. Just for fun this summer he read The Iliad (and to his great surprise was required reading for his first class). He also says there is a group that “Plays pretty hard” if you get my meaning. But, it is far less prevalent than what he experienced on his official visits to W & L and Colgate.
The biggest difference for him was living in a real city for the first time. Every other home we’ve had has been fringe rural. He had to learn about bus schedules and trains. He had to learn about “street smarts.” But, I think after one quarter he has got the hang of it and if you’d ask him today he could see himself living in a city someday.
While UChicago is bigger than some schools, I think it feels much smaller than it really is. 6,000 undergraduates and more than twice that in grad students. But those grad students are on the fringes of campus mostly and he says he seldom sees them, unless they are in the library.
One addition, even though the student body is smaller at W&L, that campus felt much bigger than UChicago feels. I think it would take 1/2 an hour to walk from one extreme of campus proper to the other at W&L and as has been scientifically proven on this very website, you can do it in a little over half that at UChicago.
There are too many different types of people at UChicago to broadly pin an adjective to the entire population (other than smart, he is enjoying all the conversations he is having with his peers) It’d be doing the school and yourself a disservice if you think only one type of person would fit in. My son is a freshman there and said he is ‘enjoying it immensely.’ He loves living in the dorms and is really enjoying meeting the students and faculty there. There are also so many social events that he participates in, clubs that he joined, and also volunteering as a tutor in the nearby neighborhood schools. That said, he finds the academics intense, but said he has learned so much that he feels ‘woke.’ Lol.
I think the biggest difference between UChicago and a state school is that the state schools will have a cross-section of their state, while UChicago has a nationwide cross-section of the upper class.
So you might have someone in your house or in a class who has strong opinions on the relative merits of a bunch of NYC restaurants most people couldn’t afford, someone else who knows all the gossip on DC prep schools, one or two people who spent their high school years hanging out in hip parts of SF, one or two people who took gap years and traveled the world, etc. Lots of lawyers’ and dentists’ kids, or people with a parent in management consulting, or kids of academics. On the flip side, you might get someone who worked 30+ hours a week to provide for their family in high school. It’s rarer to see kids whose parents are medical assistants or plumbers and make $60K a year.
The people at UChicago, like most groups of people, have an incredibly varied set of interests. There’s a case to be made that, because most students hail from the upper crust, they have more time, resources, and access to information, leading to a more eclectic set of hobbies and intellectual interests.
The community is fairly progressive in some ways - particularly socially. Anyone who decides to shame someone for their sexual orientation, or say racist stuff, or make creepy advances on a classmate, is going to have a very rough time.
We also have some serious blind spots. People who plan house trips on the assumption everyone can spend $20 on Uber, or are astonished when not everyone knows some niche reference, or talk about the South Side the same way they’d talk about Aleppo or Eastern Ukraine. I know of one person, a real piece of work, who made fun of a housemate for not knowing a (very expensive) brand of clothing.
Most of the time, this stuff doesn’t come up, and you’re just dealing with a bunch of friendly young adults. It is possible to be rich and perfectly nice, or be a classist idiot and also have excellent taste in movies and a strong grasp of linguistics. And most people are nerdy about something. But you can feel the difference between UChicago and a state school or UChicago and a high school in a working-class area - for better or for worse.
More generally, I have found people here to be supportive and welcoming. A big change for the better, relative to high school, was a sharp drop-off in toxic competition. My high school saw a lot of people who compared grades, worried others would get into a college and take “their” spot, argued over who was smartest, etc. We don’t do that here. Your classmates and housemates want you to do well, and want to do well themselves. These goals aren’t mutually exclusive, and nobody sees them as such.
It’s a weird environment, but I’m happy with it.
^^So nice to hear from a student (other than my son.) and agree about the supportive environment. Also, my son’s house parents are really loving people.
Also I’m not saying there isn’t a lot of drama going on too, but I guess that’s a part of life no matter where one is.
Oh @DunBoyer, how can this forum survive without your incisive insider perspective after you graduate ;)?
Thank you all for the helpful insights! I really appreciate your thoughtful answers
He should recruit someone the year below him to make an account and start posting a lot.
The trick is to never graduate.
@DunBoyer - thanks for the informative post!
It’s interesting you note that UChicago feels like a “nationwide cross-section of the upper class.” Does wealth (either with students from comfortable means and/or some from really wealthy backgrounds) just seem to be pretty pervasive?
All indications point to a student body that is becoming more bimodal - lots of wealthy kids, some who are from fairly scarce means, and not a lot in between. That’s probably not a good thing, but somewhat inescapable in the current climate (and with the heavy use of Early Decision).
I also think wealth has increased on campus since my day. Again, all the trends and initiatives point toward that.
The diminishing numbers of kids from the true middle-class depresses me. I hope @DunBoyer is exaggerating but fear he is not. The College needs to do more to reach smart kids from that group and, having reached them, to publicize the generous financial arrangements that will be available to them.
Lack of knowledge may not be the entire story, however. Could it also be that kids of that demographic look at the bifurcation in elite schools between the well-off and the disadvantaged and don’t see much of a place for themselves? Long ago, when I was making a decision about schools, smart working class kids looked at the Ivy League schools, rightly or wrongly, as places where they would not be comfortable because those places were so dominated by the rich and the customs and quirks of the rich. It was as much a cultural block as a financial one. Harvard is just not a place you can imagine yourself being. It will be filled with snobs and all the same sorts of high-performance types as lorded it over you in high school.
It used to be the case that the U of C was looked at differently. It was a special taste but not a snobbish one. It was known to few and those few knew it was intensely academic and devoid of frills. You weren’t going to find the BMOC from your high school there. But if you were intellectually ambitious, you could imagine yourself and lots of kindred spirits there. In my year the kid everyone recognized as the brainiest of us all grew up on the south side in Bridgeport with working class parents and was far from a smooth customer.
While there is much talk on this board about creating the amenities and brand that will lure upper class kids to the U of C, not enough is said about the turn-off that this may constitute for those smart kids from the middling classes who used to be attracted precisely because it was not anything like that.
@marlowe1 I agree with and will add, even if a “middle class” kid wanted to go to UChicago, it is really unaffordable. I joke with myself when I say I’m middle class. I’m not the top 0.1%, but I’m definitely the top 1%. When I sat down with my First Year on Saturday to pay his quarterly fees, I realized that I was paying more for one quarter at UChicago than my parents had to pay for my Undergrad at Purdue. If I wouldn’t have had the foresight to save a lot each month for each of my 3 children from their time of birth, I don’t think I could have afforded to send my son to UChicago. And we are by no means opulent, we drive 4-10 year old american made cars, we live in a middle class neighborhood. After savings for retirement and kids college, we’ve enough to do one or two house maintenance projects a year (new roof, fenced back yard, finish the basement). But that’s about it.
If that is the case for me, how can a middle class person send their kids to UChciago? The new empower initiative might catch the bottom of middle class, but by no means most of it.
Ok, so now what can we do about it? I think it is only natural that the place becomes a cross section of wealth and low income/very high achieving kids with its financial aid policies.
mmb333 mentions being from the South and mostly familiar with large state schools there. As a Chicago alum who recently gave a talk at conference at a large Southern state university I offer some words of caution. UChicago is removed from the atmosphere at such institutions along several dimensions.
Learn more about UChicago but if it doesn’t fit for you then the academic experience at certain large state universities could also be very rewarding.
Re @marlowe1 comment about wealth and the disappearing middle class at Chicago – I very much think the middle class segment at Chicago is diminishing considerably.
Put bluntly, in the “big numbers” admissions game, there is no incentive to keep them in the system. The wealthy obviously have all sorts of advantages when it comes to applying to elite colleges, and poor under-served communities are now sought after. No such luck for those in the middle class.
Back in my day (sorry to reminisce!), Chicago very much had a middle class (if teetering toward the educated middle class) feel. Lots of sons and daughters of research technicians, adjunct professors, teachers, etc. Now, I think that’s been replaced by offspring of the higher-earning professions (high flying lawyers, consultants, business people, doctors and dentists, etc.), and probably more titan of industry and unfathomable wealth (see, um, Bill Gates).
Now, I think the pendulum has swung toward a bimodal distribution. The promise of a wealthy student body is irresistible to many colleges (look at the ivies and colleges like Wash U and Emory).