<p>I'm new to CC, but I'm currently a junior and am very interested in UChicago. It's my top choice right now and I love everything about it, the Core especially. The only thing I'm anxious about is the fact that the campus is in the city.</p>
<p>I visited UPenn this last weekend and I was sort of taken back by the fact that it was right in the middle of the city and there were no real boundaries as to where the campus started and ended. Is this how it is at UChicago? Or is it more secluded and somewhat campus-like.</p>
<p>I would really like to visit Chicago and see what it's like but it is sort of difficult seeing as I live in NJ. So in the meantime I was wondering what you guys could tell me about the campus. Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>Actually, UPenn gives a pretty good idea of what Chicago is like campuswise. The only difference is the area around Chicago is a little bit more residentially oriented, albeit in the same urban fashion. If you are looking to go away for college far from a city, Cornell might be a somewhat comparable fit.</p>
<p>While I haven't visited UPenn to give you a comparison, I can tell you that it is distinguishable to some degree. In short, you'll definitely know when you're no longer on campus.</p>
<p>The whole campus is in Hyde Park. Hyde Park is technically within the city, but it's more like a neighborhood. There are no tall office buildings or huge shopping centers, and there's not the hustle and bustle of downtown. You can get downtown pretty easily (15-20 minutes) by bus or other public transportation, but the campus is not downtown. There is a central part of campus which is pretty enclosed. This area has the main academic quads and then Bartlett quad (with the huge dorm Bartlett, Bartlett dining hall, and the library) and the science quads close by. If you walk a block or two in either direction, you'll get to other campus buildings, such as the gym Ratner or the dorm Pierce or, on the other side, the dorm Burton Judson, the Law School, and other buildings. Then there are some random dorms that aren't on or even very close to the main campus. The largest of these is the dorm the Shoreland, which probably won't exist as a dorm by the time you're a student here, which is about a twenty minute walk from campus. Some people love being a shuttle ride away from campus, while other people really want to live in Max or Snell or another dorm that's right by or on the main quads. </p>
<p>Anyway, a lot of the campus feels very campus-like. There are parts of the campus that are more spread out throughout the neighborhood of Hyde Park, but the area doesn't have an overwhelming urban feel. It's easy to get downtown, but when you're on campus, you definitely don't feel as if you're in the city.</p>
<p>I'm a parent who saw the Chicago campus for the first time this past September when we dropped off our son as a freshman (we're also from the east coast and never had a chance to visit before then), and I was delighted with it. To tell you the truth, its meshing with the surrounding neighborhood felt more to me like what you see at Brown than at Penn. And "neighborhood," not "city," is the word for what Hyde Park is. Yes, you'll need street smarts to get around much beyond the campus area (see previous threads for the boundaries of the "comfortable" zone), but U.Chicago seems to do a very good job with security (also described in previous posts). The campus itself is awesome -- gargoyles and ivy and wrought-iron gates and a botanical pond and Hogwarts-like dining halls. The proximity to Lake Michigan was also something wonderful that I hadn't anticipated -- students are within walking distance of their own beach! And the University is situated in the same area where the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 was laid out, thereby benefitting from the landscaping of Frederick Law Olmsted et al. If you walk along the lakeshore, you will probably see some of the green parrots that were introduced some time ago and for some reason have thrived in the wilds of Chicago ever since. </p>
<p>In other words, it is an easy walk from campus to areas that don't feel city-like at all. Once you get to the lakeshore, you can walk or bike for miles.</p>
<p>So definitely consider it -- U.Chicago, to my mind, had a very different feel from U.Penn.</p>
<p>I am very familiar with both campuses. I disagree with uchicagoalum, although one's perspective may matter. To me, the Chicago and Penn campuses feel very different. Penn is practically adjacent to Center City Philadelphia -- easy walking distance. Big streets traverse the campus, full of people who are coming from and going to someplace that has nothing to do with Penn. There is one semi-secluded large central quad, but other than that the campus is indistinguishable from the city. There are also a lot of big-city amenities on or close to the Penn campus -- fancy restaurants, stores. And two other universities -- Drexel and University of the Sciences in Philadelphia -- are adjacent to Penn, so there is a huge student area.</p>
<p>Chicago is 6-7 miles from The Loop, and there's really nothing much around it but its own neighborhood. By itself, it's much smaller than Penn, and it's much, much smaller than Penn and its academic neighbors. Like Penn, it is somewhat diffused in the surrounding community, but unlike Penn its central core is much larger and more set apart, and there is much less hustle and bustle. Also, fewer fancy restaurants and stores.</p>
<p>Now, if you were comparing them both to Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, Stanford . . . they are much more similar to each other than they are to those campuses. But for urban elite research universities, they are about as different as campuses get. Columbia, which is very self-contained and which walls out the city to some extent, but which is right on the subway lines and on the edge of a super-affluent neighborhood, also feels very different from either Chicago or Penn.</p>
<p>Thanks to everybody that responded. I'm glad to know that UChicago is more of a neighborhood rather than a city. I basically live in a suburban area that's about an hour or so away from NYC so I'm used to going into the city once in a while. I just don't think I would be able to handle the hustle and bustle everyday, which is how I felt it would be at UPenn.</p>
<p>I'm hoping to visit sometime this summer. I was wondering if it makes that much of a difference visiting during the summer instead of during the school year. Would the atmosphere be the same? Or would I be better off trying to visit in the fall?</p>
<p>Fall is always a better time to visit colleges. While all of them have something going on in the summer, it's usually a tiny fraction of what's happening during the main part of the academic year, and it usually involves many fewer people. Students who are doing stuff give you a sense of the energy a college generates, and enliven what may otherwise seem like ponderous architecture.</p>
<p>But of course, if you can't do it in the fall, visiting in summer is far from worthless. You'll get a sense of what the university looks like, how it's laid out, and how it relates to the surrounding community. The latter may be a little distorted, though -- varying the number of students and faculty walking around on any morning by probably 5-6,000 makes a pretty big difference in how the campus and the areas where students live feel.</p>
<p>uchicago is definitely much more secluded as far as city campuses go. almost like an 'island' although the uni has taken steps to become a larger presence within Hyde Park through volunteering and such. however, if the city is not for you, i dont know that i would consider uchicago so highly. students here love to go downtown when they can (at least my friends do), it is a little difficult to figure out at first, but after a while it is fairly easy. it is also very much a city campus in that students are (or try to be) careful safety wise. so its not like being in the middle of a corn field, nor do we act like it is.
good luck on your search! sounds like you're not much of a city person.</p>
<p>Here's an idea; get a copy of the movie "Proof." It appears that parts of it were shot on campus. I don't know if the main neighborhood was shot there, but it sure has the feel of the area to the north and east of the campus.</p>
<p>While proof is a good movie, and parts of it were shot on campus, it does in no way give a good idea of what it is actually like to be on campus or around campus in Hyde Park.</p>
<p>Ok maybe, but I don't really consider anything north of 55th street part of the main campus, and I'm not really familliar with that area so maybe it does give a good feel of that neighborhood, but if the question is in regards to the campus, the movie doesn't really seem to give a good sense of that at all.</p>
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Ok maybe, but I don't really consider anything north of 55th street part of the main campus,
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<p>Well, no, but that's not what I said. I said the neighborhood in which Paltrow has her house looks enough like the neighborhoods N and E of the campus to give an idea of what the "urban" environment is like. S and W of the campus is a different story.</p>