<p>IHUM, while it sucks, does teach you how to deal with those pesky intro courses and such. like recognizing bad TA's in econ/other intro courses after only 1 class. skills i'd rather not have to learn, but IHUM manages to do.</p>
<ol>
<li> Campus is too sterile and suburban for my tastes.</li>
<li> Campus is quite large and spread out. Walking betweeen two given buildings can sometimes be quite a hike.</li>
<li> "Theme" housing. College should be a time for learning to live and study with folks whose lives and interests are <em>different</em> from your own.</li>
</ol>
<p>But overall, I think it's a great school.</p>
<p>
[quote]
"Theme" housing. College should be a time for learning to live and study with folks whose lives and interests are <em>different</em> from your own.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That's the whole point of "theme" housing--for those who want a greater exposure to diversity. So in Ujamaa, you're around 50% black students instead of the normal 10%...</p>
<p>Is the size of the campus really an annoyance? I've noticed quite a few people make that claim. I know it's 8000+ acres, but I thought most of it was in the foothills and whatnot. But anyway, having an uber-big campus has always seemed like a pretty cool feature to me.</p>
<p>Stanford owns over 8000 acres, but only a very small portion of that is the campus (a few hundred). I don't think the campus is an annoyance at all--the parts most accessed by students are clustered together. It's really nice biking or walking through campus on a sunny day--you really appreciate how beautiful the campus is. ;)</p>
<p>^My friend says that you can bike wherever you'll need to go in 5 minutes; even one end of campus to another is only about 10.</p>
<p>That's true. It doesn't take long to get from your residence to class and so on.</p>
<p>That it takes you ten minutes to <em>bike</em> across campus is exactly my point. Many college campuses are compact enough that you can walk anywhere need to go around campus, but Stanford is large and spread out enough that you probably need a bike to get around. Its size is not a huge drawback, but it's one of the things not in Stanford's favor IMO.</p>
<p>well, i'd rather bike 10 minutes in Cali weather than walk 5 minutes in Princeton/MIT/Harvard/Cornell weather... i know people that go to those schools, and they tell me their hands are almost freezing off this time of year, even with gloves. </p>
<p>so i guess it's somewhat of a drawback for Stanford, but it's more or less neutralized when you compare it to most other elite schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
That it takes you ten minutes to <em>bike</em> across campus is exactly my point.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>10 minutes to get from two very far ends of the campus--from say Escondido Village all the way over to FroSoCo. And even then, it depends on what's in your way (other bikes, people, etc. which skews it).</p>
<p>I think Stanford's campus size is perfect. I'd hate to have a tiny, congested campus.</p>
<p>wayyy too hard to get in</p>
<p>aberdeen15,
You don't necessarily have to visit before Admit Weekend. Just know that Admit Weekend doesn't paint the best picture of Stanford. I thought it was kind of corny. However, it was a great place to meet other students trying to decide between schools. My advice (and most of my friends would probably agree with this) is to ask Stanford students everything and anything you have in mind. You'll get a much more accurate picture of Stanford from the collective opinions of current students. </p>
<p>Based on your other post, I would say Stanford fulfills most of your interests to a fairly strong extent. In terms of cleanliness, I think it's pretty clean, and one of my good friends from USC who stayed over one weekend noted that Stanford bathrooms were extremely well-kept compared to USC bathrooms. While I cannot personally comment on USC's cleanliness, he told me this within the first minute of our conversation, so that kind of put it into perspective to me.</p>
<p>
[quote]
5. Condoleezza Rice is coming back, self-explanatory
[/quote]
Heh. Don Rumsfeld always thought she was nothing but a glorified Russian-studies graduate student.</p>
<p>What is ihum!!!!!????</p>
<p>I can honestly say that I pretty much liked everything about Stanford. (Easy to please, ha!)I just wish that I knew what I wanted then and took greater avantage of the available resources there.</p>
<p>just waiting: A search of "ihum" in the stanford.edu site will tell you all that you want to know.</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>Yay for girls getting a C+ in rating and guys a B. ><</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>That guide is pretty skewed. UC Irvine was rated B- for girls, but in actuality, my friend visited classmates at a variety of campuses, and his impression was that while Stanford and UCBerkeley are similar, both are much much worse than the Calstates and the lower-tier UCs.</p>
<p>And Caltech has an 'A' drug-scene? Seriously? Is that a joke?</p>