<p>This was a quote from the Insider's Guide to the Colleges. Besides the fact that it sounds hilarious, is it true?</p>
<p>You’ll find many humourous self-deprecating quotes like this, most notably “where fun comes to die”. </p>
<p>They are, of course, exaggerations for the most part, mostly just showing that chicago kids have a quirky sense of humour and aren’t afraid to poke fun of themselves.</p>
<p>People here, I’ve found, are pretty average looking. You have a set of people that are very nice looking, but most fall into the normal category, and then there are a few very ugly people–but it’s no worse or better really than looking at a crowded city street and evaluating. </p>
<p>A bit of a notable difference is that girls tend not to wear as much makeup. Many “attractive” people at “attractive” schools only appear that way because they put in the work to wear tons of makeup and polish themselves up. At Uchicago, there is less an emphasis on this image, and conversely, people may say it is uglier. </p>
<p>All in all, I find that people’s personalities shine much more than their looks, and after awhile you get used to the fact that many people don’t care as much how they look.</p>
<p>Various houses and organizations put slogans like that on t-shirts, and make a bundle selling them to incoming first-years and visiting high school seniors, especially at accepted student weekends. That quote mushes together two t-shirts, the second a response from women to the first. (T-shirts at Chicago can be an artform not unlike battle-rapping in haiku.) </p>
<p>The most successful of them, both financially and in terms of keeping the riff-raff from applying, is “Where Fun Comes To Die”. There are others, funnier than any quoted so far, that would bother your parents a whole lot more and maybe get you sent home from school if you wore one of them there. And fake, self-congratulatory ones the University sells in its official bookstore where no one but tourists shops.</p>
<p>If you get the joke, you would probably feel perfectly happy at Chicago. If you don’t, maybe you should think twice about applying. Unless the reason you don’t is that you have a “spectrum disorder” that prevents you from getting any jokes at all, in which case you should definitely apply, because you WILL find some kindred souls there.</p>
<p>For the record, the students of both sexes there look perfectly attractive, in a real-world, non-TV, not-a-lot-of-grooming-products way. Certainly more attractive than the squirrels, unless you are some kind of pre-vert or have never heard of that magical attractiveness enhancer, “beer”. (Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there’s a lot more beauty in the eye of the beholder who has had a couple of brewskis.) I am always amused when I hear men complaining about female attractiveness at Chicago, because honestly the women win that contest hands down. The squirrels may or may not be more aggressive than the men – they are pretty darn aggressive, after all – but they definitely care more about their appearance.</p>
<p>Ahaha, I wore makeup for the first week, and then just decided that 15 minutes more of sleep was worth far more. 
But no, it isn’t true, we just enjoy making fun of ourselves. (You’d be surprised how often those t-shirts come up in our discussions!)</p>
<p>We have a collection of t-shirts from when my sil and bil were at Chicago. My two favorites: one from the library with a quote from a bequest “No skeptical trash or dirty French novels” the other has a gargoyle cracking up with laughter and it says “Chicago - it’s funnier than you think.”</p>
<p>Oh ok so it’s just like one of many ongoing jokes. Nothing to worry about then…</p>
<p>My favorite UChicago T-shirt is: “That’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?”</p>
<p>^ Me too! Well, that and:</p>
<p>-…our Ivory Tower is bigger than yours.
-…where the only thing that goes down on you is your GPA.</p>
<p>“UChicago, where your best just isn’t good enough.”</p>
<p>But yeah, we have a thing about slogans. No worries, though, there are attractive/assertive people here, I promise.</p>