Anyone know anything about University of Chicago?

[Anonymous]

In my day (~20 years ago) the dominant feature of U of C was its core curriculum. Your son has interests in the sciences and the humanities so he'll likely be open to that level of rigor. What about languages? I went to a school with less rigorous core requirements and the language requirement kicked my ass and kept me from being able to take classes in all the subjects I wanted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In my day (~20 years ago) the dominant feature of U of C was its core curriculum. Your son has interests in the sciences and the humanities so he'll likely be open to that level of rigor. What about languages? I went to a school with less rigorous core requirements and the language requirement kicked my ass and kept me from being able to take classes in all the subjects I wanted.

The Common Core has been watered down. That's one of the things that has changed significantly in the last decade-plus. It now resembles a lot more what a school like Columbia has to offer, in that there are many choices within your so-called requirements. It's still there, but it's not what it was when you graduated.

[Anonymous]

I just wanted to speak up for the neighborhood, having grown up there.

Hyde Park has a reputation for being "dicey", as one PP called it. It is in a city. The actual neighborhood of Hyde Park is pretty darned safe. The University of Chicago (called the U of C when I was a kid) has a very strong police force of its own to supplement the Chicago cops. During the white flight years of the 50s and 60s, the U of C bought up a lot of property around the neighborhood, turning quite a bit of it into student and faculty housing. That practice helped to stabilize the neighborhood, as the areas surrounding it became slums. Fast forward, and those slums have had quite a turn around. The neighborhood is probably significantly safer now than it was 40 years ago, and probably safer than just 20 years ago. It is still an urban neighborhood: bikes need to be locked, probably shouldn't walk too far at night alone, don't leave valuables in your car. It is like a cross between Capital Hill, Georgetown and Catholic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just wanted to speak up for the neighborhood, having grown up there.

Hyde Park has a reputation for being "dicey", as one PP called it. It is in a city. The actual neighborhood of Hyde Park is pretty darned safe. The University of Chicago (called the U of C when I was a kid) has a very strong police force of its own to supplement the Chicago cops. During the white flight years of the 50s and 60s, the U of C bought up a lot of property around the neighborhood, turning quite a bit of it into student and faculty housing. That practice helped to stabilize the neighborhood, as the areas surrounding it became slums. Fast forward, and those slums have had quite a turn around. The neighborhood is probably significantly safer now than it was 40 years ago, and probably safer than just 20 years ago. It is still an urban neighborhood: bikes need to be locked, probably shouldn't walk too far at night alone, don't leave valuables in your car. It is like a cross between Capital Hill, Georgetown and Catholic.

Come on -- it's nothing like Georgetown. It's a dicey neighborhood with some nice old homes, a heavy University police presence, and lots of the same petty crime you'd find around New Haven, West Philly, and Harlem, home to a few of its peers. Capitol Hill is a more apt comparison.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:U of C grad here, 20-ish years ago (eeek!). Your son sounds awesome and exactly like the kind of kid I would have gone to school with. I had a great social life, partly because finding people who were like me in important ways made for a great social scene. I would have felt out of place and had a poorer social life somewhere with a big Greek culture, for example.

I hope all the claims that U of C is no longer so dorky don't mean that it has lost its special identity. Definitely visit!

I think it still has a "special identity" in that the students tend to me serious about academics, but what has been lost over the last decade or so as the admissions numbers have plummeted and the school has switched to the common app, thus attracting all the same students who routinely apply to the "top ten" schools is a feeling that the students who are there self-select specifically for the things that (used to) make Chicago unique, e.g., the Common Core, the "life of the mind," etc. Nowadays it's a lot more like you're standard top Ivy or Stanford/MIT -- super smart, accomplished kids who bask in their "less than 10 percent acceptance rate" rather than basking in being a nerd.

None of this matters as much as the fact that it's a universally renowned institution, has vast resources and well-known faculty, phenomenal graduate programs (which bolster the undergraduate's reputation and expand the reach of faculty), and excellent recruiting opportunities. While it doesn't have the cache of Harvard to, say, a grocery store clerk, it is certainly considered in the same leagues as H-Y-P-S in the rarified circles of business (finance, consulting, etc), law, politics, and academics. In other words, if your son gets in, he should enjoy himself more than "regular" kids did 20 years ago there, but should still get a top-flight education, and have vast opportunities once he graduates. Good luck!

Last winter, I witnessed the following conversation on the lift line at a ski resort:

Liftie (noticing youthful skier's UofC sweatshirt): "Hey, do you go to Chicago?"

Skier: "Yeah."

Liftie: "So you're wicked smart, huh?"

Skier: "Nah -- just lucky."

[Anonymous]

Used to be nobody finished in four years. Is that still the case. My 2 friends who went there took 5 and 6 years to get the BA respectively

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:U of C grad here, 20-ish years ago (eeek!). Your son sounds awesome and exactly like the kind of kid I would have gone to school with. I had a great social life, partly because finding people who were like me in important ways made for a great social scene. I would have felt out of place and had a poorer social life somewhere with a big Greek culture, for example.

I hope all the claims that U of C is no longer so dorky don't mean that it has lost its special identity. Definitely visit!

I hope it hasn't been invaded by binge drinking lax bros.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:U of C grad here, 20-ish years ago (eeek!). Your son sounds awesome and exactly like the kind of kid I would have gone to school with. I had a great social life, partly because finding people who were like me in important ways made for a great social scene. I would have felt out of place and had a poorer social life somewhere with a big Greek culture, for example.

I hope all the claims that U of C is no longer so dorky don't mean that it has lost its special identity. Definitely visit!

I hope it hasn't been invaded by binge drinking lax bros.

Actually, there are a lot more normal kids at UofC now, including some binge-drinking lax bros. But, the Common App notwitstanding, to get into UofC these kids all had to write the infamous UnCommon supplemental essay (see sample prompts below). So, even the laxbros at UofC tend to be irreverant and playful and not as packaged as kids at peer schools.

Essay Option 3.

“This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.” — Don DeLillo, Libra.

What is history, who are “they,” and what aren’t they telling us?

Inspired by Amy Estersohn, Class of 2010


Essay Option 5.

How are apples and oranges supposed to be compared? Possible answers involve, but are not limited to, statistics, chemistry, physics, linguistics, and philosophy.

Inspired by Florence Chan, Class of 2015

[Anonymous]

Another UofC esssay prompt:

Essay Option 1.

Winston Churchill believed “a joke is a very serious thing.” From Off-Off Campus’s improvisations to the Shady Dealer humor magazine to the renowned Latke-Hamantash debate, we take humor very seriously here at The University of Chicago (and we have since 1959, when our alums helped found the renowned comedy theater The Second City).

Tell us your favorite joke and try to explain the joke without ruining it.

Inspired by Chelsea Fine, Class of 2016

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another UofC esssay prompt:

Essay Option 1.

Winston Churchill believed “a joke is a very serious thing.” From Off-Off Campus’s improvisations to the Shady Dealer humor magazine to the renowned Latke-Hamantash debate, we take humor very seriously here at The University of Chicago (and we have since 1959, when our alums helped found the renowned comedy theater The Second City).

Tell us your favorite joke and try to explain the joke without ruining it.

Inspired by Chelsea Fine, Class of 2016

This is awesome.

[Anonymous]

Besides the essays, my son liked some of the scavenger hunt items. Here are some from the 2014 list:

-A team member with self-animated face paint that depicts a moving face. But not that team member’s
face. [11 points]
-Reanimate a dead invertebrate using nothing more than edible, common kitchen ingredients. [6 points]
-It’s not about the money; we just find zeroes deeply and inexplicably appealing. Bring us the highest
denomination banknote you can find in whatever currency you want. [4 points per zero in excess of
three]
-A team member who was born in a country that no longer exists, with documentation. [10 points]
-The Library of Congress classification system has been criticized time and time again for not being sufficiently
onomatopoeic. Prove the haters wrong: find a book from one of the University of Chicago
libraries whose call number, including at least one digit, abstractly reflects its content. [9 points]
-Is that a man behind the curtain or are you just [ERROR: EMOTION #56754 NOT FOUND] to see
me? Fail the Turing Test. [10 points] (He thought this one was hilarious)

All of the questions are like that, if you have time you should really read through them all

Anyways, is it still like that or is the scavenger hunt list just a remnant of quirkier times?

And thanks for the replies and discussions everyone! He will definitely applying and we will definitely be visiting pretty soon. Honestly I like the university more than when I made this thread.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, scav still takes place, and some kids are really into it, but for others, it's barely a blip on the radar. This makes sense in that the student body has become more diverse, so there are more kids putting a lot of time into other activities -- e.g, sports. While the quirky kids still dominate, there's an increasingly large group of smart, regular kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, scav still takes place, and some kids are really into it, but for others, it's barely a blip on the radar. This makes sense in that the student body has become more diverse, so there are more kids putting a lot of time into other activities -- e.g, sports. While the quirky kids still dominate, there's an increasingly large group of smart, regular kids.

Yeah, athletics (Div III) and fraternity life, such as it is, has grown there over time, and as you get more "normal" smart kids, quirky experiences that used to be big across campus have become less important. This also necessarily happens as the class size has increased significantly over the last several years. You're bound to get away from any one type of student the more of them you bring onto campus. Of course, it's not the "lax bro" culture, but are there lax bros there? You betcha there are. And they don't do the scav hunt. But they do end up working at Goldman Sachs rather than in the used car dealerships or wherever the lax bros from lesser schools end up!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DS (Junior) is looking into colleges and really likes what he's reading about it. He's pretty introverted, intellectual (I guess? He genuinely enjoys his classes and thinks most of his non-APs were too easy; he wants a hard school) and nerdy and loves the atmosphere. But, I'm a little worried that something like this will happen to him http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-02-17/news/chi-university-of-chicago-student-20-found-dead-20140215_1_dorm-students-death-foul-odor, because it's totally like him to just lock himself in his room for a week without talking to anyone.

Also, he wants to go into Comp Sci, which Chicago isn't known for, but I asked a colleague and he literally said that you can't wrong with Chicago (their grad program is ranked #30ish by US News, can't be that bad). DS also wants to double major in history, so he's not too happy with schools like MIT, CalTech or Harvey Mudd which aren't good at all with non-techy things. Other schools that are good with both are too reach-y for him to really pin down (Chicago's early acceptance rate is 50% from our school and the average accepted SAT score is around 2150 - nothing like the other schools in USNews top 20), though we understand that Chicago is still going to be a reach. He thinks he has a reasonable chance though, especially since he fits the exact stereotype Chicago seems to be trying to attract (he's been complaining about generic essay questions since the second time he had to write about the theme of a passage).

So...general opinions? Anyone have an experience with the school? It doesn't really come up here often... It is as good as it looks for the introverted kid who's nerdy enough to like strange things like Lord of the Rings linguistics and gets excited over a robotic library?

Bear in mind that at Harvey Mudd, you can cross register in courses at the other Claremont Colleges, even double major in a major not offered at Harvey Mudd.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DS (Junior) is looking into colleges and really likes what he's reading about it. He's pretty introverted, intellectual (I guess? He genuinely enjoys his classes and thinks most of his non-APs were too easy; he wants a hard school) and nerdy and loves the atmosphere. But, I'm a little worried that something like this will happen to him http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-02-17/news/chi-university-of-chicago-student-20-found-dead-20140215_1_dorm-students-death-foul-odor, because it's totally like him to just lock himself in his room for a week without talking to anyone.

Also, he wants to go into Comp Sci, which Chicago isn't known for, but I asked a colleague and he literally said that you can't wrong with Chicago (their grad program is ranked #30ish by US News, can't be that bad). DS also wants to double major in history, so he's not too happy with schools like MIT, CalTech or Harvey Mudd which aren't good at all with non-techy things. Other schools that are good with both are too reach-y for him to really pin down (Chicago's early acceptance rate is 50% from our school and the average accepted SAT score is around 2150 - nothing like the other schools in USNews top 20), though we understand that Chicago is still going to be a reach. He thinks he has a reasonable chance though, especially since he fits the exact stereotype Chicago seems to be trying to attract (he's been complaining about generic essay questions since the second time he had to write about the theme of a passage).

So...general opinions? Anyone have an experience with the school? It doesn't really come up here often... It is as good as it looks for the introverted kid who's nerdy enough to like strange things like Lord of the Rings linguistics and gets excited over a robotic library?

Bear in mind that at Harvey Mudd, you can cross register in courses at the other Claremont Colleges, even double major in a major not offered at Harvey Mudd.

I second Mudd for OP's son.