<p>I’m aware that RD decisions from other colleges are coming out soon, and ours are probably on the way… so I thought I might create a home base thread for what I think are the most frequently asked questions and my own personal answers to them.</p>
<p>Add-ons in whatever form are more than welcome (questions, answers, questions and answers).</p>
<li>… So, is this really where fun comes to die?</li>
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<p>Short answer: No.</p>
<p>Longer answer: Only if you want it to be.</p>
<p>More eloquent answer: The “WFCTD” slogan was created by the residents of Tufts House in 1597 as a rallying cry/ secret handshake that dissuaded inherently unfun students from applying and to attract students who understood the slogan’s humor and also understood that fun is immortal and fits pretty well in a suitcase. It’s probably the school’s best-selling and most ubiquitous t-shirt, next to “If I wanted an A, I would have gone to HARVARD.” </p>
<li>…I still don’t believe you, unalove. Prove it.</li>
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<p>Uhmmm… okay. So on top of lollygagging here on CC, I’m very involved in my job, my schoolwork, and my volunteering, and, of course, my friends. Tonight, for example, I’m procrastinating planning for one of my final papers. Tomorrow, night, though, I’m going to celebrate reading period in style by going to one of my favorite restaurants in the city with a bunch of my friends and then going on to celebratory activities… Friday I’m going to see a movie at Doc Films, and Saturday, we’ll see.</p>
<li>I heard that the U of C is centrally located inside of a huge ghetto. Will I be safe on campus?</li>
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<p>Technically, the U of C is in Hyde Park and a tad of Woodlawn. HP is a diverse, gorgeous, sleepy little neighborhood that is better than most students make it out to be and yet lacking in comparison to the ideal college town. We border less savory neighborhoods, but students and residents have little interaction between those neighborhoods outside of volunteer programs, like the one I’m a part of.</p>
<p>Staying safe is mostly about being smart. If you are walking alone at night and you see a group walking towards you who don’t look like they have any connection to the University, your best bet is probably to change direction or cross the street. Then again, there’s no reason you have to walk alone at night, because there are shuttles and door-to-door van services. But if you do walk through (I admit that I have), just be uberaware. The longer I’ve lived here, the safer I feel. I know that’s an odd thing to say, but I think it’s part of a certain kind of city identity that I didn’t have before I got here.</p>
<li> What are the academics like? Who’s teaching my classes? What’s the average class size?</li>
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<p>Really awesome, for the most part. Professors here are a bit hit and miss, but I’ve been surprised at how many hits I’ve had, and how few misses. Average class size varies widely depending on the class, the concentration, etc.</p>
<li> What do you think about the core?</li>
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<p>I’ve loved core and I’ve loved the fact that it’s given me a “tasting menu” of various academic options. I still think parts of it need to be revised a tad, but it stands overall quite excellent. I think most U of C students agree, though issues with Core Bio, Phy Sci, and Reading Cultures Hum get a little sticky.</p>
<p>If you want to quadruple-major and choose all of your classes from day 1 year 1, you will be babied by core. On the other hand, if you want to sow your wild oats before settling down in a major or are woefully indecisive and a “the grass is always greener in another discipline” person, then you will find core the best thing on earth.</p>
<li> What’s up with that grade deflation I keep on hearing about?</li>
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<p>Chicago isn’t grade-deflated; it just doesn’t give high grades at the same magnitude as other institutions. One thing I have found, though, is that grading is woefully inconsistent. I hate to divulge particular grades here, but I’ll do it to demonstrate a point: I finished a paper that I thought was pretty sloppy on my part, and I was willing to take the blame in the form of a low grade. The result? A B+. I finished a paper for another class that I thought was one of my best pieces of academic writing to date. My grade? A B.</p>
<p>What to me made the B more valuable than the B+ was that I got really extensive feedback on it, why the B was a B, and I realized that my TA didn’t dislike the paper; far from it-- he was very happy with it, but he just saw a few significant issues with it that could have been remedied. I was given the chance to rewrite the paper for an auto-higher-grade, but I turned the opportunity down. I got no feedback on the B+, so my reaction was “Okay, it didn’t stink as much as I thought it did.”</p>
<li> But won’t a low(er) GPA interfere with my dreams of being an investment banker/doctor/lawyer/grad student/contestant on “Girlicious”?</li>
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<p>There’s no real way for me to answer that question, besides anecdotally, and anecdotally, it seems like the people I know have been very, very successful at attaining what it is they wanted, whether it be admission to law school, med school, an obscure PhD program at Yale, or part of Teach For America teacher corps. Getting a Chicago education, and, with that, Chicago grades, did not hurt them and probably even helped them figure out what it was they wanted post-graduation.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s a definitive way to answer this question, though, in terms of which option, Chicago or another school, will secure admission to med school/law school/ Girlicious. To truly tell, you’d have to go to Chicago, see your admission results, and then reverse the clock four years to go to another school and see your admission results.</p>
<li> What’s the student body like?</li>
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<p>Short answer: The ying to Faber College’s yang.
Longer answer: There are a lot of kids here. It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy that you’re going to run into a lot of people who are exactly like you. You will also meet people who are not like you, not in race, family background, political views, personality, dress, etc. We like to call this diversity. And yes, you will meet some really odd people. A lot of people like school and schoolwork.</p>
<li> What’s the party scene like? What are the best fraternities and sororities?</li>
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<p>If you want parties, they will be there by the plenty on weekends, sized small (dorm), medium (apartment), and large (frat). Alcohol is permitted in the dorms, and parties are supposed to be “registered” in advance, but maybe some other students can shed light on how party registration works in their houses… in my house, registration is a rubber-stamp that basically tells the resident heads to watch out for puking guests.</p>
<p>I don’t know diddly about the fraternity and sorority scene, other than I know a bunch of Greeks who are all pretty cool. At one point I thought that all of the sorority letters I saw were advertising the same sorority, but since I’ve figured out that we have Alpha Omicron Pi, Delta Gamma, and Kappa Alpha Theta. The sororities are non-residential, so while there’s a sense of sisterhood among them, it’s not that central to sisters’ lives.</p>
<p>University Ave. is home to “frat row,” but there are frats around the neighborhood. DKE is “known” for giving the best parties (according to one of my friends, who frequents frats). AEPi has Jewish kids. For those of you visiting campus on one of the April days, you’ll have the opportunity to see our frat scene all by yourself. And then enjoy the fact that yes, Chicago kids do have parties. And then laugh at how simple it all is. You’ll probably tell your friends who go to state schools that the party was lame, but you’ll also probably think it was the best thing that ever happened to you, because you stood outside on the lawn and had a great conversation with some random frat brother you’ll never see again.</p>
<li> What don’t you like about the University?</li>
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<p>I have very small quibbles, on the order of that I don’t like that Saturday and Sunday brunch start at 11am, that the Div School coffee shop’s milks are not out on the table any more but in the fridge, where the Department of Health says there are supposed to be, and that I have to awkwardly interrupt the line to get to the skim milk. I often wish that Chicago was surrounded by more natural scenery, and I wish we had an American Studies or Urban Studies major. I wish Hyde Park had a few more retail-y options, and I wish that everybody who wanted to come here could, and that college admissions didn’t exist. I would also make college free and I’d make the fountain on the Hutch quads spew dark chocolate.</p>
<p>On a more practical level… I would like to see a student body more involved in extracurriculars. Between school, sleep, friends, and “Girlicious,” I feel like a lot of students don’t go out and do stuff in the community or continue along with their bizarre interests. For me, I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t found the energy (or the desire, really) to continue some of my non-academic interests that I pursued in high school. I’ve discovered the hard way that I prefer a sort of free-floating academic one to a rigid one, but I think I like people who like rigid work ethics more, and I make sure I get out and do other things by scheduling them first and getting work done in the time in-between, rather than devoting a whole afternoon to schoolwork and not attending that poetry reading, that meeting, that study break, etc.</p>
<p>Of the people I know who have transferred out, all (so far) have done so for family/financial/personal reasons, and would give anything to return.</p>
<p>One of my friends was a pre-med at one point and realized the error of her ways, and is now a sociology major. She told me that she felt that her pre-med cohort was very unhappy, and that she and her classmates often mentioned transferring, but once she switched majors she, and the people in the sociology major, were much better off. </p>
<p>Of the two people I know filing transfer apps now, one feels a little overwhelmed by the school and wants a fuzzier, homier, smaller, more remote school (Grinnell, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Bates, etc. are the schools she is vaguely considering). Another is thinking about a school with more urban flair and more of an arts scene, hence, Columbia and NYU are on her back-burner.</p>
