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Hyde Park gets somewhat of a bad rep, but it’s not an unsafe place at all. Basic common sense will keep you safe. Every summer there’s a handful of apartment robberies, and there have been a couple of muggings, but that’s it, and that’s not much worse than any other campus. Security has recently been beefed up a bit too, there’s now security officers (I think 24/7) around the main quad along with the very good police force.</p>
<p>For the other things, yes and yes. I’m very strongly of the opinion that college will always be what you want it to be. There isn’t much of an athletic or sports connection in the general population here (though sports teams themselves are very close), but there is a strong sense of community. The Core and difficulty of courses also helps this, providing a common experience many places don’t have. And there’s always stuff to do as long as you go out and do stuff. Find friends, find clubs, find interests.</p>
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I don’t think that you can take intermediate econ before finishing calc (APs will not help you), but either way, don’t bother. It’s not worth it. Econ does not work here like most schools, and there’s a reason why everyone takes it second year.</p>
<p>I did take 160s, and I absolutely loved it. It’s a pretty difficult class, especially at the beginning, simply because it’s such a different way of thinking about and doing math. But it’s phenomenal at what it does, which is basically a year-long proofs class. You will be very good at doing proofs by the end of that class, along with having a much deeper level of understanding of calculus and math in general. It also has an extended drop period, so there’s very little risk in taking it for 3 weeks.</p>
<p>I don’t think anything really surprised me about it. Maybe the macro classes I’ve taken so far (I’m in the accelerated sequence, so I’m not sure how applicable this is to the standard one). We do a lot more math- and theory-heavy stuff than any other school. Most intermediate macro classes include a lot of quasi-keynesian ideas, which we didn’t do any of. Instead, our class started with Solow growth, quickly moved into basic neoclassical models, and hopefully by next year we’ll do same basic dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. Lots of first-year graduate school material rather than the stuff they normally teach in undergrad.</p>