@JHT, sadly they are shutting down Maclean: http://housing.uchicago.edu/houses_houses/community_and_traditions/residence-hall-closures/
I would never forget Maclean! It is being shut down, sadly, along with the other dorms with lots of singles: Broadview, Breck, and Blackstone. Thoughts on this on the ground range from “It’s about time, Broadview is awful” to outrage from Breckies and Macleaners.
@boatlift as someone who lives in Max, can also confirm that it has a lot of jocks. I’m a v introverted/non-sporty person, and I chose Max mainly because the location is unbelievably convenient (from the front door of my dorm it’s ten steps from the dining hall on one side and ten steps to the Reg on the other). I don’t regret it because the location has been great, my RAs and RHs are fantastic, and several of my friends at uchi are people in my house, but I definitely don’t feel connected to people in my house the way my friends in Snell or BJ do. I’m not sure I could even name more than half of the people in my house, to be honest, and I don’t really have much in common with most of them. For me that’s not a big deal, since I p much found “my people” in my classes, but it can definitely feel more isolated than being in one of the close-knit dorms.
Is grade deflation as real as some people make it out to be? I got in EA and I would much rather focus on actually learning something rather than worry about my grades constantly. Thanks!
@nishaus It’s definitely true that As seem to be given out sparingly, but honestly we have no idea what the average GPA and how it compares to other school. Personally, I suspect that grade deflation does exist.
IMO, the way grades work at Chicago helps you focus more on learning than on your GPA. There’s definitely a sense that it’s totally normal to be closer to a 3.0 than a 4.0 and there’s absolutely nothing to worry about if that happens. A few bad grades doesn’t mean you’re a failure. The difference between Chicago and other schools is that no one at Chicago feels alone with their GPA problems, whatever they may be. My friends at certain schools with reputations for grade inflation feel like everyone around them has a 4.0 and they need to stay at that level to keep up, while at Chicago you’ll feel like a genius for getting an A in any class (though there are relatively easy classes, of course). As a result, people focus more on finishing the work and learning the material every week than on micromanaging their grades. If you get a B or a C or even a D, so what? It happens to everyone. It’s not the end of the world.
Also you can take classes pass/fail if you’re terrified of it ruining your GPA, it just can’t be counted for the core or your major.
The summer before we started college, [url=<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/stress-social-media-and-suicide-on-campus.html?_r=0%5Dthis%5B/url”>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/stress-social-media-and-suicide-on-campus.html?_r=0]this[/url] article came out in the NYTimes and I was very worried about an environment like that at Chicago. I’m happy to say that I couldn’t conceive of anything like that happening here. There just isn’t a culture of perfection. Certainly, there’s a culture of working absurdly hard and learning as much as humanly possible and maybe putting academics before fun and extra-curriculars sometimes, but there is no sense that anything less than perfect isn’t acceptable.
And that is what our “If I wanted an A, I would have gone to Harvard” shirts really mean, IMO. If we could choose between an A and learning more, we would choose learning more every time.
@nishaus I also got in EA last year and had concerns about grade deflation! I think a lot of people tend of overstate their academic problems here at the college. I’ve found that as long as you put in a reasonable amount of handwork you can easily get a GPA above a 3.5, which is pretty good here (keep in mind though, I’ve only finished one quarter of my first year - it certainly gets harder from here). I’ve found all of my professors’ grading processes to be pretty fair; either they’re incredibly difficult graders and push you a TON but curve pretty generously, or they don’t curve that much but all tests and assignments are very fair and easy to do well on if you work hard.
Also, I’ve found that I don’t really mind working that hard to get good grades here because I enjoy the whole process of ingraining knowledge into my head and really understanding what’s in front of me. I think the same can be said for many students.
@HydeSnark and @tawsch
Thanks a lot! That makes a lot of sense 
Is Hyde Park really a “bad” area? Should I be worried about crime in the area at all? I mean, I know there was that shooting threat a couple of weeks ago, but do you guys ever fear for your safety?
Under what circumstances/for whom would the new North Campus residential halls be a bad housing choice?
@QueenOfBohemia The short answer is no, there is nothing to worry about.
Hyde Park is stupidly safe, it’s one of the safest neighborhoods in Chicago. It’s much safer than, say, Morningside Park, to name a totally random neighborhood of a totally random city 
I’ve walked around Hyde Park at 3 am by myself and felt safer than I have just after sundown in many cities. The immediate area around UChicago feels more like a college town than a busy city, and is probably safer than your average college town.
Immediately north of Hyde Park is Kenwood, which is also very safe - Obama lived lived there, not in Hyde Park as some people think. Immediately south of Hyde Park is Woodlawn and immediately west is Washington Park, and this is where things get dicier. UCPD does not patrol either neighborhood (though they do patrol as far south as 63rd, you can ride the green line at Cottage Grove by yourself at most times and be fine and people do), and because of this, while they aren’t significantly poorer than Hyde Park and Kenwood, they do have higher crime rates. However, we as UChicago students are fortunate enough to not live in either of those neighborhoods and the higher crime rates are very unlikely to ever affect us. It is not dangerous to go into these neighborhoods and they absolutely do not have to be avoided.
My RH had an amusing story about that during o-week. Someone asked if there were “borders” that we shouldn’t cross. My RH replied that during his o-week his RH actually did say to never cross 61st street, so he raised his hand and asked, “Excuse me, I live on 95th street. How do I get home?” (In Chicago, the numbers go up as you go south) The bottom line is that the city is probably not going to kill you, despite the popular perception of the south side.
That said, Chicago is a city and you should be aware of yourself at all times, no matter how safe it feels; the loop has the highest rate of property crimes, like theft, in the city. Don’t walk and stare at your phone or listen to music in headphones, if you look more confident you’re less likely to get mugged, walking into dark parks at night alone is generally a bad idea, etc. etc. This applies in any city, I’m sure Harvard tells students this too and Cambridge doesn’t have the same reputation as the south side of Chicago.
As for the shooting incident, the fact that based on nothing more than a shadow of a threat UChicago was able to swarm the area with police speaks of our overcompensation for the reputation of our immediate area. Other schools in much “safer” areas get shooting threats and, sadly, actual shootings and most are not nearly as well prepared to deal with incidents like that as us.
I don’t think anyone feels unsafe here. I don’t think it’s possible to feel unsafe in Hyde Park.
@exacademic If you dislike modern architecture (and Jeanne Gang in particular), if you want smaller houses, if you don’t want to take the chance of inheriting upperclassmen from Breck (they’re basically a smaller Snitchcock), if you want to guarantee a close house culture…can’t really think of any other reasons. North’s design doesn’t have the same flaw as other huge dorms South and Max P with houses blending into each other - each house has 3 floors to itself with a 3 story house lounge running up the middle.
Hi. I’ve been wanting to go to Uchicago for about a year now and now that I’ve been accepted, I’m beginning to doubt my choice. I’m a smart girl, but i want to have fun in college. I know UChicago is a hard school with tough curriculum but i want to be able to learn and have fun. I dont just want to be all about school and looking at this and other threads has me thinking on whether Uchicago is a good fit for me. Any comments?
I’m a junior and I want to apply to uchicago through questrbridge. But can you tell me about your stats before you applied? Do they look for rounded students? I want to do journalism/literature majors and uchicago has a journalism track that lets you major into anything else so that’s really convenient for me. I’m not doing poor in school or anything and my ecs are quite good but I’m sure they look for something more. What do you think made you stand out and got you accepted?
@othfinatic I had the exact same concerns! We all work hard here at uchicago, of course, but a lot of us also subscribe to the “work hard, play hard” mantra (and “work a little so you can ball a lot” more than I’d like to admit). It’s not rare that someone will opt out of a party on a saturday night because they have to finish a problem set or catch up on reading, but at the same time the library is usually pretty empty on your normal friday and saturday nights. If you want, you can easily go out and party wednesday-saturday (esp. if you’re in greek life, like myself). Everyone is always open to a study break. We care about our grades and overall success, but we also just want to have fun when we can.
@ukegirl98 I applied undecided with a 2210 SAT and a 4.0 GPA. I’ve danced my whole life (professionally for several years) and have volunteered for an international charity for several years that my mom is on the board of. But no one really gives a crap about that stuff. I firmly believe that I got into Chicago because my essays conveyed not only that it was my top choice by far, but also they showed my unique thought processes and why different opinions, like my own, are valuable to a community and to society. Chicago wants students who can think differently without discrediting variant opinions. They want people who value curiosity.
@othfinatic The school is hard and if you come here you will have to work hard, but lots of people party. Dorm matters, choose Max P or South, they have way more people interested in partying. The culture of North remains to be seen.
@ukegirl98 I had a 1500 (out of 1600, they don’t look at writing) and a 3.8 unweighted GPA with a lot of AP classes. I mostly did well in programming competitions and read a lot. I think these articles from MIT are the best answer to your question about what elite schools are looking for:
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/whats_the_big_deal_about_402
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/applying_sideways
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/no_chance
I’m positive all of that applies to UChicago, too.
How would you rate the riskiness of your essays? I wrote some pretty risky essays (things I would never write for any other college) but the essays were totally me. Is there is a point do you think, where you come off as being too risky?
What’s risky? One of my daughter’s essays was a mix of humor and seriousness (nicely pulled off, IMO – it was like listening to a smart, funny, well-read friend on a topic she felt strongly about) and the other two weren’t, formally, essays. Form was appropriate for content in each case – numbered list of paragraphs for Why Chicago? and scads of Top 5 lists for the "favorites"question. She was accepted EA (no hooks), so I’m deducing that the admission office appreciated her “essays.”
Bottom line, I think, is to read your own work as if you were a stranger and ask what sort of person you’d imagine the author to be. Is the person who wrote this application someone you’d love to have in one of your seminars or working next to you in a lab or talking with you in the house lounge late at night? If so, whatever risks you think you took are worthwhile. You may have guessed wrong (or you may be looking for different kinds of classmates), but the focus here is more on getting a sense of who the candidate is than on evaluating writing skills or on looking for right answers to these questions.
If your essay makes a reader wonder if you are perhaps a sociopath, it is probably too risky. Topics to avoid: your history of setting fire to things, of torturing animals, of bullying classmates. An essay that confirms a reader’s suspicion that you are a teenager is not too risky. An essay that presents yourself as too much of a goody-two-shoes is probably too risky in the other direction – it risks making you seem boring.
HA is not the be-all and end-all. S1 got into HA as a freshman and decided to take IBL instead. He had attended a summer program that used the IBL method and spent a lot of time on proofs. The late great pirate, Paul Sally, told S he could take HA, or do something more interesting and take IBL Analysis. It was the best math sequence he took at Chicago. They did much the same thing as HA, only they derived it all themselves. He took Honors Algebra instead of IBL, mainly so he could graduate with departmental honors.
He was a math major and took every theoretical CS class offered. Is now doing really interesting work in SV. Had very good math/CS grades, middling in everything else. Didn’t prevent him from getting multiple job offers. He finds that his writing skills, speaking ability and liberal arts exposure are greatly valued in a tech environment.
Breck, Scav and contradancing were central parts of his UChicago experience. The Core kicked his butt, though he liked most of the courses. Lesson learned: take enough foreign language to exempt out of the language requirement. German nailed him. He made many friends at Chicago and has remained in touch with them.
Why he got in: excellent test scores; decent but not perfect GPA; 13 post-AP courses in math, CS and physics; several national awards in CS; essays that reflected his quirkiness and fearlessness in taking intellectual risks. The same things got him into MIT, but he chose Chicago because he knew what his long-range goals were, but wanted to explore the liberal arts and humanities as well. Chicago had the math and CS he wanted, but without the engineering focus that he didn’t want. He spent two summers doing research at MIT, so in many ways, he feels he had the best of both worlds.
Could anyone comment on the food in the dining halls? Is there a better one- Bartlett or Cathey? ( not sure of the spellings)