<p>A few comments:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>No marketing is not positive. On all college campuses on all days of the year, the weather is beautiful and co-eds lazily strum guitars as they contemplate the Big Wide World around them. All pictures of students display all colors of the rainbow and at least one has a Greek sweatshirt on. All professors’ photos are of them mid-lesson, and they look interesting. To the extent that the article is a marketing piece, it did not strike me as dishonest. It just told a different story than the one that is usually told. And all days that the photographer wanders around campus are nice days.</p></li>
<li><p>There isn’t one quintessential University of Chicago experience. Case in point: a prospective student and parent invited me and another fourth-year out to dinner. I didn’t know the other fourth-year and I didn’t know the student or parent-- they are friends of relatives. Anyway, I felt like our conversation was something out of the three stooges:</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Parent: Is there a lot of political and social activism on campus?
Other fourth year: None whatsoever.
Me: There’s so much!</p>
<p>Student: Do people go to big frat parties on the weekends?
Other fourth year: All the time!
Me: Almost never!</p>
<p>Parent: What do you and your friends want to do after graduation?
Other fourth year: Law, business, and medicine.
Me: We’re too busy writing our BA’s to think about the real world right now. We don’t really know what’s coming next. Goat farming? Grad school?</p>
<p>And on and on. Clearly neither of us was lying; we were just retelling our story of the University through our own lenses. The other fourth year and I are at totally different ends of the U of C spectrum, so we see entirely different things in our own little universes.</p>