**Please Help an Indecisive Person Make a Disision**

TheDesertFox
Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:25:37 +0000

I wouldn’t decide by which campus you think is more “beautiful.” It’s a really horrible reason to decide where you want to go, actually, since you are basing a good campus off of never having actually gone to a University for an extended period yet.

This is especially true in the upper midwest, where the crude November - mid April winters turn the most beautiful, picturesque mall or park into the most bleak, dark, depressing, and empty wasteland. And of course, frigidly, astoundingly cold. During these months, the last thing that will be going through your mind will be something about the aesthetics of the campus. Most likely, you’ll just be silently whispering “$*$ing *#$! I want to get home!” Not to mention, looking at buildings gets old fast… as does looking or sitting at a mall. Sitting on a pretty blue lake doesn’t.

More importantly, though, a year after you move on campus… your ideas of what constitutes a good campus will change a bit. The whole “secluded campus” thing gets a bit old - I was in it for a year - and although you do want to hang onto that “college experience” of a campus, you definitely don’t want to feel trapped in it. In this regard, I think UW-Madison offers one of the best experiences in the Big Ten. Why do you think so many people want to live in the SE dorms, even though they are “uglier,” afterall? (And I’ll admit it, the architecture firm that designed the new Ogg/Smith should be forcibly closed).

Behind Bascom Hill, I’ll agree that the campus isn’t all that great (although it is getting better). However, I think Bascom Hill, Library Mall, Memorial Union, and State Street are so far superior to anything any other peer college has to offer that it doesn’t matter. As an Engineering Student, your area of the campus is starting to get dramatically better with the addition of the beautiful Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and the new Union South.

Not to mention the best part: Starting about two inches off campus, you will find literally well over a hundred different diverse dining options within a 10 minute walk on a usually packed pedestrian mall. Not to mention all the stories, music venues, and other places that are only a short hop off campus.

I’m not saying go to UW-Madison, I’m just saying… keep these things in mind. In my opinion, UW-Madison’s campus is much better than UMN’s, which seems to me to feel almost suburban, as if it could have been placed 30 miles outside the city in the middle of a prairie. A ton of parking lots, extremely spread out (UMN’s campus is 3 times bigger in area than UW’s), etc. Admittedly, most campuses are like this, but UW’s unique blend with the city and it’s urban feel are something that I think most students value, not detest, despite the slight loss of the idyllic “picturesque campus” that inevitably the ensues.