<p>A few additional thoughts:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>One lovely Chicago tradition (of recent vintage) is Kuvia/Kunsomethingorother, a made-up winter festival that replaced what used to be a massive camping trip for first-years. For a couple weeks in January, people meet at 6:00 am to do martial arts / yoga type stuff and other enriching activities, outdoors, culminating with a polar bear swim in Lake Michigan on the last day. It was designed by faculty members, and a number of them participate alongside the students. (Of course, it’s completely voluntary, and completely nuts.) It is apparently a real feel-good thing with lots of friendly, informal contact.</p></li>
<li><p>Economics profs: I know little specific about the Chicago Economics professors, but I know stuff about famous professors in general and Economics professors in general. Ultra-famous professors tend to have to devote a lot of effort to fending off undergraduates who are quasi-stalkers – kids who actually know next to nothing about what the professors do or think, and haven’t put in the work to learn about it, and who project all sorts of things onto the professors that have little or nothing to do with anything but the students’ own psychological needs and fantasies. It gets wearing after awhile, and tends to make them a little standoffish.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>That’s the bad news. The good news is, they tend to like teaching. If you put in the work to get yourself up to a level where you can actually appreciate what they are doing, and you pay your dues a little, and hang around respectfully, and make yourself entertaining, you can generally get them to teach you stuff outside of class as well as in it. Trust me. In my younger years I was very good at that, and I had a great time as a result (plus getting some great opportunities and jobs out of it).</p>
<p>Graduate students are a key bridge, by the way. They are the ones who can get you from 0 to 60 so you can run with the big dogs.</p>
<p>Economics professors, especially famous ones, tend to have lots and lots of lucrative side deals going on – well-paid consultancies, book deals, advising the President’s advisors and then giving speeches about it, etc. So, frankly, they tend to be very busy, and they also tend to be somewhere other than their university at any given time. They don’t hang out much. Probably there are exceptions, but that’s what I have observed.</p>
<p>My wife actually knows one of the Chicago Nobelists fairly well, professionally. They are allies in policy initiatives that are at the core of what each does, and probably agree on about 90% of everything relevant. They have done a lot of work together over the past 3-4 years. I don’t think she would describe him as friendly or approachable.</p>