Straight guy here here :). Stigma is kinda true. I visited one of my friends at NYU last week and the general consensus is that Tisch and LSP are the dumber kids although Tisch kids are generally going into performing arts obviously. I personally wish that NYU would take out LSP since I don’t see any positive impact that it has on the school.
I wouldn’t necessarily call LSP kids dumber, but they essentially got rejected by their first pick school, so they are below CAS, Stern, etc kids in terms of how good their applications were. The whole college process is a crap shoot, but if you look at past official results threads, then you’ll notice that those who were accepted to LSP have lower stats than those accepted to the other schools bar Tisch.
Social life will be weird. My friend lives at third north and the walk was slightly long. The walk to washington square park from all of the better freshman dorms is somewhat long and it is in NYC, so you won’t be getting the calm campus feel and have an easy feeling of meeting new people since you won’t be able to tell if the people you are walking with are NYU students or not a lot of the time. There are still plenty of opportunities to meet people, but you should try to get that done in the first week when we’re all trying to get to know each other and find friends. We aren’t attending NYU for the traditional college experience so you shouldn’t expect the traditional college experience.