Ugly but excellent

Christine123
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:31:50 +0000

A professor at UPenn (ironically) told me that part of New Haven’s city planning was a sort of an urban sociology project: The city is divided by a highway with the slums on one side and the wealthy on the other.

I remember one bad incident that happened to a girl I know the summer I was at UPenn and another that happened to me, but I think the thing that happened to me would happen on any college campus. I felt safe on campus, but at the same time I was young and naive and 16.

I spent the summer before UPenn at Brown and I wasn’t a big fan of that campus. There was also the fact that the campus was laid out so that most of it went along one street (I might be wrong about this, who knows, but this what I remember) and I had to walk more than a mile along that one street from my dorm to a classroom.

I agree that MIT has something that’s just plain depressing (and confusing) about it, especially when most people visit the other universities in the Cambridge area along with it on the same day =].

About Harvard: I’m now in Ann Arbor, which is, honestly and without bias, my favorite college town and I’ve visited plenty. Cambridge, especially Harvard Square, is my second favorite college town. I have noticed in both Ann Arbor and Cambridge that there are homeless people and beggars present, which is interesting, because one thinks of these places as ritzy areas that developed around academia. (I just wrote a story about this, I’m a nerd.)