<p>I agree that Auburn is a distinctly Southern university and a Midwesterner might experience some culture shock there. However, it’s a big place, and not everyone who grew up in the South is culturally Southern. A Midwesterner in the engineering honors program who loves football is going to find plenty of kindred spirits at Auburn to be friends with. To put it another way, there are a lot more people at Auburn than Illinois who have strong Southern accents, hunt, talk about Jesus with total strangers, etc. But there are also many thousands of students at both schools (especially among the engineers) who are more or less interchangeable culturally – if you met them at Disney World or Yellowstone, you’d know they were American college students, but that’s it. When the OP visits, he’ll see whether he actually feels alienated there. It may surprise him.</p>